Today’s scenario: you have a link to a typeform on your website or social media post/bio AND you send the link out from your CRM/ESP to folks in your email list. But you want the users to ‘start’ the typeform at different spots.
Can you have 1 (one) typeform which will take, for example:
- existing purchasers of your product(s) to one spot to ask some questions about their product experience
- non-clients coming from a random URL you have posted to another spot to ask some questions about themselves and their organization
The technique I’m going to show you today have been implemented for about two dozen clients over the past year. I’ve also seen about a dozen of these requests in the Typeform Community as well. So I thought I would cover it today.
Here’s the essence of what we are going to do in the form:
- Using logic rules on hidden fields to determine the start point
- Hidden field is called ‘h_variable’
- We’ll assume, for this example, that we send a subscriber’s email address in the URL from our mailing list
- For example…. ‘h_variable=username@email.com’
- All other links which we point to this form will use the ‘default string’ for the hidden field that is created when you publish the for ‘xxxxx’
- Default value on publishing looks like …’h_variable=xxxxx’
Fair enough?
When we get to publishing the form, here’s the URL that is created - note that I created a custom link name for the form.
- https://desborough.typeform.com/2welcome-stmts#h_variable=xxxxx
This URL is what we use for the ‘random links in the wild’ to the typeform. (You might add UTM parameters if you want but for this note, I’ll keep it simple.)
When we send folks from our CRM/ESP to the typeform, we’ll be sending something along these lines:
- https://desborough.typeform.com/2welcome-stmts#h_variable=
The syntax for your CRM/ESP to dynamically include an email may be different BUT it should end up with a result that might look like this when it arrives at the mailbox:
- https://desborough.typeform.com/2welcome-stmts#h_variable=username@email.co
Make sense so far?
The image below is HOW we do that in the logic rules. At the start of the form, this set of rules is run first and foremost.
So what does the whole thing look like? I've put the whole thing into a Google Doc for you - it saves space in your inbox and makes it easier, I think, to be able to have you go back and look at it.
In the Google Doc, I cover the questions and the logic rules that make this work easily and simply. You can extend this in many ways and add other hidden fields, etc. But to get you started...
This is a really simple way to put this in place. Especially if you want to use one common URL to one form, from both your CRM/ESP or from random links you place in the wild.
Hope this makes a little sense about an easy way to get a single form to handle two purposes - just in case you need it someday.
Cheers till the next time.
des
(aka John Desborough)