Paperform is marketed as the “Digital Swiss Army Knife” for all your web form creation needs and rightfully so. It’s a cutting-edge online form builder that lets you build smart forms without any coding or design background needed.
With it you’ll never create a boring form again. Paperform allows you to create customizable forms for surveys, payments, bookings, onboarding, lead generation quizzes, order calculations, and landing pages, among others. There is very little that you can’t accomplish with your web forms.
That said, let’s dive deeper into what Paperform has to offer.
Features of Paperform
Paperform enables simplicity in collecting information. The form builder can help professionals and agencies of different sizes. It’s useful for:
- Collecting information and biodata such as names, emails, contacts, etc. You can integrate this into your SaaS marketing strategy to collect and follow up on leads.
- Appointments and bookings allow you to sync your booking form with Google Calendar.
- Calculations, which can be estimates, quotes, or payments with advanced excel-like options.
- Conditional logic. You can add questions to your form and generate output based on conditional logic.
- Collecting one-time or recurring payments is especially useful for an e-commerce business.
In addition to these, you can automate your workflows on Paperform with integrations such as Asana, Slack, Google Sheets, and Zapier. Paperform also allows suave reporting capabilities for your forms. For instance, you can get data and information on the number of submissions, downloads, and form completion rates.
Let’s look at each of Paperform’s main features below:
Form Building and Editing
Paperform allows you to build forms from scratch, or choose from various customizable templates.
The Paperform editor functions more like a doc where you can type in what you want and then select the type of output expected. Typically, building a form happens in the “Design” tab. As seen in the image below:
The “Configure” option lets you customize the behavior of the form when it comes to managing payments, dynamic pricing, coupons, analytics, reporting, and scoring.
The “After Submission” tab provides options such as creating a PDF after the form is created, sending an email after form submission, or adding integrations. With this process, you can create a registration form such as the one below.
With the sign-up form above, the creator only needed to type in questions like “Are you pre-approved for a mortgage?” and “What’s your budget?” to set up the input fields. It works the same way for any type of form you want to build.
Email Builder
Paperform provides an intuitive email builder that allows you to customize your messages, set up subject lines, and attach custom PDFs (for example, an eBook or a report). An example of email configuration is shown below.
You can also set up logic in the email configuration. For example, custom emails can be triggered if only certain criteria are met.
Analytics
Paperform analytics help you monitor how effective your forms are. For example, if you run a lead generation campaign for your sales funnel, you can use Paperform analytics to know how your forms are performing. The screengrab below depicts how you can use analytics to gauge user behavior.
You can view different metrics such as the number of form views, submitted forms, completion rates, etc. It should also be noted that Paperform allows you to keep incomplete forms for up to 30 days, just in case you’d like to follow up with leads.
Calendar
The Calendar is an important Paperform feature for scheduling and appointment booking. You can set up a calendar in Paperform and sync that to Google Calendar.
By default, Paperform uses Sydney, Australia as its benchmark time zone. However, a user of the created form can choose their preferred time zone. They can also pull information directly from their Google Calendar.
Calculations
Let’s say you’re building an order form and need to calculate the total price of items and apply any coupons or discounts. Paperform supports functions that can be deployed in such scenarios. For example, you could set an appointment booking form and charge a fixed or discounted hourly rate.
Paperform has powerful mathematical capabilities with added functionalities similar to Microsoft Excel. This includes the use of conditional logic such as and/or/if statements and loops to create even more powerful output.
Pricing
We’ve covered some of the most important Paperform features. Let’s now get a summary of its pricing.
On its release, Paperfom charged $7/month for its Essentials package and $14/month for its Pro package. Since the company has scaled, the price per month has also increased:
Don’t worry because the tool gives you the bang for your buck. The Pro and Agency packages contain all the features in Essentials, with added capabilities. These include advanced themes and templates, the calculations field, custom domain support, Paperform analytics, API access, etc.
Paperform also has a generous 14-day trial with no credit card lock-in where users can try out some of the more advanced features.
Pros and Cons
As with all other tools, Paperform has its pros and cons. Let’s summarize them below:
Pros
Paperform is preferred because of its dynamic forms which are useful across multiple industries and niches—you can create virtually any type of form with the app.
Also, Paperform provides an unrestricted trial for two weeks where you can test out most of the app’s features.
Here are other Paperform advantages:
- Easy-to-use interface.
- Supports thousands of integrations including Mailchimp, Zapier, Asana, Google Sheets, Freshdesk, and Moosend.
- Provides hundreds of templates to choose from with a beautiful design.
- A few bugs and fast loading times.
- Offers advanced payment features.
Besides, Paperform has an extensive Help Desk where you can find solutions for almost any problem you encounter while using the app.
Cons
One downside of Paperform is the current pricing structure which can lock out small businesses, freelancers, and nonprofits. Other disadvantages include:
- Inability to sync all booked appointments into one time zone display. So, if your business is running appointment booking forms for customers across different time zones, you won’t be able to view all these appointments in your preferred time zone.
- Not everyone likes the learning curve.
- Inability to deploy the same web form across different apps.
- Only supports Google Calendar.
- Paperform branding isn’t removable in the Essentials package.
- Inability to import forms, font colors, and custom templates.
The Paperform team is constantly innovating to develop better solutions and a more pleasant user experience.
In Closing
While it has its cons, Paperform is an excellent app for business owners looking to build beautiful web forms with powerful functionalities. From the hundreds of templates, it provides, to its amazing features and numerous integrations supported, the Paperform team is truly a master at its craft.
As a small business, you have almost unlimited options with how you can use Paperform. You can chase down leads, close sales, up your scheduling game, and leave your business on autopilot.
Overall, Paperform is definitely a tool worth including in your arsenal.
