Getting Notified: Email, Slack & Webhooks

Once your form is live, you'll want to know the moment someone fills it in. StoutStack gives you three separate ways to get notified: email, Slack, and webhooks. They're all optional, and you can switch on any mix of them. One important reassurance up front: every submission is always saved in your account, and kept for 90 days, so even if you set up none of these, your leads are recorded for you to act on or export. Notifications just push the news to you so you don't have to keep checking.

Option 1: Email notifications

The most common choice: get an email each time someone submits, so it lands right in your inbox. You set this up in the form's Emails section, and you can add more than one email row if different people need to be told about different forms.

Setting up an email notification

  1. Open your form and find the Emails section.
  2. Add an email row.
  3. Set Email To, the address (or addresses) that should receive the alert. To notify several people, list their addresses separated by commas, like you@yourbusiness.com, partner@yourbusiness.com.
  4. Write a Subject line so you can spot these at a glance, for example, "New contact form message."
  5. Write the Message body, the content of the email (see how to include the visitor's answers below).
  6. Save. That's it. The next submission triggers the email.

Putting the visitor's answers into the email

An empty "you got a submission" email isn't much use. You want to see what they actually wrote. You can drop answers straight into your message body using double curly braces around a field's key:

  • {{firstName}}: inserts whatever the visitor typed in the field whose key is firstName. Use the exact field key for any field you want to pull in.
  • {{*}}: a shortcut that outputs every answer on the form, so you don't have to list each field by hand.
  • {{*:table}}: outputs every answer laid out as a neat table, which is the tidiest and most readable option for most people.

A simple, effective message body might read:

You have a new enquiry from {{firstName}}. Here are the full details:
{{*:table}}

Important: who the email comes from

Notification emails are always sent from StoutStack's own sending address. You choose who receives the email (the "Email To"), but you can't change the from address to your own. In practice this is a good thing. It means your alerts arrive reliably without you having to set anything up. Just know that when the email lands, the sender won't be your own address, so don't go looking for that. If you want to reply to the person who filled in the form, use the email address they entered in the form itself (which you'll see right there in the message body).

Option 2: Slack

If your team lives in Slack, you can have each submission posted straight into a channel, handy for a shared "new leads" channel everyone watches.

  1. In Slack, create an incoming webhook for the channel you want messages to appear in. (Slack calls this an "Incoming Webhook" app; it gives you a web address to copy.)
  2. Copy that web address.
  3. Paste it into the Slack setting on your form.
  4. Save. From then on, every submission posts a tidy, easy-to-read message to that channel automatically.

This is great for teams because nobody has to be watching an inbox. The whole channel sees each lead arrive in real time.

Option 3: Webhook (connect to other tools)

A webhook is the most flexible option: it sends each submission's details to any web address you choose, so another tool can pick it up and do something with it. This is how you automate follow-ups: adding the lead to your CRM, starting an email sequence, creating a task, sending a text, and so on.

  1. In the tool you want to connect (for example Zapier, Make, or your CRM), create something that "catches" or "listens for" incoming data. It'll give you a web address to send to.
  2. Copy that web address.
  3. Paste it into the Webhook setting on your form.
  4. Save. Now every submission is sent to that address, and your connected tool can take it from there.

Once the submission reaches Zapier or Make, you can route it almost anywhere: a spreadsheet, your email marketing tool, a project board, a text message alert, and more. If you're not technical, Zapier and Make are the friendliest starting points because they walk you through the setup step by step.

Mix and match

These three are completely independent. Turn on whichever ones suit you, in any combination. A common setup is an email to your own inbox plus a Slack post for the team, while a more automated business might add a webhook into their CRM on top. And remember: whatever you choose (or don't), every submission is still saved in your account and kept for 90 days, so you always have that record to fall back on. Just export any leads you want to keep for longer.

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