Automate a form confirmation email

This article covers a common use for automations to send a confirmation email after an Airtable form has been submitted. In this article, we'll use this event planning template as a real-life example to demonstrate this functionality. 

Add a form

To start, you'll need to create an Airtable form. You can create a form by opening the view sidebar and adding a form view. Your form must have an email field to collect email addresses from event registrants in order to send the confirmation email. 

Setup an automation trigger

The next step is to set up an automation trigger to look for new records added to the Attendees table.

Using the "When form submitted trigger" automation will trigger (run) every time the form we select is submitted. 

In our example, this automation will trigger after someone fills out the event registration form.

Setup an automation action

To send the confirmation email we'll use the Send an email action which is covered in more detail in our in this article. To set up the "Send an email" action click the blue "+ Add Action" button. Then, click on the "Send an email" option. This will bring up a box with configuration options to add recipients, a subject line, and the message body.

For the To field, we'll select the email field used to collect registrant email addresses. 

You can then configure the other available fields. By clicking on the "Show more options" drop-down arrow, you will have the ability to customize four additional parts of the automatic email you send out, which includes "CC", "BCC", "From name", and "Reply to". It's a good idea to BCC your own email address. You can remove your email address after the automation is confirmed to be sending the email correctly.

Test and review the confirmation email

After your message looks the way you want it to you must click "Run test" to ensure the action is working properly. If the test runs successfully, then at this point it's a good idea to check that the test email sent successfully. If so, you can now turn on the automation. 

Every time someone registers for an event they'll receive the confirmation email you created!