7 Time-Saving Cognito Forms Integrations to Simplify Form Building
In recent years, digital form building solutions have become a staple for business. Cognito Forms is a tool allowing users to create and distribute forms. The applications are almost endless, and includes:
Employee satisfaction surveys
Proposal and contract requests
Student registrations
Job applications
Webinar sign-ups
Program applications
Most of these were around long before the internet, but the digitalization of the workplace simplified form creation and distribution. Nowadays, nearly everyone prefer digital forms to their paper counterparts because they are:
Easier to design
Simpler to fill out
More accurate and secure
Faster to process
More cost-effective
It has been shown that digital forms take 40% less time to complete than their paper cousins. Their asynchronous nature (users can fill the form in their own time) helps create a more user-friendly experience and mitigate filling erros. And last but not least, digital forms are more environment-friendly than our old stacks of paper.
While opting for digital forms makes sense, getting integration options right can be overwhelming. So today we will focus on Cognito Forms integrations, and share seven solutions you can implement right away.
Now let’s take a look at what your business needs to grow and excel with Cognito Forms.
What is Cognito Forms?
Founded in 2013 by a group of consultants, Cognito Forms is a form-building tool designed to help SMBs make the most out of online forms. Boasting a 4.6/5 average rating on G2, it stands out from other form builders by its ease of use and advanced features.
Top Cognito Forms features
When it comes to digital forms, users have come to expect the following:
Versatility and ease of design
Embeddability - forms must be easy to embed into websites
An user-friendly form export process
Native and/or third-party integrations
Cognito Forms offer all these features. In addition, existing forms can be tracked to collect insights and analytics.
Image Source: Microsoft
Cognito Forms meets the expectations for most tools in the space, but it really shines in its offering of advanced features, which includes:
Payment solutions integration: Users have the ability to to accept secure credit card payments directly in the forms via PayPal, Stripe or Square
Advanced automation: From conditional logic to calculations, the builder interface allows to create elaborate forms and user paths based on the answers provided
HIPAA compliance: Cognito Forms is one of the few solutions providing HIPAA-compliant forms for new patient registration, appointment scheduling, refill requests, patient satisfaction surveys and online bill payment.
For a seamless implementation, let’s take a look at how Cognito Forms integrates with other software.
Cognito Forms integrations
Because forms are instrumental to many business operations (from sales to marketing and customer support), choosing a solution that integrates with the rest of your software is important.
There are different ways to go about integrating your digital forms platform with other software in your organization, and these are:
Taking advantage of native integrations
Coding your own integration with open APIs
Using a dedicated automation platform
As you might have guessed, we’re strong advocates of the third option, as Make stands out as one of the go-to ways to integrate Cognito Forms for better productivity and more efficient workflows.
With this in mind, we’ve gathered seven examples of integrations to showcase the type of automations you can create. Let’s check them out.
7 Cognito Forms integrations to up your productivity game
In this list, we will go over 7 automations to make the most out of your digital forms. Each integration will feature an Make template that you can implement today. If you don’t have an Make account yet, please create one for free (no card required).
1) Improve efficiency by gathering answers in a single place
Whether it’s for market research or generating leads, digital forms are data-gathering machines. However, it can be difficult to sort through answers and find your way around.
With Make, this is no longer a problem, as you can connect Cognito Forms to Google Sheets and automatically funnel every single form answer into a spreadsheet.
By automatically forwarding entries to a predetermined Google Sheet, you can:
Easily sort and search through records
Share clean data with collaborators and teams
Create visual representations of results
Keep a copy of all entries
The fact that you can automate this not only saves time and effort, but it also reduces the chances of manual mistakes corrupting the data.
Use this template to automatically save Cognito Form entries to a new row in a Google Sheets spreadsheet.
2) Sync your forms with your CRM to automate data entry
Sales professionals spend a significant amount of time working on administrative tasks such as data entry, and this has a negative impact on their sales.
By connecting digital forms to your CRM, you can turn form entries into a CRM record, and thus remove a burdening step from the sales process.
Use this template to automatically create HubSpot CRM contacts from new Cognito Forms entries.
3) Make tasks out of form entries to stay on top of your to-do list
Whether you work in sales, support or marketing, staying on top of tasks is most likely one of your top priorities. Automation can help by sending reminders and syncing with your favorite productivity tools.
For example, by integrating Trello with Cognito Forms, you can turn form entries into tasks, reducing friction and the likelihood of forgetting about your to-dos.
Use this template to create a new Trello card every time someone fills out a Cognito Form.
4) Get notified every time someone fills your form to never miss a beat
Timing is one of the pillars of business, and reacting quickly can make a huge difference. For example, research has shown that waiting just 10 minutes to respond to an inbound inquiry drops the likelihood of qualifying a lead by 4.
With that in mind, integrating your favorite communication tool to Cognito Forms is worth the effort.
By receiving notifications whenever a user fills a form, you’ll be able to reach out in a timely fashion and increase your conversion rates.
Use this template to receive a text message when someone completes your Cognito Forms form.
5) Automatically add webinar users from form entries to ensure no one is left behind
For reasons we all know about, webinars have grown in popularity. However, there is a common problem with these: only 40 to 50% of people who register for webinars will eventually attend them.
As such, it’s paramount to make sure that users registering to your webinars are reminded of the event.
By automatically registering people who sign up in a form as participants, you’ll be able to ensure that everyone is reminded ahead of the conference.
Additionally, you’ll be able to send participants reminders and calendar invites, maximising your chances to convert signees into attendees.
Use this template to add registrants to WebinarJam from new Cognito Forms entries.
6) Use form entry data to improve the quality of customer support
Digital forms can be helpful in your customer support strategy. For example, they can be used to:
Pre-qualify issues and topics
Weed-out spam conversations
Route the user to the appropriate customer support representative
Direct simple inquiries to an FAQ
Automation can help by streamlining the legwork. An easy way to achieve this is to create a new conversation in Help Scout for every new Cognito Form entry. Make is able to detect whether users already exist in Help Scout to avoid redundancies.
This can save much-needed time and energy for your customer support team to focus on customers instead of admin work.
Use this template to create Help Scout conversations from new Cognito Forms entries.
7) Automatically verify email addresses of respondents and add them to MailerLite
Once you’ve received a form entry, enrolling that lead as a subscriber in an email delivery service is a no-brainer. This can be used to:
Grow your newsletter reader base
Deploy lead nurturing and marketing campaigns
Inform of company and product updates
However, there’s a catch: users can fill your forms with false information. And what’s worse than receiving a “we couldn't deliver your message” automatic email reply? (Admittedly a lot of things, but still).
To prevent that from happening, Make lets you add an extra step into your automated email-gathering scenarios. So, before adding form respondents as subscribers, you can run the email address provided through an email validator.
This will ensure that your email list stays clean, and that your forms are filled with valid information.
Use this template to create MailerLite subscribers from Cognito Forms entries and validating them with MailboxValidator.
Important considerations before jumping the gun with digital forms
While digital forms are a great solution to a lot of business problems, it’s important to keep some limitations in mind, notably:
Project-sensitive: lack of access to a computer and internet services can affect the success of a project. Low digital literacy levels can also have an impact on this.
Cold touchpoint: Forms can seem too “robotic” to some users who would rather speak to a representative
Fake answers, ignored forms: These also apply to paper forms and are unfortunately out of your control. We said digital forms made the process easier, but they’re not magical!
Needless to say, these issues are not exclusive to Cognito Forms, and can affect your projects in disregard of the tool you end up choosing.
Conclusion
Digital forms have become so useful that is not a question of whether to use them or not; it's about which ones to use. Just remember these 4 simple tips to create an effective form:
Keep it simple: Only ask what is required, make it short
Minimize typing: Whenever possible, use multiple choice answer
Organize visually: Divide fields into clear, logical groups
Justify why: Provide explanations if you ask for specific data
In the case of Cognito Forms, there is the added value of HIPAA compliance, which positions the product as a go-to option for any data-gathering effort that deals with sensitive medical information.
Effective forms coupled with automation will save you time, effort and money. Check out all the other Cognito forms integrations available on Make to make the most out of your forms.
Happy automating!Cognito Forms
