Send form answers to the contact record
Map every question on your signup form to a contact field, tag people by the answer they pick, and build a segment that keeps itself up to date without a single import.
A signup form collects answers, and by default those answers live inside the submission. You can read them, you can export them, but you cannot segment on them, personalize with them, or start an automation from them, because the contact record never learns what the person said.
Map answers to contact fields changes that. Point a question at a contact field and the answer is written onto the person. Point a choice question’s options at tags and everyone who picks that option is tagged, which is the shortest route there is from a form to a segment that keeps itself up to date.
Take a membership form as the worked example. Which chapter? is a dropdown with three options, and Organisation is a text box. Map the dropdown’s options to three chapter tags and the text box to the Company field, and the day after you publish the form you have a live chapter segment and a company on every new record, without importing anything.
Open the mapping card
The card sits on the Settings tab of any form, as a row called Map answers to contact fields, under a purple arrows icon. Its description says what it does: Optional: save what people answer onto their contact record, and tag them by their choices. The Email field always identifies the contact.
- The switch on the right suspends the whole thing. It is off until you use it, and saving a real mapping switches it on for you. Turning it off later keeps everything you configured and simply stops applying it.
- The purple pill beside the title counts how many of your fields currently carry a mapping.
- Open the row and a line at the top repeats the one rule you cannot change: The Email field always identifies the contact, so it is matched automatically.
- A form with no data fields yet says so: This form has no data fields to map yet. Add fields in the builder first.
Open your signup forms in Mailsoftly
Choose where each answer is saved
Every mappable question on your form gets one row: on the left the question exactly as your visitor reads it, with its input type underneath, and on the right a searchable picker of where the answer should go.
The picker holds two groups.
- Contact fields is a fixed whitelist: first name, last name, phone, mobile phone, work phone, company, job title, website, industry, address line 1, address line 2, city, state, ZIP code, country, note and date of birth.
- Custom fields is everything your account has defined, each with its type in brackets, so a Chapter field created as Single choice reads that way in the list.
- Search with no match and the picker offers to create a custom field without leaving the page. The new field arrives already selected on that row.
- Do not save to contact is the top option and the default. Leave a row there and the answer is kept with the submission only, which is the right choice for a free text comment nobody will ever segment on.
The email input is not in the list of questions, and neither is the Email Subscriptions field. The first identifies the contact, the second already has its own job.
The picker is a whitelist, not the whole contact record. If the field you want is not in Contact fields, create it as a custom field and map to that instead. Manage your contact fields covers types and choices.
Tag people by the option they picked
A dropdown, a radio group or a checkbox group gets a second half, under Tag contacts by their choice (optional). Each option on the question gets its own tag picker, defaulting to No tag, with the same quick-create so a missing tag is one search away.
- Pick a tag per option and everyone who chooses that option carries that tag from the moment they submit.
- A tag applied this way behaves like any other tag, which means an automation that starts when a tag is added fires from a form answer with nothing else wired up.
- You do not have to tag every option. Tag the two that matter and leave the rest on No tag.
Single choice questions, meaning a dropdown or a radio group, also offer Keep only the tag for the latest answer. Ticked, somebody who submits again and picks a different option loses the tags for the other options on that question, so their tags always describe their current answer. Left unticked, they keep every tag they have ever picked, which is what you want when the question is really a history rather than a state.
The exclusive mode only removes tags belonging to the other options on that same question. It never touches a tag you applied by hand, by import or from an automation, so a Donor tag is never collateral damage from somebody changing chapters.
Save it, then check one real record
Press Save mapping. The card confirms with Mapping saved and, if the switch was off, turns it on for you, because a saved mapping nobody applies is just a trap for the next person.
Then submit the form yourself once, with an address you can find, and open that contact. The answers should be sitting in the fields you chose and the tags should be on the Tags card. That thirty second check is worth more than reading the configuration twice.
Two rules decide what a second submission does.
- Last write wins. Somebody who submits again with a different company overwrites the company you hold.
- A blank answer never erases. Leave a mapped question empty and whatever the contact already had stays exactly as it was, so re-sharing your form never hollows out records you have carefully filled in.
This is the piece that turns a form into a segment that maintains itself. Map the question, publish the form, then build one segment rule on that field or that tag. From then on the segment grows on its own every time somebody signs up, and nobody has to remember to import anything.
What to watch for
Four things decide whether a mapping does what you expect, and none of them are obvious from the card itself.
- A mapping only reaches the contact record when the form actually creates or matches a contact, which it does through the email address. A submission without a usable address stays a submission.
- A bad mapping cannot break a submission. Each write is protected on its own, so if one field cannot be applied the rest of the submission still lands and the contact is still created.
- A form with no mapping behaves exactly as it did before this feature existed. Nothing changed underneath forms you have already published.
- Typed custom fields are enforced here and only here. An answer written by a form is checked against the field’s type and, for a choice field, against its options; an import or an inline edit still writes whatever you give it.
This card is in English for now, whichever language your account is in. Every label you see quoted in this guide is what a Turkish account sees too, and the behaviour is identical.
Ready to try it in your own account?
Free to start with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. No credit card required.
