Nutshell Forms: Create forms for your website

No need to deal with complicated integrations to add new contacts from your website into Nutshell. You can create new leads, add people to your audiences, and more.

Any administrator in your Nutshell account can create and share a form.

What you can do with Nutshell forms:

Forms can be set up in Marketing > Nutshell Forms. On this page, you can see all your existing forms and add a new one by clicking Create new form.

Choose from one of four Nutshell form templates to get started quickly, or click Start from scratch for a blank form:

Next, click Edit form to open the form editor and start building your form with drag-and-drop blocks.

The form editor uses a drag-and-drop canvas where you can see exactly how your form will appear to respondents.

Left side (Canvas): Your form preview – drag blocks here to build your form. Click any field to select and edit it.

Right side (Sidebar): Contains two tabs:

The Blocks tab in the sidebar contains draggable content blocks that you can add to your form. Content blocks consist of two types:

Content for layout and text:

Input for collecting data:

To start building your form, click Add a block

When you add a new content block (like a Header or Body text), click into the field to start adding your text.

To start adding input fields to your form, drag an input block onto the canvas or click to add it. These inputs will correspond with the field in Nutshell where the information will go – for example, choosing Person name will add a person by that name in your Nutshell account.

Some fields, like Email address and Phone number, could belong to a company or person, so you can select which you'd like to use from the dropdown:

You can customize both the field label and the placeholder text for any input field. After adding a block to your form, click into it to edit. You can update the label to change how the field is titled, and add your own placeholder text to guide your customers with an example. This is helpful if you want to personalize the form or clarify what kind of information you're looking for.

On input fields, you can make fields required or not by checking the box:

Click See more Nutshell fields to access your CRM's custom fields. You can drag Contact, Company, or Lead fields directly into your form – data will automatically map to the correct entity on submission.

You have the flexibility to customize how address information is collected. When you click on the Address block, you'll see the sidebar open with the field settings. In the Address display section you can choose between:

Here's how:

Click the Form design tab in the sidebar to customize your form's appearance.

You can choose between a Palette option and a Custom option.

Palette: Choose from 7 pre-built color schemes that automatically set coordinated colors for buttons, text, labels, and backgrounds.

Custom: Set individual colors for buttons, text, labels, inputs, and background.

Additional options:

When you are satisfied with your form, click the Preview form button in the upper right to see how it looks! Your preview will open in a new tab, and you can test the experience of filling out your form (nothing entered on the preview page will be saved in Nutshell).

Break longer forms into multiple pages to improve the respondent experience.

Click + Add a page below your last page to create a new page. Each page can contain its own set of content blocks.

When your form has 2 or more pages, a Reorder pages button appears. Click it to open the sidebar where you can drag and reorder pages.

Between each page, you can configure what happens after a respondent completes it:

For linear multi-page forms, you can enable Show progress steps in the Design tab. This displays step indicators (Step 1, Step 2, etc.) so respondents know how far along they are.

Note: Progress steps are only available for forms without conditional branching, since branched forms have dynamic paths.

Send respondents to different pages based on their answers to dropdown or radio button questions. This allows you to create personalized form experiences where users only see relevant questions.

Fields with branching display visual indicators on the canvas:

To remove branching from a field, open the branching rules sidebar and click Remove field branching.

A decision field gives your audience the option to choose an answer from the options you provide, such as a multiple-choice or drop-down option field.

Nutshell Forms lets you automate certain processes based on a respondent's answers. When adding a field that gives respondents the option to choose from a selection of answers, you can set up Form answer automations in the Additional rules section under your Field properties on the right. Depending on the type of field, you can choose to trigger an action when the contact provides a related answer.

For instance, you could set your decision field answer rule to do the following automatically when a specific response is received through your form:

You can also choose to include a pre-selected answer to a question, if it makes sense for the type of form your prospect or customer completes.

Click Publish changes in the upper right, then Publish now. Your form is now live and ready to receive submissions.

In the form sidebar, you'll find a Spam prevention setting that enables you to add hCaptcha to your Nutshell forms. This tool is designed to verify whether users are human by presenting challenges that are easy for humans but difficult for bots.

Click on this Spam prevention section to access the settings.

Here, you can choose from three levels of spam protection per form:

The hCaptcha added to your Nutshell form will be included at the bottom of the form:

Define what happens when someone submits your form:

When someone fills out your form, it automatically creates or updates a person in Nutshell. Based on the fields in your form, it may also create or update a company. Duplicates are merged based on email address (people) or name (companies).

And with Form answer automations set up, you can add specific tags, audiences, products, and sources to People, Companies, and Leads, based on the answer they give.

If your form is collecting leads, use the Add a next step button to create leads in a specific pipeline for the people who submit your form.

You can customize even more next steps to stay even more organized:

Create a person next steps

Need to label anyone who fills out your form to add them to custom sales lists or marketing lists? Automatically add one or more tags to people after they submit your form. Or, add them to any audiences that you're building up:

You'll need to select the "Update person based on the answer to this question" option under "Additional rules" in your Field properties when creating the form to specify which answers should automatically add specific tags or audiences to People when submitted. You can also pre-select an answer to the field question within the "Additional rules" section, where it makes sense.

Want to track the contacts created from a specific form? No worries – Nutshell will automatically include the form as the origin of your new contacts, no setup required.

Create a company next steps

You can automatically tag any companies that are created via form submissions.

And with Nutshell's Form answer automations, you can decide which specific tags to add to companies based on the answers submitted through the web form. Simply use the "Update company based on the answer to this question" option under "Additional rules" in your Field properties when building your form to link the relevant tags with their related answers.

Create a lead next steps

Just like decision field answers relating to people and companies, you can automatically add tags and audiences to leads created through a form submission.

Nutshell Forms also provides a Form answer automations option to link a specific source to leads generated through forms using the "Update lead based on the answer to this question" option under "Additional rules" in the Field properties to the right when creating the field.

In addition, you can distribute form-generated leads to a pipeline of your choice based on how they answer a question on your form. This can be done using the "Add a next step" option and the "Add a create rule" tool after publishing your form. Here, you can choose to create a lead when the form is submitted, and choose the pipeline to send that lead to.

Under the "Special cases" section of the "Add a create rule" dialogue box, you'll see the option to "+ Add a distribution rule." This allows you to route leads to a specific pipeline if the answer to a certain Nutshell Forms question equals a specific value.

Want to assign leads to a particular team member based on a Nutshell Forms field answer? Go to the related pipeline, click "+ Add user assignments" under "User assignments," and select "+ Add an assignment rule." Here, you'll be given the option to assign the lead to a specific team member if the response to a variable form field is a specific answer.

For help setting up your web form and fields, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team.

From your form page, click the Embed form button in the upper right to get a URL or embed code to get your form out into the world.

Use your form's URL to share a link to your form anywhere – on your website, in an email, on social media, or somewhere even more creative ;)

Copy the form's embed code onto your website to make it available directly on any of your web pages.

Need help embedding your form in WordPress? Click here for instructions.

Once your form is completed, head to your Notifications settings to set up notifications via in-app, mobile push, or email to be alerted when one of your customers submits a form.

Go to the Submissions tab to see all responses in a table view.

The table includes:

You can download the form responses as a CSV file for easier review or analysis. To do this, click the Download submissions link at the top right of the table. The CSV will include all the submission data, allowing you to work with it outside of Nutshell Forms.

To view the list of people who have submitted your form, go to the Respondents tab, located to the far right. This tab shows the names and details of the respondents, and it functions the same way it did before.

The connection between Nutshell Forms and your website is powered by the Nutshell tracking snippet. Learn more about the Nutshell tracking snippet to enhance your website visitor tracking and lead generation efforts.