How to Create a Contact Form with Multiple Recipients in WordPress (2023)

Want to make your WordPress contact forms more powerful and useful in 2023? Sending notifications to multiple recipients takes things to the next level.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this in-depth guide:

• Key reasons to implement multi-recipient form notifications
• An overview of exactly how the functionality works
• A closer look at the #1 form plugin for enabling this
• Step-by-step configuration walkthrough
• Deep dives into 4 advanced notification use cases
• Pro tips for segmentation, targeting, and optimization

Let’s dive in!

Why Send Contact Form Notifications to Multiple Recipients?

First things first – why would you even need to send messages to more than one person?

Plenty of compelling reasons exist:

Notify Your Entire Team

WordPress sites are often collaborative efforts between content teams, developers, designers, strategists, and stakeholders.

Contact form submissions contain customer insights gold – feedback, questions, suggestions, and engagement that impacts many roles.

Improve Response Times

With more eyes on form notifications, you can vastly improve response times and overall customer satisfaction. This builds loyalty and trust.

As an example, a study found companies who respond to messages within 5 minutes are 9x more likely to convert contacts into paying customers.

Fast replies require proper notifications.

Route Inquiries to The Right Departments

An intelligently segmented contact form simplifies routing messages internally.

For example, automatically send:

• Sales inquiries directly to the Sales Team
• Pre-purchase questions to Customer Support
• Partnership opportunities to the Business Development Group

And so on. This prevents delays from manual triage and cuts down on human error risks.

The data backs this up powerfully:

Below we’ll explore advanced routing methods.

Clearly, strategically sending form notifications to key recipients across your business unlocks huge benefits:

✅ Faster response times
✅ Less manual message sorting
✅ Expert answers from the proper departments
✅ Better overall customer experiences

Configuring Multi-Recipient WordPress Forms

The only catch? You need an advanced WordPress form builder that supports multiple notifications out-of-the-box.

We recommend and will cover setup using WPForms – the most popular, 5-star rated contact form plugin in the WordPress ecosystem.

Why Choose WPForms for Multi-Recipient Forms?

Don’t just take our word for it. With over 6 million active installs globally, WPForms is the #1 choice for creating conversion-focused WordPress forms.

But why choose them specifically for multi-recipient functionality?

Several compelling reasons:

🎯 Drag-and-Drop Form Designer: Quickly build forms without any code
📤 Unlimited Email Notifications: Send to unlimited recipients
🎯 Smart Conditional Logic: Route notifications based on rules
⚙️ robust Integrations: Connect 150+ vital business apps
🔐 GDPR Friendly: Supports data privacy regulation requirements

These capabilities empower advanced, targeted, segmented notification configurations.

And WPForms offers a FREE version with robust features to get started. Their affordable paid plans unlock additional capabilities.

Let‘s explore setup steps using WPForms for enabled multi-recipient contact form notifications.

Method 1: Copy Multiple Recipients on Identical Messages

The most basic approach is sending identical form notifications to various recipients.

Best for situations like:

• Keeping a client or external stakeholder looped in
• Notifying a team of a general inquiry
• Simple internal triage of submissions

Here is how to copy multiple recipients with WPForms:

1. Install and activate WPForms
2. Create a new form
3. In Form Settings → Notifications tab
4. In the "Send To" field, add emails separated by commas

For example:

[email protected], [email protected]  

5. Customize the subject line, "From Name", and body as desired
6. Publish your WPForms contact form!

Now identical notifications will reach all recipients list. Simple but effective.

Pro Tip: You can combine this approach with other methods covered below.

Method 2: Build Custom Confirmations and Notifications

The real power of multi-recipient contact forms unlocks with custom, segmented notifications.

For example:

Send users a customized confirmation message upon form submission while admin receives a separate notification with all details and responses.

Or granularly segment by inquiry type, form values, user selections, and more – explained shortly.

Let‘s first explore how to create distinct custom notifications with WPForms, then we‘ll cover advanced routing.

Creating Distinct Messages for Different Recipients

Custom notifications allow sending each recipient or group a tailored message fitting their needs.

For example:

• Users: Thank you page and confirmation email
• Sales Team: New lead notification with contact details
• Admin: Complete form data including messages and attachments

Here is how to set up custom form confirmation and notification emails in WPForms:

1. Build your form including desired fields
2. In Form Settings → Notifications tab
3. Click "Add New Notification"
4. Name your custom notification
5. Set "Send To" recipient(s), Subject, From address info
6. Craft a custom message body per use case
7. Publish your form!

Now different audiences will receive focused messages optimized for their role upon form submission.

Let‘s take this to the next level…

Method 3: Conditionally Route Notifications by Rules

Building upon custom messages, notification routing unlocks intelligent automation based on:

✅ User selections
✅ Submitted form values
✅ Conditional logic

For example automatically:

• Send IT issues to Tech Support team
• Copy Sales on new lead notifications
• Alert Customer Service of pre-purchase questions

Here is how conditional routing works in WPForms:

1. Add a Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, or Dropdown field for recipients to self-select
2. Under Notification settings, enable Conditional Logic
3. Build conditions like: If Choice = "Sales", Send Notification 1
4. Craft notifications tailored to each scenario
5. Publish your high-value segmented form!

Now submissions route to proper teams based on user selections or form values. No manual triage needed!

Below we share creative ideas and best practices for notification routing automation.

Method 4: Carbon Copy (CC) Key Recipients

Sometimes you simply want colleagues to stay loosely looped in on submissions and conversations via email threads.

Carbon copying is perfect for keeping cross-functional team members informed without cluttering up inboxes.

Here is how to CC recipients in WPForms:

1. Navigate to WPForms → Settings
2. Select Email tab
3. Check the "Enable Carbon Copy" box
4. Save your change
5. Open desired form Notification settings
6. Add CC recipient emails
7. Publish your updated form

Now when you receive notifications, those CC’d will be included for easy collaboration all on one chain.

No more forwarding emails manually!

Creative Segmentation and Targeting Ideas

We covered the four methods for configuring multi notifications in WPForms above. Now let‘s get creative with use cases.

Here are suggestions for intelligently segmenting and targeting form submissions to recipients:

By Inquiry/Request Type

Empower visitors to self-identify the most relevant internal teams for their needs with a Multiple Choice field. For example:

• General Inquiry
• Sales
• Customer Support
• Careers
• Partnerships

Then build mapped, conditional notifications for each selection routed to correct groups!

By Products/Services

Split requests by offerings with checkboxes:

• [ ] Product A
• [ ] Product B
• [ ] Service C

Sales and Support can efficiently triage later.

By Customer Type

Identify ideal account managers and nurture flows. Examples:

• Existing Customer
• Site Visitor
• New Lead

The options are almost endless when tapping into user-provided data!

Pro Tips for Multi-Email Forms

When implementing multi-recipient contact forms, keep these success factors in mind:

💡 Be selective yet inclusive with notifications – find the balance between awareness and disruptiveness

💡 Craft tailored messages solving each recipient’s needs

💡 Consider supplemental tools like email marketing automation for personalized follow-ups at scale

The key is providing value – not simply spam!

Wrap Up

Hopefully this deep dive empowers you to configure targeted, multi-recipient notifications for your next WordPress contact form in 2023!

We explored:

✅ 4 turnkey methods supported in WPForms
✅ Creative segmentation techniques
✅ Reasons and benefits
✅ Step-by-step walkthroughs
✅ Optimization best practices

At the end of the day, strategic notifications increase productivity, boost customer satisfaction through quick answers from experts, and unify dispersed teams through collaboration and transparency.

To build high converting, optimized contact forms on your WordPress site, start a free WPForms trial today!

Questions or suggestions? Reach out via email or Twitter!