Fluent Forms Tutorial 2021 - A Gravity Forms Replacement?

so when you are working on building your sales funnel in wordpress as you probably already know you have to have a form of some sort to uh be able to start the process now sometimes this is going to happen at checkout but sometimes it's not sometimes you just need to collect information on the front end or you want the user to sign up for your email newsletter or maybe you just want to use the forms plugin to even sell the product that's something that you can also do there's one plugin that i have settled on using over and against a plethora of others there's a sea of forms plugins but fluent forms is the one that i have chosen to go with and i've done so for a few very specific reasons and we're going to talk through some of those today first of all i just kind of wanted to show you around their website here and so you can see this is it fluentforms.com they are actually um developed by the folks at wp manage ninja okay so they have been around for probably five or six years now and the main product that they are known for at least in the beginning was probably ninja tables so they came out with ninja tables and then fluent forums i think followed um pretty soon thereafter and now they have just a whole suite of plugins that is really really awesome including my favorite email automation plugin which is fluent crm so we're really having a good time using those things we're really seeing some success with people using them in our funnels and for email campaigns and so it's really a great tool and i want to take a few minutes just to show you around it today so as you see this is kind of their main websites they have done some performance testing here with their plugins over and against some of the other tools that are available and i have to say um that i agree with the results the back end as long as you're on you know good hosting and everything all those main assumptions right you're on good hosting and you uh ideally you're on a private server and things of that nature when you're running a test on any of these fluent forms is definitely going to be the fastest option of any of them just because of the way it's built you'll you'll see what i mean when you experience it okay so there are no shortage of options but with fluent forms you do get just about everything you could possibly want you can do a multi-step you can do registrations again you can do payments um you can even create outside posts so you can have somebody post to the back end of the website to a custom post type you can create custom post types and posts using this uh from the front end one of the things that's cool for a sales funnel as well is you can even put an order bump in here and actually sell two products with um fluid forms so you could integrate stripe paypal it's got all your payment integration modules etc it's really a fully functioning piece of equipment and they have some interesting videos out there that will show you some of the different things that you can that you can do i'll go ahead and say um of course there are a lot of wonderful integrations here um like i've mentioned briefly already but you get web hooks you get zapier right out of the box you can even integrate with convertkit and get response in mailchimp even though they have a competitor to those products right here with fluent crm so there's really no shortage of the opportunity that you have to make this plugin work okay another thing that is really really important about this form builder against other ones is the click and drop form builder okay in other words drag and drop now this is huge and it cheats because it has a user interface that is super easy to navigate super helpful you're not going to be wondering where stuff is or how to find stuff it's very easy to follow along with and that will help you because the main thing that you should be focusing on is putting together what you need to be able to sell your products putting together you know creating your products creating your sales funnels creating your things you only be worrying about the technology and so this forums plug-in is a really great option for that so as we dive right in if we just go kind of to the fluent forms pro dashboard this is what we get okay so these are all of my forms again i only have two created now i have this newsletter form and i have this blank form so as you're going over first there are a couple things to notice right here you get the id which which form number it is of course you can sort by that you get the title which of course you can sort by that as well and then you also get right here a look into the conversion rate which is super helpful for you funnel builders the views that the actual forum has gotten and then the number of entries so obviously this column right here is just doing some math against um these columns right here okay and so that's really really helpful so you get a look right there without having to wonder anymore um what your conversion rate is if there's things that you can go ahead and do some tweaking on right here on the form you're able to go ahead and do that now before we dive into actually some of the form things itself um let me show you this so for one you actually do get the short code right here that you can go ahead and click to copy you just click that and boom it copies it right to your clipboard so you can grab it and use it wherever you need to on the site so you get that as well just from this main dashboard and then of course as you might expect as soon as you hover over it you get some of the different options you can do here it's got duplication built right in which is always always fun and helpful all right now let me take you to some of the um settings so that you can see what things maybe you need to configure before you even start diving into the form level itself there are some global settings that i think are useful to think about what you want to do with okay so you have some layout settings of course you can choose where you want to place your labels if there's any help messages as you're filling out you can actually create little help messages right so those are going to go where you specify right here next to label or below the input and then same with the error message placement right now email summaries this is really important because if you're like me you're just absolutely inundated with email so what you're trying to do is limit that as much as possible so you could come right here and say well do you want to get a weekly report or no if so let's send it to a custom email and then of course the sending day you can choose what day that is so this is just going to give you options you can get more granular than this of course with each individual form you can you can actually be very very specific but this is just the global settings some miscellaneous settings here we're not going to go through all these um but it is important to know that you have these settings you can you could do some really cool stuff with disabling ip log in disable the analytics on on the forums etc you can do that all right from here now this is important as well for permissions if you have a team that you're working with only administrators have access to manage the forms okay so you have to select these additional roles below if you want people beyond that to be able to actually access these forms and edit them double opt-in settings so we do have the ability to do a um a double opt-in here in general and you can also be a little bit more granular with this on the form level as well i typically do not use double opt-in um because i use download triggers and other things like that where they are confirming essentially their their subscription that way so there's different ways to go about this the double opt-in is important if you're not using any other sort of mechanism to uh to be sure that they've confirmed that download okay payment settings so this right here is where your settings would be if you wanted to go ahead and introduce payments into fluent forms i'm going to go ahead and do this now while we're looking at it because um i do think it's going to be important for us to talk about payments a little bit so you might want to see what that looks like so here is the fluid forms payment module and right here we get to set up the business name the address the logo again we could set all of these settings for our local region etc and here you see we have stripe and paypal settings that you can enable and add that information here are your webhook events and your web hook right here for if you um needed to configure recurring and subscription payments which you can totally do with this plugin so you don't have to get yet another plug-in to handle accepting your recurring payments you can actually just handle it right here with fluent forms and if you're in the boat right now where you've only got like one or two products i would just handle it with fluent forms you know why have the bloat of an extra plug-in on your wordpress dashboard of like woocommerce or anything like that or even a sales funnel plug-in when if all you're selling is that one product or at the most two you could probably handle that with a single order form and the order bump here on fluent forms so that's just something for you to think about okay now paypal settings again and stripe settings and then offline test payment settings you can enable offline mode here and you can even do coupons yes coupons are included you just have to enable the fluent forms coupon module and there you have the ability to do coupons again without needing a separate shopping cart software so this is a pretty powerful forum builder plug-in they really spared no expense here they charge appropriately which we'll talk about in a little bit they charge appropriately for the product that means that they can develop the product well and at a acceptable pace as well so it's really really helpful okay and then here you have re captcha okay if you do happen to use recaptcha you can enter information there i personally don't use this because i subscribe to another service called cleantalk which you can find a link below to below in the description to that if you'd like to check it out but cleantalk has literally saved my websites from spam i never i never get spam anymore on my websites which is um a pretty high praise as far as i'm concerned no spam comments submissions no spam form submissions uh honestly no spam anything it's pretty amazing across any of my websites so i would highly recommend you check out cleantalk okay so but again there's the recaptcha option if you want it clean talk makes that obsolete but if you're not using something like cleantalk please use recaptcha on your form so that you don't get all these nasty spam submissions that are bloating up your wordpress dashboard so that's our global settings if we go down here to tools okay you can export you can import and then you can do you can check the activity log so for certain bits of data et cetera okay so that's pretty self-explanatory not much to go over there on the smtp tab so right here is where you would add their smtp product which is fluent smtp now as you might imagine um they are promoting other products within their own ecosystem okay and i don't blame them for doing that especially as a product creator and besides these plugins just work really really well together their support is good the smtp plugin is free so i don't know why you wouldn't use it right it's just as good as any other one at least and in fact i think it might even be a little bit better you get some advanced logging and things so i would highly recommend you check out fluentsmtp to use that so that your emails are being delivered properly that's one of the biggest problems we face as website administrators with with form submissions and things like that is emails not being delivered properly so this will fix that and make sure that the email notifications that your forms send are ready to go let's check out the integrations real quick before we move on and so this is where you can see all of the different integrations that they currently have available and of course they also do have a zapier integration right here and so if you don't know zapier is an integration platform essentially that connects things even beyond what you see right here so there's a lot of native integrations so there's a lot of native integrations but then also there is a native zapier integration which allows you to do nearly endless integrations with other products and i'll go ahead and give a specific mention too while i'm on zapier integrations that the web hooks is a super helpful feature with web hooks just as an example you could collect form data from customers or prospects on one website but then take them into your email marketing campaign that's happening on another website that's just a really good example web hooks let you again make integrations with products across the internet so it's very very helpful let's move over into all forms and we'll see some of the options that we get on the individual form level so i have a newsletter form set up here but i'm going to go ahead and just start with a new form and let you see that process so if you have a drop down you can create a post form so it's a little bit different than just creating a new form here but for now i'm just going to do a new form and now you see immediately we're taken to a bunch of templates right so here's some templates for products here's some templates for education i mean university enrollment high school transcript all this already done for you marketing forms right so pricing survey workshop registration client satisfaction here's your non-profit there's your donation form right there it forms software requests website feedback report a bug financial forms um hr forms social for i mean here we just the list goes on of the templates that you get right away even healthcare patient intake so they give you a lot of templates a lot to work with there in case you don't know where to get started now for our purposes i'm going to actually start with a blank form so i can show you the process from scratch so if we create a blank form here we are taken to a blank form right and we have a video instruction right here so you can go and learn exactly how to do this from this video instruction if you would like to or you need a reminder and of course you can see a little bit of how the process works just with this cool little graphic here so right away we have this form editor drag and drop and then settings and integrations of course and this is where you get a lot more granular or specific with what you can do inside of your forms um you can actually create those of you who are used to like convertkit for example you could have forms that you created in your convertkit account but then you can also have a landing page with those forms you can actually do the same thing with fluent forms you can create a landing page mode so that you have a distraction free landing page to boost conversions using your form which is uh which is super super cool you don't have to actually create an individual page you just create the form turn on landing page mode and you created uh really hit two birds with one stone you've created the landing page for your website of course you can enter custom css and javascript across all of this and you can do marketing and crm integrations now this this part right here is is worth its weight in gold it really is because you can add new integration and whatever plugins and things that you have integrated in your global settings will show up here so i have fluent crm integrated so i can add a new integration feed with fluent crm and a really good example of something i'm doing that's really cool because you can add multiple feeds for one integration i have one client on their website they are collecting two email addresses in their form and so i could just create multiple feeds for that form and i can use one form to add in multiple email addresses with separate tags and everything in the crm so it's really important and a cool feature of course you have some of the standard settings that you might expect you have the standard form confirmation settings some global layout settings for the form also some login requirements scheduling and restrictions form validation and even survey information here and then email notifications you can totally customize these admin notifications or add custom email notifications you can use conditional logic with those as you might expect out of any good form builder plugin and then the same with confirmations you can add multiple confirmations you can go to landing pages you can do redirects you can do a lot of interesting things so back to our forum editor let's go ahead and just add some basic information let's say that we just wanted to do um a basic email newsletter okay we would add our name so it automatically gives you first and last and then we would do our email and then if you wanted to get really fancy you could even come right here and do your gdpr agreement and just drag and drop and then there you go you have your checkbox saying that they can they consent to the website information being stored and and data being managed by us then we have the first name last name and the email now we could leave it just like this if we wanted to we could hit um come over here and hit save form and we would be totally good okay so let's go ahead and do that so there our form is um is live okay so the form is taken care of and we could come right here and copy right there right so there's our short code again click to copy that's always just a nice feature saves a couple steps especially if you're working with forms a lot and there is that now what's interesting is you definitely get a lot of design control with fluent forms that other form providers don't give you in my experience some of the other ones that do give you design control it's just not a very friendly user interface but um fluent forms pro really seems to take care of that issue for me okay so there are two ways to essentially customize the look and feel so once you have got the input selected you go over to this input customization tab so right here if i wanted to boom i just get rid of that last name now it takes up the entire row and if i come right here and i want to make the first name required i could come right here and say that is required okay now a really cool little pro tip for you is in the uh default label right here what you could do or not label but the the default input what you could do is you can populate this with information from wordpress so i can actually populate this by default with user first name so if i'm working with a form where the user is already logged in to the website then their first name will populate without them having to do anything pretty cool and you can actually do the same thing with the email address as well so that may be useful for you depending on the use case for the form since this is an email subscription like a newsletter type of form it would be kind of odd that they would already be logged into the website for any reason though they may be they may be but it would be kind of a random use case for that for sure so i'm going to go ahead and just take that out we're just even not going to enter a default value beyond what they give us there okay so first name email address of course we would need that to be required so we'd come right here and say yep let's make that required and then we can come right here and make the gdpr required which of course it just is okay this field is required it's required by nature of it being a check box okay it has to be filled out in order for them to submit the form okay again there's no additional styling going on right here but this is something you may be interested to know on input fields you can come right here and add a container so we can add a two column container or a four column container etc okay and then we can drag fields into each of these containers so we actually get a lot of um design flexibility with things that we can do in terms of the structure right here okay now i'm going to delete these containers out and show you how fluent forms takes it to the next level okay so i'm going to hit save now what you get is this preview and design tab so it's not unusual to preview your forms but on this tab you can actually do your design now a few things here they've got some awesome default templates you can choose from and go ahead and just do whatever you want now you get the advanced customization and in the advanced customization you can add um well you can really disguise the limit okay you could customize this entire thing we'll probably do another video soon about how to actually customize these forms to get them looking how you want them to for now just know that you have the ability you can come in here and customize the submit button as much as you want you really have a ton of flexibility with this plugin there's miscellaneous information here so container styles asterisk styles etc and then import this is i think one of my favorite things i've ever seen i can import this styling from another form i've already done so if i've already done the styling like there's one website that i've implemented this on where their entire website utilizes like a black background type of feel a really dark feel um and it's an unusual kind of situation usually you wouldn't do that but to do that i need a certain style across every form and so when i create a new form for their website which happens fairly often all i have to do is come right here and select another form to apply the custom style from it and as you can see i had already done some styling on the newsletter form so i just went ahead and imported the styling and you saw how it totally changed that which is pretty cool all right so i definitely would recommend that you uh go right here play with these design settings it's going to give you so much flexibility right out of the gate without having to go through and do a lot of custom css or download custom styling plugins etc which is what you had to do working with another tool like uh gravity forms for example now another thing you can do with the styling is right here um before you even go into that preview and design which by the way once you go there you're going to see it didn't save any of my settings you do have to save settings here and then once you go back here those will be applied i'd typically refresh the page just to be absolutely sure but no changes that you make over here would overwrite what you did here okay they're saved separately um but you do get some styling right here so if you're in the submit form and you wanted to do some things with that you do get some advanced options so you can add some css and things of that nature but in the submit forum styling you could do a button you can do an image you can go with the default button style or you can change these colors right here and of course you can do custom and go ahead and do some customization on the button right here even make it small large or medium and change the alignment so a lot of times in a form people only want to change the button so they make it really easy for you to go ahead and style the button without having to go into that whole preview and design section you can if you want to but you don't have to do that okay so right here this is of course the basic implementation of the form i mean it's ready to go it's ready to go embed the form on a page and of course you have so many options here i will have to do some different videos on what some of these different options might be i think i'll probably do that in the coming days but for now let's go ahead and show you how to implement the form that we've created on the front end of the website and go from there so i'm going to go ahead and copy my form there it is and then i'm going to go and i'm going to create a new page okay so i'm here on my new page and we'll just title it uh fluent fluent forum demo and i prefer to use the divi website builder you could use either the website builder or the default editor since this is such a just a short code it doesn't matter in terms of implementing it it's going to be the same either way okay so i'm just going to use the default editor i'm going to come right here in my block and i'm going to paste my shortcode there it is and then i am going to hit publish and go check out my new page and there it is right so there is our fluent form just living on the front end of the website of course it looks uh horrible right now you'd have to do some styling again on your page to be able to um um make the rest of it look good but look at how good the form looks and it keeps that styling so you don't have to style that element separately it's all done on the form itself and just for um kicks and giggles if i go back to my form editor and let's see i'm going to go ahead right here and i'm actually going to go back to my preview and design now so if i go here and import my styles from the newsletter form and save my settings there i have my new styles imported just like that without any problem at all okay so that is a basic overview and look at how fluent forms works before we're done let's go look at some of the pricing and some of the options and things like that and then go from there so here in our pricing section at fluentforums.com you see they have a single site license an agency license and an unlimited license now i have to say this right here is is i mean this pricing is just really incredible i'm always a big time fan of unlimited whenever i could possibly get it now they have a uh a savings going on right now i'm not entirely sure what the occasion is at this moment but um it's pretty exciting for the savings even if the savings wasn't there 199 for the yearly unlimited license is not bad at all i mean if you're using this for your sales funnels you could make that money back in no time frankly okay so that's a good way to do it i'm also a fan of paying for things lifetime though okay i like to buy the lifetime subscription and then i'll have to pay for it again they do have lifetime options and right now this is a great deal and they're not like they don't just run sales whenever there's a sale going on right now as i'm doing this video so if you're watching this video uh soon after it's released go check it out and see if you can jump on that sale okay um 7.99 is a lot different than 559 at least in my world it is so you could jump on that right now and get lifetime access to it so you wouldn't have to worry about it going forward if you want it unlimited of course it's even less if you wanted to go single site or agency maybe you only plan on ever using it on one site you could go with a single site license for a lifetime for 174 dollars which is just an absolute steal given how amazing this plug unit is it's going to replace your gravity forms it's going to replace your formulator in my opinion it's going to replace your caldera i mean it really can do everything their support has been super responsive and i definitely would love for you to check it out okay so i am going to post my affiliate link down below in the um uh description of course you don't have to use it right you can just come right here to fluent forms and sign up that's totally fine with me if you use my affiliate link though i'm going to and you send me your receipt show me that you bought it um uh using my affiliate link i'm going to go ahead and send you a free course i haven't created it yet but i am working on it and it's going to take uh take you from really a to z showing you how to use fluent forms specifically inside of your wordpress sales funnels to collect leads and even to sell products so it'll be a course on using fluent forms and i'll send you that for free if you use my affiliate link to purchase the product and email me your receipt all right you guys take care and i hope you enjoy fluent forms leave a comment below like and subscribe if you find this content helpful and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Steve Schramm - Funneltalk

Views: 290

Keywords: fluent forms tutorial, Fluent Forms, Fluent Forms Pro, Gravity Forms Replacement

Id: XuxRMZzSpC0

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021