Demo: HubSpot’s Form Interactions Event Trigger!

I think I’ve discovered HubSpot’s best kept secret: Form Interactions in the “event triggers” beta for workflows. In my opinion this is a game changer for creating form abandonment strategies, and I wonder where HubSpot could be going with this new feature. Maybe A/B form testing? How amazing would that be?!

Anyway, in this week’s video I share a demo of this feature and how I’ve put a Form Interactions workflow together to identify website visitors who simply “interact” with my Referral Program form but don’t submit it.

What’s So Great About HubSpot’s “Form Interactions” Trigger?

For marketing teams: this can give you some hints about whether your forms need tweaking. Did this person start but not submit the form because it was too confusing or too long? Because it had too many required fields?

For sales teams: what if the person was about to request a quote on your site, but decided against hitting “submit” and went to your competitor instead? Have this information routed to a sales rep so they can reach out and get a conversation started (not in a creepy way, please!).

For service teams: what if this person was about to submit a service ticket, but decided against hitting “submit”? You could have an automated email kicked over to them that simply asks how they’re enjoying their new product or service, and ask if there’s anything they need help with. You would be the most lovable company on the planet!

Demo Transcription

We start in my HubSpot, creating a new workflow from scratch. My workflow is contact-based, so it’s going to enroll people who are already in my CRM, and the enrollment trigger will be event-based, which is in beta right now, so I have to opt into it. I’m going to use a form interaction event trigger, which is different from the existing form submissions and form views enrollment trigger.

I think this is brand new because I’ve never seen it before, I can’t get any information from support, there’s nothing in the knowledge base about this, and I’ve googled it and I can’t find anything. None of my clients have ever used this or asked for such a use case.

The form I want to see “interactions” with is a form that I have set up for my referral program, and I want this to run every time the trigger happens.

So every time someone in my CRM comes to my website and they interact with the referral program form on my website, they’re going to be enrolled in this workflow. Next, I’m going to add a delay for amount of time. The form on my website or the workflow that I have running right now, it’s 15 minutes, but in the interest of time for this demo, I’m going to set it for 2 minutes.

Now I am going to add an if/then branch. It’s going to check for whether or not they fill out the form. So “did not fill out the form.” Let me show you what this means. So after two minutes of being on the website and interacting with the form, it’s going to check to see if they did not fill out the referral form, and it’s going to take them over to this branch here: they did not fill out the form.

I want to happen is, I want HubSpot to send me an internal notification — I want it to send it to the existing owner of the contact. I could also have it sent to specific users, but I want it to send it to the owner of the contact. Subject: “New form interaction from [company name], and Body of email: “Consider reaching back out to [first name] [last name] at [company name]. They interacted with a form on the website today but did not submit it.” Okay, and save.

Next, I could add another short delay and send a marketing email to this person and say, “Hey, did you know we have a referral program? You could make as much as $1,000 per Hub if you refer a new HubSpot customer to Lovable Marketing!” That would be a great way to reach out to this person because we know that they’re we are top of mind with this person in terms of making a referral. So that’s just one great way to use this particular event trigger.

So let’s see this in action. Let’s turn it on. Let me give it a name first:. Referral Form Abandonment. All right, so we’re gonna watch this as it works. So let’s push that over to the side and go over to the website. So I’m gonna refresh this, my referral program page. I’m gonna scroll down to the bottom.

Now you can see that I’m on the page. I am an existing person, Hohn Smith. I’m a contact in the CRM. I’m just looking at the form. Okay. Nothing’s happening. I am not being enrolled in the workflow. This is not considered a form interaction. We just looking at the form, okay? I’ve been looking at it for a little while now, not being enrolled in the workflow.

As soon as I begin to interact with this form, John Smith, johnsmith@demospot.org, Biglytics. Okay, now I’m enrolled in the workflow. How cool is that?! So the delay is now in action. So now we can see that John Smith is in the delay for the next minute and a half. And let’s just wait.

All right. So John Smith has gone through the workflow, so let’s go see how this went.

All right, so John Smith was enrolled at 4:00. The delay was set, and they went through the if/then branch, and then the internal notification was sent. So let’s check that out. Hey, and here’s my internal notification! So now I can follow up, I can go see their record in HubSpot. Now that I’m in his record, I can see all of the pages that he’s visited the website, and I can take some notes, send an email, I can make a phone call. I can do many, many things from his record.

I hope this was a little bit helpful and that it gave you a few ideas for possible Form Interaction event-based trigger use cases! Whether you have HubSpot or not, if you’d like to discuss any of this, I would love to chat with you.