Gravity Forms is a popular tool for sales teams using WordPress

Making the sale easier for your customers

When starting a new business, one of the most crucial tasks is to make it easy for clients to contact you to engage your services or purchase your product. If your business website relies on an open source WordPress installation, there are a plethora of free and inexpensive forms available as WP plug-ins.

However, you want to be sure to select a form builder that is dependable, robust, and easy to use for both your client and your web developer. Furthermore, turning the data gathered by your web forms into valuable information for your sales team can be a bit cumbersome without the right tools.

Custom forms with Gravity Forms

Meet one form builder to rule them all — Gravity Forms which was released in August 2009, and is in use on over one million WordPress (WP) sites. Gravity Forms allows you to build, design, and embed custom forms on your website through the use of their form editor.

Whether a simple contact form or a multi-page form to separate your order pages from your shipping and payment pages, Gravity Forms can meet a wide range of business needs.

Keep in mind that Gravity Forms is not compatible with the WordPress.com hosted service. You can only use Gravity Forms on self-hosted WordPress installations. Gravity Forms is licensed under the GNU general public license.

Three tiers of plans

With three tiers license plans, you can select the best fit to suit your business needs. The Personal License at $39 per year provides unlimited forms and entries on one site, and you can export entries as CSV files. At the Business License level ($99/year), you can use Gravity Forms on up to 3 sites and have access to basic add-ons that allow you to integrate third party services such as Emma and MailChimp.

It’s the top tier Developer License ($199/year) that opens up a multitude of benefits for your business, with access to more advanced Gravity Form Add-ons on an unlimited number of WP sites and WP Multi-Site. These advanced add-ons include communication tools such as Campfire and and Slack, as well as CRM solutions such as Agile’s Sales Marketing CRM, Capsule, and Zoho. Integrate your invoicing and payment system with add-ons for Freshbooks and PayPal Payments, and many others.

The Developer License includes priority ticket support, while all three tiers of Gravity Forms licenses offer auto-responders, entry export, spam protection, and 1 year of updates and support.

Connected Systems founder and WordPress web developer Rich Plakas states that Gravity Forms is “easy enough for beginners to get started with basic forms.” Plakas has used the PayPal add-on to accept payments for events, and stated that “support has been very good when we needed it.”

Zapier Add-on

Don’t see your preferred solution in Gravity Forms list of add-ons? No worries, there’s the Gravity Form Zapier Add-On that you can install to integrate with the over 200 web services that Zapier is tied into including Salesforce, Basecamp, and Gmail.

Tommy Oddo of Oddo Design stated that he uses Gravity Forms on just about every client project. “As a developer, its drag-and-drop features cut my development time in half— compared to the old way of creating/coding/designing forms. My clients don’t realize it— but my use of Gravity Forms saves them a lot of money.”

Minimize lost leads

Sales teams can appreciate the integration of forms with CRM, although Oddo opines that “they will almost certainly need some assistance from a developer/designer.” Oddo explained the Gravity Forms integration through Zapier in this September 2015 post “Why and How You Should Auto-Send Sales Leads from WordPress to Your CRM.”

Paying $199/year for Gravity Forms may seem a bit steep for some SMB owners, but it can more than pay for itself through its efficiency and minimizing lost leads.

Affiliate program and commissioned sales

Need more incentive? Gravity Forms also offers an Affiliate Program – receive a 20% commission on every sale you generate as an affiliate – but it is temporarily closed and they are not accepting new affiliate applications at this time. Stay tuned to their Affiliate Application webpage for updates.

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