Why Webflow doesn't allow us to style the form submission email structure? I don't want to integrate Zapier. Is there anyway to do this?

Design help General
1

One of our clients has this massive form. The problem is, when a customer submits the form, the submitted data comes altogether in email. It’s not readable at all. It’d be great if we can style the email structure through Webflow without integrating 3rd party tools like Zapier. Zapier is great, but I believe that everyone doesn’t like to pay for another tool to get this feature.

2

If you’ve ever built an email system, you know that generating HTML that email readers like is an ugly affair. The designer would be mostly useless for that.

That aside, the problem you describe isn’t a styling issue at all.

HTML forms have a rather archaic data structure that must to processed into something useful if you’re wanting a specific output. You need a business logic layer for that, or a specialized designer.

Some options-

  • Use an automation system like Make, Zapier, n8n, Pipedream to process your form data the way you want, and then send it through a solution like Mailjet, which gives you the presentation layer.

  • Use a dedicated form handler like Basin, which has more styling options ( maybe data formatting ones too ).

  • Use a custom form package like Jotforms.

  • Skip email altogether, push your form data somewhere useful like a leads management system. We do this often with Pipedrive, Nutshell, Notion, and Slack.

3

Hi Michael, I’ve got a customer that wants their form to be easier to read. So I set-up zapier and mailjet, I have the form submissions successfully going to mailjet, but I’m having an issue with the mailjet e-mail template.

I tried creating a custom template where I put in variables, it’s not working. I think it’s my variable syntax that is the issue.

Mailjet variable syntax is [[data:name:“dataname”]] but webflows is {{data_name}}

I cannot find any tutorials or anything to help unfortunately and I’m just a measly graphic designer…any info would be greatly appreciated.

4

Hey Aaron, Zapier will handle the mapping, and any formatting you want, from the Webflow fields to the Mailjet fields.

It’s been awhile since I’ve dug into this but it’s not very complex.
I’ll DM you with my details if you need some help building it.

5

Use a free Make (Integromat) account. It has a healthy free tier that gives you access to most (if not all) of their features.