Receive Google Forms responses by email
Google Forms allows you to get email notifications each time a user submits their answers. The built-in notification only tells you that there’s a new response, but doesn’t have any other useful information in it, and you still need to open the form to see the detailed response.
In this tutorial, we will address all those gaps and improve upon this built-in feature.
In this article
📊 This feature is available only in our add-ons for Google Sheets.
💎 This is a premium feature.
Note: Only 1 Schedule Delivery option can be used per campaign sheet.
For example, using the Row by row feature together with recurring functionality (via Select hour/date) option is not possible and will cause conflicts.
A. Set up Google Forms
Open the relevant Google Forms.
Click Settings > check Collect emails > click Save.
Info: Enabling Collect emails automatically saves your form respondent’s email address in your Form Response Sheet (campaign sheet).
Click the Responses tab > Create Spreadsheet > Create.
The linked Form Response Sheet will open in Google Sheets.
Go back to your Form > click the Responses tab > More actions > uncheck Get email notifications for new responses.
B. Set up Gmail
Click the Compose button in Gmail.
Enter the Subject & content of your draft, then add relevant {{merge tags}} to personalize your email.
We used 4 merge tags in our draft - including {{Name}} in our Subject field.
☝ Remember: The subject of our email is Upskilling Workshop for {{Name}}. We will reference this draft later.
C. Set up your campaign sheet
We’ll just add a column that will automatically insert your email address for each form entry added.
Go back to your campaign sheet (the Form Response Sheet we created in Step A3 earlier).
Add this formula next to the last Form field (header) - column F in our example:
= {"Send to My Email";
ARRAYFORMULA
(IF(ISBLANK(A2:A), "",
"test@email.com"))}
This formula inserts your email address on column F if the cells under column A are not blank (with form entries received from Google Forms). This also adds a header labeled Send to My Email.
Info: You need to be mindful of the correct punctuation marks used in your formula.
If you use incorrect punctuation, you will get this error:
In our example above, I used a comma since the Locale I used for my campaign sheet is United States.
But if your Locale is set to France, use a semi-colon. The resulting formula should be:
= {"Send to My Email";
ARRAYFORMULA
(IF(ISBLANK(A2:A) ; "" ;
"test@email.com"))}
Note: Don't forget to replace the email address & header label (Send to My Email in our example) with your own.
D. Set up Mergo
Open Mergo > click the Mail Merge menu.
Update the Mail Merge page with the correct settings. Learn how.
You can see below that the:
- Gmail draft field is linked to the correct draft (Upskilling Workshop for {{Name}}).
- Email Column references column F (Send to my Email) in our campaign Sheet.
By default, Mergo will automatically enable the On Form Submit feature on Google Sheets that are actively linked to Google Forms.
So when you open your Mail Merge page, you should see a prompt saying: An email is sent when a response is submitted to the form.
Info: To cancel your scheduled mail merge, simply click the CANCEL button (under the Scheduled Campaign section).
Alternatively, if you want to change the schedule delivery settings, click the UPDATE button.
E. Test the Workflow
Now that you’ve successfully configured everything, it’s now time to test your Notification setup.
Submit an entry on your Google Forms.
Google sheets automatically updates after submitting a form entry.
And immediately, the form submission is sent to your email - complete with details.
Info: To optimize schedule deliveries, make sure that your Spreadsheet's Time zone is configured properly since schedules are dependent on this.
To do this in Google Sheets, go to File > Spreadsheet settings > choose the relevant Time zone (1) > click Save settings (2).
