Surveys, text notifications, online payments… taking a look at Gravity Forms add-ons

For those that haven’t yet come across it, Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that let’s you easily add forms to your website.  The form on my contact page is created using Gravity Forms.

It’s pretty useful in it’s own right – just as a contact form.  But I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the more exciting things that you can do with the help of some of Gravity Form’s add-on modules:

 

Take online payments via PayPal

Gravity Forms integrates with PayPal, so if you’ve got a single product or event that you want to sell on your website, this could be quite a nice solution.  (Definitely not recommended for complex e-commerce applications though!!)  It means you can have people fill out a registration or order form and pay for the event/product all in one go.

One could also use this to allow clients to pay online – just direct them to your form, ask them to fill out the invoice number & amount etc, and then they’ll get transferred to PayPal to make payment.  The normal PayPal transaction fees still apply of course.  (Talking of invoices, there’s also an add-on for Freshbooks integration).

 

Run a survey

If you want to run a user survey on your own website rather than via an external service such as SurveyMonkey, Gravity Forms comes up trumps.  The survey add-on allows you to create Likerts, Rankings, Ratings fields and more.  Brilliant for customer satisfaction, employee surveys, market research… you name it!

 

User submitted posts

This is not actually an add-on, but it’s worth a mention here.  You can set up Gravity Forms to allow a user to submit a blog post (or other content type – perhaps a business listing or something) – which then gets saved in WordPress, ready for you to approve and publish on the website.  Clever!

 

User registration

This usually ends up getting a bit more involved, but if you want a simple way for users to register on your website, the User Registration add-on could be handy.  You’ll then need to integrate with another plugin or write some custom code to ensure users can login (perhaps to access restricted content that’s only visible to logged in users).

 

Tie your contact form up with your newsletter distribution list

Do you use Mailchimp?  (Or Campaign Monitor?).  If so, you can tie your contact or order form up with your newsletter distribution list.  Perhaps add a tick-box to the bottom of the form, asking whether people would like to receive your newsletter – if it’s ticked; Gravity Forms will automatically send their details to your Mailchimp list.  Useful!

 

Send SMS notifications via Twilio

This could be really useful if you had a form which required a quick response time, maybe a support request form or similar.   Set your form to send an SMS message when it’s submitted.  Methinks though, that this will be less useful now than it was 3 years ago – as more & more people have email on their smartphone anyway.

 

Polls

Want to do a quick snap poll on your home page?  Gravity Forms has an add-on for that!

 

Let me know if you think any of the above would be useful on your website…