Are you looking for a simple way to get Slack notifications from your WordPress forms?
Setting up form notifications on a Slack channel is a very useful way of staying informed about any new entries as they’re submitted.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to integrate your WordPress forms with Slack.
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How WordPress Slack Notifications Work
WordPress forms can be set up to send a notification to a specific channel or individual user whenever a visitor submits a new entry. In this way, you can keep your whole team notified about form submissions as they happen.
One of the best ways to get this done is by using the combination of two popular WordPress plugins: WPForms Pro and Uncanny Automator.
We’re going to show you, step-by-step, how it all works.
How to Get Slack Notifications From WordPress Forms
Setting up WordPress forms to get notifications from Slack is a fairly simple process as you’ll see from the steps below:
In This Article
- Step 1: Install the WPForms Plugin
- Step 2: Install the Uncanny Automator Plugin
- Step 3. Create a New Form
- Step 4. Connect WPForms With Uncanny Automator
- Step 5: Integrate Uncanny Automator With Slack Workspace
- Step 6: Configure a New Uncanny Automator Recipe
- Step 7: Get Slack Notifications From WordPress Forms
Ready? Let’s get started!
Step 1: Install the WPForms Plugin
The first thing you need is a WordPress form plugin that can be integrated with Slack. WPForms is a top-rated form building tool for WordPress sites with the most user-friendly interface and a valuable set of features. It also connects with Slack seamlessly for form submission notifications.
So the first thing you need to do is to install and activate the WPForms plugin on your site.
You’ll need WPForms Pro or a higher plan to connect WPForms with Slack
After WPForms is installed and active on your site, go ahead and install Uncanny Automator, which will enable you to automate processes between Slack and WPForms.
Step 2: Install the Uncanny Automator Plugin
Uncanny Automator is one of the best WordPress automation plugins. The plugin makes it possible to connect your websites, apps, and plugins, allowing you to automate their various functions. You can even set up functions in one app or plugin to trigger actions in another.
That’s exactly what we’re trying to do by triggering a notification in Slack each time a user submits a form on your WordPress website.
Uncanny Automator is available for installation from the WordPress plugin directory. WPForms also comes with a native Uncanny Automator integration, so it’s quite easy to install and activate it.
Step 3. Create a New Form
To get started in earnest, let’s create a new form. From the WordPress dashboard click WPForms » Add New.
This will open a form setup screen. Here, you need to add a name to your form and select the form template you want to use. You can choose any template according to your business needs.
WPForms’ template library offers 1,900+ form templates including:
- Quote Request Form template to provide an easy way for your site visitors to request a quote from you
- Refer-a-Friend Form template to generate leads
- Maintenance Request Form template to let your tenants put in an online request for the maintenance of their apartment
- And many more
Here, we’ll go with a Simple Contact Form template.
The Simple Contact Form template comes with 4 fields by default:
- Name
- Email address
- Website / URL
- Message
You can add more fields to your form by dragging them from the form fields panel on the left.
Once you’re done adding form fields, the next thing to do is add an automation to it. This is what will make it possible for your website to send notifications to Slack each time a user submits a form.
At this point, it’ll be time to connect WPForms and Uncanny Automator. Make sure to Save your form before proceeding.
Let’s go over the steps for integrating WPForms with Uncanny Automator now.
Step 4. Connect WPForms With Uncanny Automator
Once you’ve saved your form, navigate to the left sidebar and click on Marketing.
This will open up a range of native WPForms marketing integrations. Click Uncanny Automator » Activate now (you won’t see this on the screen if you’ve already activated the plugin).
Then click on Yes, install and activate.
If all goes well, you’ll then see a popup box showing that the installation has worked successfully.
Click Yes, save and refresh to wrap the process up.
Great! You’re now ready to use Uncanny Automator to create an automation recipe for WPForms and Slack.
Step 5: Integrate Uncanny Automator With Slack Workspace
Now, when you click Uncanny Automator from the Marketing tab of the WPForms form builder, you’ll be prompted to create an automation. Click on Create Automation.
This will open up the Uncanny Automator editor on your WordPress, where you can define your automation recipe to determine how your integrations should behave.
As you scroll down this page, click on the Add Action button under Actions
Before you can create a recipe, you must first connect your Slack workspace with Uncanny Automator. Click on the Slack logo to proceed.
You’ll see a popup open with two steps. The first is to sign up for a free Uncanny Automator account. You can do this by clicking on Sign Up.
Once this is done, the second thing to do is connect your Slack account to Uncanny Automator. Click Connect Account.
In the new window, click Connect Slack Workspace » Allow.
Once this is done, you’ll be redirected back to the Uncanny Automator dashboard on your WordPress website.
Step 6: Configure a New Uncanny Automator Recipe
From the Uncanny Automator editor screen, give a name to your recipe.
Recipes have two main parts: a trigger, and an action. The trigger is the first event that leads to a follow-up event, which is the action.
In this case, the trigger will be the submission of a form, and the action will be a notification in Slack.
The trigger will already be selected as the form you chose to connect Uncanny Automator with earlier.
All that remains is determining the action event for your form submission trigger. Scroll down to the Actions section and click Add Action.
After that, select Slack from the list of available apps.
You’ll then be able to choose from 3 basic actions:
- Create a new channel.
- Send a direct message to a Slack user.
- Send a message to a channel.
Depending on where you want the form submission notification to, you can either select Send a direct message to a Slack user or the Send a message to a channel option.
For this example, we’re going to send a message to a channel.
You’ll now have to select a channel from the Slack Channel dropdown.
Plus, you can edit the notification message that you’d like to see to inform you every time there’s a new submission.
We’ve gone with a simple notification message: “Hi! You have a new form submission!” When we test this automation out in the next step, we’ll be looking out for this message in Slack.
Click Save, and your form will be set up to send notifications to Slack each time a user makes a submission.
Now, there’s just one more thing to do, and that’s toggle the recipe status from Draft to Live.
One thing to remember is that if you choose to have the notification sent to a channel rather than a single user, you’ll have to add the Uncanny Automator bot to that Channel in Slack.
In the channel you’ve chosen, type in @Uncanny Automator.
Press enter and choose Add to Channel.
This will add the bot to the channel, all ready to leave a notification every time there’s a new submission.
Let’s test this out and see how it works!
Step 7: Get Slack Notifications From WordPress Forms
You’ve successfully set up the automation. All that remains now is to publish the form.
Go to the Forms Overview page by clicking on WPForms » All Forms.
Find the form we created in Step 3 and click Edit. Once in, click Embed from the options on the top right corner of the page.
You can choose to embed this form in an existing page or a new one. The process is nearly identical for both options but if you chose to embed it in a new page, you’ll need to give the new page a name before you then click Let’s Go to move on.
Your form will then open up on the new page. Publish this page, then open it up on the frontend of your website to see the live version of the page with your form embedded in it.
You’ll want to fill out and submit this form the way a regular user would. If you’ve followed all the steps so far, you should then have a notification waiting in Slack!
And that would be it! You can now get Slack notifications from WordPress forms and never miss out on a new entry!
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Next, Get Alerts via SMS
We hope this guide helped you to create Slack notifications from WordPress forms automatically.
Next, you might be interested in learning about:
- The best SMS plugins for WordPress so you can get alerts right to your phone
- Or, you might want to get an SMS notification from your contact form submissions.
- And you can also check out our detailed guide to Get Microsoft Teams Alerts from Your WordPress Forms.
What are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today.
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