I’ve heard from a couple different sources that you can’t use ONTRAforms in custom objects. But that’s absolutely not true. You just need to know this one little trick in Ontraport!
Video Transcript
Hey, Ontraport. Neil here from EMAIL SPLAT, and I’ve heard from a couple different sources recently that you cannot use an ONTRAform when you’re doing custom objects, which is absolutely not true. There’s just one little trick to it you need to know. It’s not super intuitive, so once you know that one little trick, it works just great. So, I’m going to show you what’s going on here.
So, here I’ve got my sandbox account. I’ve got a leads, object inside there that’s connected to contacts. And if we go over to my website, I’ve built some forms. I’ve built the incorrect form, which is what, I think, most people are doing here and why they’re saying it doesn’t work. And then I’ve built the correct way to do that form. So let’s … Already filled this out. Let’s submit the incorrect and see what happens. And we go to that fancy Ontraport default page. Now, I refresh my leads and see did it push in a lead? And, yes, it pushed in a lead, but if we go to the lead, I’m guessing there’s no contact associated with it. Correct. There’s no customer associated.
And if I go to contacts, did it push in the contact? I’m betting no. No, it did not. There is no new contact in there either. So, that’s, I think, why everyone is saying it doesn’t work, because they’ve done this and then nothing happens. But, if we … Exact same looking form. Also built in the leads object. But, if we do correct, test …So, if we do use this other form. Looks exactly the same. Takes us to the same thank you page. But, I’m betting we go in here and refresh. I’m betting there’s going to be a new contact in here.
And there it is. A new contact. And I bet if I go in there, it will have a lead associated with it. Somewhere. Yep. Correct project. There it is going to the project, and there it has got my customer associated with it. So, it can be done. So what’s the difference? What did I do? Well, if I go in here, this is the incorrect form. And we could look at the correct form, but it’s going to look exactly the same. I’m going to show you how I did this. So, I’m creating a Smart Form inside my leads object, because in this case, that’s a child of contacts. So, we have to build the form in the leads object.
And if I start from scratch, and I just grab this form, grab a Smart Form. Smart Form. And we’ll just look for the one I was using. Grab the Smart Form. If I just add. Whoop, that’s not what I wanted. If I just go in here and I add my project field and my status field, this will not work. This is exactly why this is not working for people, because this first name, last name, e-mail default, that is coming in from your ONTRAform generator, these fields don’t exist. Because this is inside my leads object, and in my leads object, I don’t have a first name, last name or e-mail field. And so, when you’re filling out this form, it’s looking for these fields within the lead object and they don’t exist.
So, what do I need to do? I need to delete these, because these are just default fields that will not do anything. And then I need to add new fields, but I need to add them from the customer object. So, I need to click through, find the first name field. I need to go to the customer, click through, find the last name field. And I need to find the customer, click through, and find the e-mail field. Looks exactly the same, but on the back end it’s totally different. So, now Ontraport knows that this is a related object field and it knows what to do with that. Even though it looks exactly the same here, if you were look at the code on the back end of this form, it’s different fields. And that is the trick.
The trick is that, yeah, the default fields don’t work, because you’re inside of an object. You need to delete those, and grab the fields from the related, you need to cross the line and go into the other related object. Cross over to contacts, in this case, and use the fields from there.
So, there you have it. The trick for using ONTRAforms with custom objects. Now, if you found a lot of value out of this, then you’ll probably get a lot of value out my Custom Objects: The Manual course. This is all about how to use custom objects, how to set them up, how to think about them, how to plan relationships, how to navigate, little tricks like this I just showed you that might not be really obvious when you first start with custom objects. And, of course, everybody’s favorite the bonus, super ninja tricks where I show you how I’ve, kind of, pushed the limits of what you can do with custom objects.
So, if you think that looks interesting to you, you would find that at emailsplat.com/custom-objects-manual. Thanks for watching.
