Want to create new leads, people, and companies in Nutshell when they fill out a form on your website? Skip the complicated integrations and bring in new form submissions with connected forms.

Before you can start to connect your forms, you will need to embed a Nutshell Analytics snippet on your website. Not sure where to start? Visit this page in your account to get some one on one help from our team. 

By the way, if you haven't yet included any forms on your website and are ready to start collecting new contacts and leads online, you can create forms from scratch in Nutshell.

If you choose to use Nutshell forms, you do not need to use the connected forms features, since your Nutshell forms are already linked to Nutshell!

Setting up connected forms

Prerequisites

To get started, ensure that you have already enabled Nutshell Analytics on your website. You will also need to receive a form submission for any form you want to connect with Nutshell (hint: fill out a test submission for the forms you want to set up). 

Nutshell Analytics can take around 15-20 minutes to start displaying visitor tracking data, and form submissions can take 5-10 minutes to appear, so if you're setting this up for the first time feel free to take a break, grab a coffee, check the weather, and we'll meet you back here!

Connect your form fields

The Connected forms page in your Nutshell account will begin to display the forms on your site as new submissions are detected. 

Every form will first appear in "Draft" status, until you connect fields and activate the form.

Click on any of your form URLs to begin setting up the connection to Nutshell. Nutshell is automatically labeling forms based on the URL where they live, but you can change the form's name by clicking on the URL on the editing page.

Your form fields will be separated with a preview of recent submission data. Click "Connect" to tie a specific field with the field inside of Nutshell. 

You can choose from any Nutshell text field to begin tracking the submissions. 

If there are any fields you don't want to track, simply check the box for "Don't save data from this field."

Be sure to click Save in the upper right!

What happens when a form is submitted

Create new people, companies, and leads

You can now begin to create or update companies, people, and leads in Nutshell when they fill out the form. Click on the create box to set up rules for how new contacts are added.

For most forms, you'll want to create a new person (or update them with the information from the form if they're already in Nutshell). Nutshell will automatically detect people that are already in your account based on their email address, so you don't need to worry about duplicates being created. 

If your form is collecting company data, you can decide if you want to update existing companies (detected via an exact match of the company name) or if you'd like every form submission to add a new company to Nutshell. 

If you are adding leads to Nutshell, you can specify the pipeline you want to add them to in addition to tagging them. 

Get notified about new form submissions

You can set up notifications from Nutshell to go directly to any of your team members, or to send to a Slack channel. To set up notifications, click "Add a notification" and select the notification type.

Decide whether you want to be notified through Nutshell or Slack. 

If notifications are sent through Nutshell, they'll be delivered to your teammate based on their notification preferences.  Form submission notifications can be sent within Nutshell, via email, or as a push notification on their iPhone or Android. Admins can configure other user's notification settings by clicking on anyone's name in the Users and teams list. 

If you are sending notifications to Slack, please note that they can only be sent to public Slack channels. Private channels cannot receive notifications from Nutshell. 

Managing your forms

Once you've connected your form fields to Nutshell and determined what should happen when your website receives a new form submission, you can activate your form to begin collecting new data in Nutshell! 

Click the blue "Activate form" button in the upper right corner of the form setup page. You'll also see the option to view the form on your website. Nothing you set up in Nutshell will change the look or behavior of your form. 

Form status

On the Connected forms page, you can find several ways to manage your forms.

Forms that Nutshell has newly detected or forms that have not yet been set up to connect to Nutshell will automatically be labelled "Draft".

If there are forms on your website that you do not want connected to Nutshell, use the three dots on the right to ignore the form. 

Forms that have already been set up and activated will be "Active."