Send Contact Form Submissions to an Inbox

A Beacon can be used as a contact form to add to your site or app. If you prefer to use a third-party contact form, then it is easy to keep track of contact form submissions by directing those entries right to your Help Scout Inbox. This article talks about sending contact form submissions to Help Scout.

Form Applications

While it is possible to create a conversation using the Help Scout API, sending a form submission email is the more common approach. If you aren't comfortable building the contact form on your own (light programming required), we highly recommend one of these great services:

• Wufoo
• Gravity Forms (WordPress)
• Feedbackify

Send Submissions to Help Scout

1. The simplest way to set up your contact form is to send all submissions to the same custom email address (support@yourdomain.com) connected to your Help Scout Inbox. If a submission is sent to that address, it will forward into Help Scout the same way your regular customer emails land in Help Scout. 
2. An alternate method is to send contact form submissions directly to your Help Scout Inbox Address. This approach is useful if you want to circumvent forwarding delays and do not need a copy saved at your email provider. You'll see those contact form submissions pop-up in Help Scout almost immediately.

Best Practices

Make sure the From: address and Reply-to: address values are set appropriately so that Help Scout can properly identify the customer:  

1. Set the From address to something like contact@yourdomain.com or no-reply@yourdomain.com. If the From: address is set to the customer's email (spock@gmail.com), the message might be marked as spam since it's not really being sent from Gmail.
2. Set the Reply-to: address as the customer's email address. We'll pull in this address and link everything to the correct profile. When you reply, you'll be sending your message back to the customer and not contact@yourdomain.com or no-reply@yourdomain.com.

Form Submissions and Spam

Most forms that exist on the internet will get spammed sooner or later. Because the emails that your form service will generate are not just regular emails, Help Scout's spam filter will often not recognize the spammy form submissions as spam. Modern form services all offer security features that will prevent spam submissions to your form - if you find that you are receiving many emails from your form service that have spammy content, check with your service provider about ways to stop those submissions. If you have built your own form using the API, we'd recommend your developers look into adding a CAPTCHA to stop automated spam submissions to your form.