Forms aren’t commonly used in email. Besides some technical limitations, users generally don’t expect interactive elements in an email, so they may ignore the functionality altogether. With this in mind, first decide if it’s better to stick to having your form on a landing page that the email links the user to.
Having a form in an email
That said, the user may be reluctant to leave their email inbox via a link to a form that they have to fill out. Especially when they don’t know what to expect from the form. Letting them know the length of the form in advance may be helpful for this. Or, this is where putting your form in your email may make sense.
To increase engagement, you’ll always want to try and keep your forms as short as possible. This is especially true with a form in an email. If your form feels like it’s getting long, you can consider splitting it, having just the first question, or a few questions in your email as a first step, with a next step button that goes to your landing page with the rest of the form.
A common practice for using forms in an email is to get some quick feedback. Like at the end of an order process or service. This normally entails a few multiple-choice fields and/or a short textbox. A single-question star-rating or up/down thumbs option can be done without even having to use a form, by just tracking the number of referral clicks.
Technical limitations
The majority of email clients support some level of form submission:
- Of the clients that work, many only allow GET form method
- Some allow POST, but require it opening a landing page
- Yahoo and AOL on mobile iOS or Android do not support any form
- All Outlook and Windows Mail also do not, except for Outlook on iOS
Since most of Outlook doesn’t allow form submission, you can use a fallback method that hides the form from all Outlook clients. This is especially necessary since it’s not just legacy Outlook that doesn’t support forms, but modern Outlook as well.
The HTML code below will hide your form content from all Outlook clients:
<!--[if (!mso)]> <! -- -->
<form></form>
<!--<![endif]-->
And you can show alternate Outlook content with:
<!--[if mso]>
<a href="#">Fill out the survey</a>
<![endif]-->
Blocks Edit allows using your custom design and code to build your emails visually, including with form fields.
