Contacts and form submissions
When a visitor submits a form or survey in a widget, Personizely saves the answers to that visitor's profile. A visitor becomes a contact the first time their profile gets an email address or a phone number. Contacts can be sent to your email, SMS and CRM tools with Widget automations, exported per widget as a CSV, used for targeting and personalization, and deleted on request.
Available on: all platforms.
How it works
- The visitor submits a form or survey. The values are Form spam protection and email validation and sent to Personizely.
- The values are saved to the visitor's profile, one profile per visitor. Each form field maps to a profile field, either a default field (such as Email or First name) or one of your Custom fields. Values from Change field value automations on the same element are saved with them.
- If the profile now has an email or phone number for the first time, the visitor becomes a contact. Personizely records the sign-up date and the widget they signed up through, and adds 1 to that widget's Contacts count.
- Automations run, for example adding the contact to a Klaviyo list, sending a webhook or an email alert.
- The new values are available right away for Dynamic text (personalization variables) such as {visitor.firstName}, for prefilled form fields and for targeting on visitor fields.
Profile fields
Default fields you can collect in forms and surveys:
Group | Fields |
|---|---|
Identity | Email, First name, Last name, Phone, Address, Birthdate, Bio |
Company | Company name, Company title |
Consent | Marketing consent - Email and SMS, Email marketing consent, SMS marketing consent, Privacy consent |
Profiles also hold fields Personizely fills automatically, such as UTM parameters, first visited page, referrer, country, city, region and zip code. These appear in exports.
Add your own fields in Settings → Custom fields. Types: text, number, textarea, email, tel, checkbox, select, radio, multiple choice and date. See Custom fields.
Export contacts
On the Widgets list, open a widget's ⋯ menu and choose Export contacts. You get a CSV of every contact who submitted a form in that widget.
Column | Content |
|---|---|
One column per field | Every default and custom field, with the contact's current value. Checkboxes are Yes or No; empty values are - |
Sign up date | When the visitor became a contact |
Sign up widget name | The widget through which they became a contact |
- Only contacts are included. Visitors who submitted without giving an email or phone number, for example in a survey-only widget, aren't in the export.
- Values are the profile as it is now, not a log of each submission. If a contact later changed their name in another widget, the export shows the new name.
- Sign up widget can be a different widget. A visitor who first signed up through widget A and later submitted widget B appears in both exports, with widget A as the sign-up widget.
- The export covers all time; there's no date filter.
For survey answers per question, use the Survey card in the widget's report.
Sending contacts to other tools
Contacts are usually synced to your marketing stack at the moment of submission, with automations on the form or survey:
- Email and SMS platforms and CRMs, such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend, Brevo, HubSpot, Attentive and Postscript: add to a list, apply tags, set properties. See Integrations.
- Shopify: Add customer creates or updates a Shopify customer with tags (default tag "Personizely").
- Wix: add a contact or label to your Wix contacts.
- Send webhook posts the submission and the visitor's profile to your own endpoint. See Send webhook automation.
- Send alert emails the submission to your team. See Send alert automation.
Automations run once per submission. Submissions made before you added an automation aren't sent retroactively; export them as CSV instead.
Deleting a contact
To delete a person's data, go to Settings → GDPR, search by email address and delete the contact. See GDPR and data deletion. Deleting in Personizely doesn't remove the person from tools you've synced them to.
Behavior details and limitations
- One profile per visitor, latest value wins. If the same visitor submits two forms with different first names, the profile keeps the most recent one.
- A visitor is identified by their browser. The same person submitting on two devices can end up with two profiles unless you Identifying visitors from your own login.
- The Contacts count is first-time sign-ups. A visitor who was already a contact and submits again doesn't add to the widget's Contacts, but does add a submit.
- Visitors can become contacts outside widgets, for example when your code calls ply.identifyVisitor() with an email. They aren't counted for any widget and have no sign-up widget.
- Phone numbers are stored in international format, such as +447911123456.
Examples
- Weekly lead review: export contacts from your list-building popup every Monday and import them into your CRM, or connect the CRM with an automation and skip the export.
- Survey plus email: a survey step followed by an email form. Both answers end up on the same profile, and the export shows them in one row.
- Personalized follow-up: after sign-up, a second step says "Thanks, {visitor.firstName or 'friend'}!" using the value just submitted.