7 Gravity Forms automation ideas

Website forms might seem simple, but they’re powerful tools that can transform how you connect with your audience. From building mailing lists with subscription sign-ups to gathering feedback through surveys or scheduling appointments, forms act as a bridge between you and your users. They can even handle tasks like receiving files or running interactive polls.

For WordPress users, the Gravity Forms plugin takes this functionality to the next level. It’s a robust form-building tool that lets you create custom forms and collect valuable user data right away. But collecting that business-critical data is only the beginning. To truly make the most of your form submissions, you need a system to process, organize, and act on that data—without the headache of manual work. That’s where automation comes in.

With Zapier, you can connect Gravity Forms to the rest of your tech stack. With just a few Zaps—what we call automated workflows—you can organize data, assign follow-up tasks to your team, and even respond to customers automatically.

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Track form submissions in a spreadsheet

The most important thing with form submissions is keeping track of them. And automation is much better at doing this than people are. Automated workflows will quickly, efficiently, and, most importantly, accurately transfer data from Gravity Forms into your spreadsheets.

Once your form submission data is in your spreadsheets, you can track, store, and organize all your data much more easily. You can also more easily share submission results with teammates and collaborators without them having to access Gravity Forms. And—most importantly—you always have a backup of important information. 

Try one of these workflows to get started:

Add contacts to your mailing list or CRM from Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a great lead generation tool, but you need to add those leads to a mailing list or CRM to reach them successfully. Don’t spend your valuable time copying and pasting details from every submission. That doesn’t scale and inevitably leads to errors in your important customer data.

Set up one of these workflows to transfer all the info you need instantly. Automations like these can add or even update contact info when someone submits a form through your site. If you have multiple mailing lists or targeted outreach, you can add more granular details for each new subscriber. Your contact list will never fall out of date if you automate it.

Get notifications in team chat

You and your team need to know what’s happening with your forms. And likely take action from them.

Keep your team in the loop where they’re spending the most time—in team chat. These automations give your team a useful record of new submissions. They also keep everyone informed of what’s happening at all times so you can be faster, more responsive, and on top of all your work.

Respond to customers with an automatic email

A form submission shouldn’t just go into a black hole when sent. You want to acknowledge you’ve received it. Use these workflows to trigger an automatic email when someone fills out your form. 

You can use this automation to send thank you emails, follow up on requests or questions, offer discount codes, or simply confirm receipt of a submission. Whatever you’re using it for, an instant response makes users feel appreciated and builds a positive relationship.

If you don’t have time to respond to dozens of form submissions at scale, you can instead rely on AI to do the heavy lifting for you. With these workflows, you can use AI tools (like ChatGPT or Claude) to generate personalized email responses based on the content of each form submission, saving you time while maintaining a professional touch. Whether it’s answering common questions, thanking customers, or providing next steps, AI-powered responses will ensure your users always feel valued.

Create follow-up tasks in your project management app

Analyzing and reacting to new form submissions is part of your daily workflow. Make sure you’ve assigned the appropriate follow-up task with automation.

Scale how quickly you can follow up on form responses by automatically creating a new task in your to-do or project management app with these workflows. When tasks are added automatically, you’ll never miss following up again.

Connect your forms to your calendar app

Do you use Gravity Forms to schedule important meetings with customers or to register webinar attendees? Manually creating events and attendees can be risky—nothing loses a customer faster than missing a call or follow-up.

Automation makes it easy to generate detailed calendar events (or new Zoom webinar registrants) for new incoming Gravity Forms submissions with no missed details.

And if you use forms to follow up after meetings—maybe you want to see how you and your team did on that sales call—you can use a Zap to automatically create a form for each new client you schedule:

Back up submissions and files

Do you use Gravity Forms to collect files? It’s an easy way to gather needed documents or even give clients an easy way to submit drafts of work. But it’s also an easy way to lose track of important images and docs.

Integrate your forms with your cloud storage tool of choice to automatically upload, store, and organize all your important assets. That way, you not only have an organized archive of all your important files, you can also more easily share them with the right people when needed.

Ensure your files are safely stored for convenient access later by backing them up instantly every time you get a new submission.

Want to back up Gravity Forms submissions inside a custom app or a tool that doesn’t connect with Zapier? In that case, you can use webhooks. 

Webhooks allow your apps to communicate with each other by sending detailed information in real time whenever something happens in your trigger app. This Zap, for example, automatically sends a webhook to a specified URL whenever you get a new Gravity Forms submission, making it easy to transfer and manage your form data in the tool or system of your choice.

Make your form submissions work for you

Dive into a world where your website forms do more than just collect information. When you pair up Gravity Forms on your WordPress site with Zapier’s automation magic, things get a whole lot easier and faster. With just a few clicks, you can set up workflows that take your form data where it needs to go, without you having to lift a finger. 

From tracking form submissions in spreadsheets to creating tasks in your project management app to even scheduling follow-up emails with your customers, automation lets you do it all, and then some. Say goodbye to the boring copy-paste routine, and hello to a smoother, more organized way of handling your form data.

And this is just the start of what you can do with Gravity Forms and Zapier. What will you automate first?

This article was originally published in August 2020, written by Nick Moore, with previous updates by Wren Noble. It was most recently updated in November 2024 by Elena Alston.