Kajabi How To: Create a Contact Form (Plus a Mistake to Avoid and a Tip That Helps!)

On your Kajabi website, you'll definitely need a way for people to contact you, whether it's to ask a question, offer comments, share an opportunity, etc. As with many things, Kajabi does contact forms differently than other platforms like WordPress and Squarespace.

I see a lot of questions about this so I want to explain the big picture about Kajabi forms in general, how to create a contact form, and then share a no-no + give you a sweet extra tip to making responding to inquiries even easier. 

Third-Party Contact Forms for Kajabi

The "easiest" solution, if you don't mind paying for it - and it may be worth it if your contact form is regularly used - you can try embedding contact forms from other places, like Elfsight.com or POWR.io 😊

But if you want to keep it "all Kajabi, all the time," here's how to do a better-than-out-of-the-box Contact Form using only Kajabi.

How Kajabi Forms Work 

As you know, Kajabi is an all-in-one system to run your entire online business (and if you haven't tried it out yet, you can use my Kajabi affiliate link to sign up HERE and receive a free 30-day trial, yeah!). Because it's so all-encompassing, they have to organize all its functionalities kind of like building blocks or layers.

There are WordPress plugins that do nothing but make forms so that's the only functionality they have to worry about. But Kajabi forms have to mesh with all its other functionalities and it's a bit more complex. 

The beauty of Forms in Kajabi is DATA COLLECTION. You can totally personalize your Forms to collect whatever fields of data you need and in whatever order you want. 

For example, say you want an opt-in form but instead of the standard First Name, Email Address, you also want to know what Country they're from. You can just add a "Country" field! Or perhaps you're a coach and you want to do a mini intake form on a landing page for your coaching package. You could make a Form with Full Name, Email, Website URL, Phone Number, and Time Zone. 

How to Make a Kajabi Contact Form (with Screen Shots)

So while it may seem unnecessarily complicated to make a Contact form, now you can see how it all makes sense when you look at the big-picture functionality of Forms in Kajabi, right?

Here's how to create a basic Contact form for your Kajabi site:

1. In your Dashboard, go to Marketing, Forms.

2. On the top right, click New Form.

3. Give the form a name, e.g., Contact Form.

4. For a Contact form, don't make the mistake of checking the box for double opt-in. You're not using this form to build your email list and they're not opting in to anything. 

5. Under Form Fields, use Add Form Field as needed to configure something like this:

6. In the After Submission box, you should enter the email address of at least one of your team members who you want to receive a notification when someone submits your Contact Form (otherwise, the form is submitted but you won't know about it). Also, you can set up a Thank You page if you'd like, e.g., "Thank you for reaching out. I'll respond as soon as possible. In the meantime, please enjoy this free gift" or whatever.

7. On the top right, make sure to click Save and you now have a Contact Form. 

8. To embed the form on your Page or Site, you'll do either a. or b.

a. click <> Embed on the top of the Form page, scroll down to customize the form, copy the code, and embed that code, say, into a Wordpress site (you only need to format the form here if you're embedding it somewhere other than Kajabi).

b. go to the Kajabi page where you want to insert the form and add a Form section. There will be a dropdown where you can select the Contact Form you just made; then style the form.

Here's the Tip: Make Your Kajabi Contact Form Easier to Use

Okay! Now that you've created your Contact Form, you'll notice something a little funky when you test it or get your first submission. The email you get starts off like this:

Then you'll see the First Name, Email, and Message (or whatever fields YOU used when you set up the form).

The problem is that if you hit Reply, you'll be replying to where the email came from which is "Kajabi Support <[email protected]>" and that's no good!

One solution - but it's kind of pain - is to hit Reply, change the email subject, delete a bunch of Kajabi-generated extra info you don't want the person to see, and then copy/paste their email address into the "To" field. It works but UGH.

So here's my little workaround for you that makes this a little cleaner and quicker.

How To Add an Automation to Your Contact Form

1. Go back into your Contact form and scroll down to Automations

2. Add 2 Automations so that yours look similar to this

3. Here's what the first Automation should look similar to; make sure to put that special coding in the Body:

4. Here's what the 2nd Automation should look similar to:

How To Easily Reply to Your Kajabi Contact Request

Okay, so why did you just make those 2 Automations?

Automation 1: Because now here's what your incoming Contact Form email will look like:

Now, as you can see, it's much easier to respond to this version of the email. All you need to do is:

1. Hit Reply, copy the person's email address from the first line of the email body, and paste it into the To field

2. Enter your response.

• You no longer have to get rid of all the extra gobbledygook in the email.
• You don't have to change the Subject line. Now instead of it saying "Re: [NOTIFICATION] New Form Submission From 'Contact form' 🎉🎉"," it says "Re: (Your Site Name) Contact Form" which makes a lot more sense to your recipient, lol. 

Automation 2: Kajabi will now automatically tag each person with "contact form" (or whatever you named your tag). When you go to send out emails, you can easily choose to NOT email those with the Contact Form tag, since they didn't subscribe to your list, they merely filled out your contact form. Therefore, you need to back them out of any communications you send as you did not receive consent to market to them. Makes sense?

Putting People Who Fill Out Your Contact Form Onto Your Mailing List

Contrary to the instructions above, if you want to be able to market to those who filled out your Contact Form, 1. Make the contact form GDPR-, CCPA-, and privacy-compliant, so when someone fills it out, it's very clear that you'll be sending them marketing emails; and 2. You can either skip the Automation 2 step above - or still do it, if you'd like to track who got on your mailing list via your Contact Form with a tag for other reasons.

I do not have my Contact Form set up this way and don't recommend it. People who feel strongly about "not signing up for a bunch of email lists" or "getting slammed with emails" may refuse to fill the form out. 

So you've either sent them off for the extra work of finding your email address or you lost the opportunity to receive contact from them altogether. I think it also sends the message that you care about marketing to people more than you care about serving them 🙁 

But it's your decision ;) (Just use your best judgement, Joel. You know I trust you). 

YOU DID IT!! You Created a Kajabi Contact Form

Please give yourself a big hug. You just did this all on your own:

1. Created a Contact Form

2. Created 2 Automations

3. Implemented a workaround to streamline your contact form process

4. Set up a tag for people who submit (but didn't subscribe)

I hope you found all this info helpful! Please email me any time with questions or comments: [email protected]. 

xo,

Update 04-01-21: 
Today, I officially published my Kajabi site and blog re-do! I've been using Kajabi's Premier website theme since 2016 and it was past time for a refresh. I'm using Kajabi's new Encore Website builder. I hope you like the changes!

Another new thing I'm trying is, instead of a Contact page, I'm using a contact form widget by Elfsight.com. You can see it by clicking the little paper airplane icon on the bottom right of any page of my site. Instructions to install it on YOUR Kajabi site are forthcoming ... xo, Erika