SMS Notifications for Form Submissions

Overview

This tutorial explains how to create a custom action email which will be triggered when a contact is generated through a website form, and then send an SMS notification of this to one of more cell phones.

Setup

• From the administrative dashboard, click on "Integration > Custom Hooks".
• In the secondary navigation, click on "Create Hook".
• Select the "E-Mail Dispatcher" type.
• The "Create Hook" popup will appear:

1. To: In order to send this email as an SMS, we need to determine the email address for the mobile carrier that will be used. For this, you will need to reference this list of email-to-SMS addresses. In this example, the "to" will be a Sprint customer with phone number "5551231234".
2. CC: The "CC" is optional. It allows you to forward this message to another mobile phone, if desired. In this case we are forwarding the email to a Verizon customer with phone number "9991231234".
3. Subject: Most providers will include the subject in the text message. For that reason, you should keep this short and to the point. An SMS is limited to 160 characters, so we don't want to put more information that is absolutely required.
4. Message: This is the body of the text message that will be sent. In order to determine which caller tags can be used on the email, you will need to reference the hook page in our documentation for the "Task Trigger" that you are creating. In this case, we are creating a "Contact Created" custom action trigger, so you would reference this article.
   
   In this case the "data" component holds all of the fields that are being submitted from the website contact form, meaning you can only use caller tags for fields that are on the form. Since the custom hook stores the fields in the "data" component, the caller tags are formatted as "%component:field_name%".
   
   Click here for more information on caller tags.
   
   Need help? The format of the hooks can be confusing to non-technical users, so please feel free to contact us for more information.
5. Task Trigger: This controls when the custom hook will run. In this case, we want to send the SMS when a contact is created, so we select "Contact: Created" from the drop down list.

In the above example, the final SMS would look something like this on a mobile device (the exact format depends on how your provider handles the email-to-SMS):

Useful Links

• List of E–Mail to SMS addresses for major carriers