Welcome to the first in a series of posts that put the spotlight on various Zoho applications. With close to 50 applications on offer and 50+ million users, Zoho is incredibly powerful solution and almost all apps are offered in one handy offering called Zoho ONE.
We’ll begin our journey through the Zoho app landscape with a look at Zoho Forms for Data Collection.
Everyone is familiar with web forms, and will have used them either to contact a company, make a purchase or perhaps as a questionnaire. Web forms are ubiquitous and yet under the surface they are certainly not all the same.
Zoho Forms is a cloud based service that lets you create simple and complex forms to collect data for a wide variety of use cases and with great control over how you do it.
But before we get into how to create forms, there are some considerations to keep in mind...
Businesses obviously need quality data to make informed decisions. The journey towards this data isn’t explicit though—instead, it differs based on audience, geography, available resources, and more. Before anyone embraces digital data collection for their business, it’s essential to understand the basics, planning methods, and data security involved.
Before you even create a form, ask yourself the following: What do you want to collect with your form? Images from your construction site, resumes from your job candidates, assurance signatures from your employees, or something else?
Answering this will give you an outline of the form and its fields. As you brainstorm further, methods to store the data, extract it, and share it will also become clear.
One of the main benefits of collecting information digitally is that you can quickly view and organize data in one cohesive space as reports, which can later be shared and exported to the team for collaborative work. In addition, using smart integration options that automate transferring responses, you can conveniently analyze these responses in your favorite applications—CRM, Sheets, and more. Marketers can also analyze the reach of a campaign, and thereby its success, by tracking leads and measuring goals right from within digital forms software.
How wide and far are your forms going to travel? Think about the number of audiences and the different, multiple ways forms are shared. Based on available resources, your team can decide on which platforms to showcase and host forms and choose a subscription plan accordingly.
You also have the power to limit both the number of submissions you receive for a form based on a specific date and the submission of multiple entries from a single IP address.
Creating forms is very simple using the form creator software that's designed to accommodate users with no coding experience. Add and personalize form fields according to your individual needs. Generate custom reports to view and analyze all your form submissions.
Collect data efficiently with the help of 40+ field types. Each field in the form maker has customizable properties that make your forms unique. These fields are optimized to protect the privacy of your respondents and safeguard any sensitive information.
Urge respondents to avoid duplicates or repetitions in their responses. Field validation clearly indicates fields that may be marked as mandatory, such as name, terms and conditions, and more by pointing them out to respondents.
Apply additional validation and logic using a simple, easy to learn script language.
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