I wanted to use two webforms in GetResponse, and it seemed such a simple thing to do, so why did it take me so long?
For one of my health blogs I was contacted about an affiliate program that looked good and was well targeted to my readers. I wanted to promote it, so I decided to follow my own recommendations and use webforms in GetResponse to collect names in an autoresponder and send prospects mailings about the ebook being sold.
Now that I'm getting better at using webforms I didn't think it would take me too long. So I copied in and modified the autoresponder series, helpfully supplied to me by the affiliate manager, set up a webform and was ready to promote. I decided to make a blog post reviewing the ebook, a copy of which had been supplied to me.
My original aim was to add the opt-in form to the end of my review, so that people could read my review then opt-in to the email series if they felt the book would be helpful.
The problem was, my review “went on a bit”, so when I was reading it back, it occurred to me that people might give up before the end. Simple, I thought, I'll put one form at the start of the post, and one at the end.
I used the JavaScript code – as I always do – because that gets updated if I make any changes to the form.
All seemed to be going well, but when I checked my post, only the webform at the start showed up. Then started the usual re-editing and checking everything, assuming I'd done something silly, wondering if it was my theme, or what it was. Wasted couple of hours!
Finally, I viewed the source of the webform and convinced myself that the JavaScript code was there twice, but only showing up once. Rats!
After an couple of exchanges with GetResponse's support team it turned out that you cannot use the same JavaScript code twice in a post. If you want the same form twice, for one of them you need to use the HTML version. That's lesson one.
I don't feel completely stupid for not realising this was a restriction on the use of webforms in GetResponse because the lady on the support desk only found out by checking with their IT department!
It's not the end of the world, of course, once you know. It just never occurred to me that it would be a problem. What I actually did was to add a completely different post containing just the webform and link to that instead.
In fact it's lucky I did, because I later found that the post had been published by an online magazine which had stripped the JavaScript form out completely, leaving only the link. So, my second lesson was to beware of webforms within posts being removed. I've already spent too long on this simple exercise (hahaha) but next time I add a webform to a blog post I'll try using the HTML version and check whether the form is removed. I imagine it probably wouldn't be.
In fairness to GetResponse I imagine these are problems caused by using JavaScript rather than being specific to webforms in GetResponse. Has anyone else experienced these problems with any other auto-responders?
