In this article, we will cover how to send a copy of Google Forms responses directly to your email.
Google Forms offers a built-in feature for this task. Follow these steps:
This will create a new Google Sheet that will populate with new Google Form responses. Copy the URL.
Google Sheets does not have native email notification functionality so we will use our free software Lido to send emails. You can create a free account at: www.lido.app/go/signup
Create a new file in Lido. Click Connect Data, then select Google Sheets. Paste in the URL of the Google Sheet from Step 1 with your Form submissions. You will be prompted to login to a Google account that has access to the Google Sheet.
In this data browser screen, select which columns to import to Lido. Each column should correspond to a Google Form question. You should select all of the columns that you wish to include in your emails.
Click Add Data. This will create a table in Lido of your Google Form submissions.
Now, let's establish a template for the email that will land in your inbox every time a new response is submitted.
Create a new worksheet. Write your email subject and body templates, referencing different tables as columns using [@Column] format.
Now we need to link our newly created templates to our form submissions. Go back to your table and create a new computed column for “Email subject”.
In the second row of the new column (cell E2 in our example), enter the formula:
```=STRINGTEMPLATE(Sheet1!$B$1)```
Make sure to replace this with the actual cell location of your email notification subject from the previous step.
Create another computed column and do the same thing for email body:
```=STRINGTEMPLATE(Sheet1!$B$2)```
You should now have a table that looks like this. Notice how the variables referenced with [@Column] are now replaced with the actual values from the form response for that row.
We will use Lido’s SENDGMAIL formula to send our emails. The formula is:
=SENDGMAIL(<sender-credential>, recipient, subject, body, status)
Here's what each parameter represents:
Sender credential: The email address from which the email will be sent
Recipient: The email address where the email will be delivered
Subject: The subject line of your email
Body: The content or message of the email
Status: The location of a spreadsheet cell that will be updated with the status of whether the email was successfully sent
Create another computed column. Then enter this formula in row 2:
```=SENDGMAIL(<sender-credential>, “recipient@email.com”, E2, F2, H2)```
Since your data might look different than our example, it’s important to replace the cell references in the example properly. Here is what each cell maps to in the formula:
E2: the location of your subject column
F2: the location of your body column
H2: the location of an empty cell to the immediate right of this new computed column
Variations:
This creates a column of SENDGMAIL Action formulas. Action formulas only run when they are triggered either manually or via an automation. To manually trigger an action, right click on the formula and select Run action. Heads up that this will actually send an email!
You must login to the sender email address the first time you run SENDGMAIL. Make sure that it is a Google mail account, and that you log into the same email address that you’ve entered in the formula.
After the email successfully sends, you will see a “success” message flash in the cell. The cell you selected as the status cell will also now say “success”.
We need to add some logic to ensure that only one email is sent per form submission.
Add a Linked Column to your table to keep track of email sent status. You will be prompted to choose an ID column. We recommend Timestamp, since it will almost always be unique. If you did not connect the timestamp column, you can click Edit data and go back to the data browser to add it or pick another column like email.
The location of your status column must be the same as the location specified in the status_cell for your SENDGMAIL formula. In this example, it is column H. If they are not the same, then update the SENDGMAIL formula to account for this.
Now we need to add an IF statement to our SENDGMAIL formula so that it only displays if an email notification has not already been sent.
```=IF(H2<>”success”,SENDGMAIL(<sender-credential>, “recipient@email.com”, E2, F2, H2))```
As you can see, the SENDGMAIL formula now only displays if an email has not already been successfully sent.
Now we need to automate triggering all of the SENDGMAIL formulas in the column. Click on the column header and select Run column on a schedule.
This will open the automation panel. Select how frequently you want to check for updates. On each automation interval, Lido will pull in your latest form submissions and send notifications. In this example we will select 15 minutes.
Click Save. Then you are all set!
The automation starts running immediately, and you will get emails for each new Google Form response.
We hope you are now able to send your google forms responses to your email address by following the steps above! You might also like our articles on how to get email notification of each response in Google Forms and how to send custom emails based on responses.
