How to Create a Contact Form with Multiple Recipients (4 Ways)

Do you want your contact form to send notifications to different people in your company?

Perhaps you want all messages to get copied to your assistant, or you want specific messages to be sent to different departments, or maybe you simply want to send users a copy of the information they submitted.

In this article, we’ll share four different ways to create a contact form with multiple recipients, so you can choose the option that best fits your need.

Why You Might Want to Send Multiple Recipients From Your Contact Form

By default, contact forms only send notifications to one email address.

You might want to change this for a number of reasons. Here are some situations that you might face:

• You run your site with a friend, and both of you want an identical copy of all messages that come in through your contact form.
• You want your users to receive a confirmation email whenever they send you a message. You want this confirmation email to be slightly different from the one you receive yourself.
• You want your contact form messages to go to different people depending on the purposes of the message. For instance, you want sales inquiries to go straight to your sales team vs billing inquiries going to your billing team.
• You want to copy your blogging partner, and your assistant in on your contact form emails, so you can easily “reply all” to keep everyone in the loop.

In this article, we’ll be showing you several different ways to get your contact form plugin to send multiple emails to different people. This lets you deal with all the above scenarios and anything else you might face.

Note: Our tutorial is meant for self-hosted WordPress sites only. If you want to learn more about WordPress, see our article on how to start a WordPress blog or how to make a WordPress site.

Choosing The Right WordPress Form Builder

There are a ton of WordPress form plugins on the market. Some of them support multiple email notifications, but not many of them allow you to customize notifications.

We’ll be using the WPForms plugin for this tutorial. It is a popular WordPress form builder used by over 3 million websites.

There is also a free version called WPForms Lite which you can use if you only want to send the contents of your contact form to multiple recipients.

However, if you want to send custom notifications to multiple recipients, then you’ll need the paid version of the plugin. To demonstrate all four methods, we’ll be using the pro version in this tutorial.

Sending Multiple Notifications for Contact Form

There are multiple scenarios for sending contact form email notifications. In this article, we will be tackling each one of them.

First, you need to install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Next, you’ll need to head over to WPForms » Settings page to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the WPForms website.

After that, you need to visit WPForms » Add New page to create your first contact form. For instructions, see our step by step tutorial on how to create a contact form in WordPress.

Now that you’ve created your form, you can use any of the methods below to add multiple recipients and even create custom notifications for your forms.

1. Send Same Notification to Multiple Recipients

The simplest way to set up multiple recipients is to send the same notification to each person.

Simply go to WPForms » All Forms and edit the form that you want to setup notifications for.

Next, you need to go to the Settings » Notifications tab in the form builder and enter the recipients email in the ‘Send To Email Address’ box.

You can enter as many emails as you like, but remember to separate the email addresses with a comma.

In the example, notifications will be sent to:

• The default admin email address
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Tip: The {admin_email} is the email address for your WordPress administrator. This might be you if you’re the site owner. It could also be whoever set up the website. You can check what it is under Settings » General menu in your WordPress dashboard.

2. Send Different Contact Form Notifications to Multiple Recipients

In some situations, you might want to send a different notification to each recipient.

For instance, you might send users a confirmation email that’s different from the admin email notification you get.

You can easily do this with WPForms. Simply open the form builder, go to Settings » Notifications, and then click the ‘Add New Notification’ button.

You’ll see a popup that asks you to name the notification. This name is just for your reference, so you can put in whatever makes the most sense to you. We’re going to use “Thank you email” for the sake of this tutorial.

Next, click the ‘OK’ button and your new notification will appear at the top of the Notifications list. You can scroll down to find your original ‘Default Notification’ below this.

Delete the {admin_email} tag from the ‘Send to Email Address’ box.

After that, you need to click on the ‘Show Smart Tags’ link just above the ‘Send To Email Address’ box. This will expand to show available fields. Simply, click the ‘Email’ field.

This will then be added into the box as {field_id=”1″} if you’re using the Simple Contact Form template. If you’ve customized your form, then the field ID will be different.

All what this means is that WPForms will send this notification to the user’s email address, which they entered into the contact form.

Next, you’ll need to fill in the Email Subject, From Name, From Email, and Reply-To. Here’s an example of how that could look:

You’ll also want to add a thank you message. By default, the ‘Message’ section contains the tag {all_fields}. This will show all the data that the user entered.

Here’s our thank you message:

Now, your user will get the thank you message after submitting the form, and you’ll get the standard default notification without the thank you message.

You can set up as many custom notifications as you like. You don’t have to include all the form data in each message, either.

For instance, if you’re a coach taking bookings, then you could choose to have all the form data sent to you and the client. Your assistant might only receive the client’s name, email address, and the time(s) for which they’ve booked. That way, any private information stays confidential.

3. Add Different Recipients for Different Form Options

Sometimes, you might have a single form that you want to send to different people depending on what option the user picks.

For instance, you may want to use a single contact form that allows users to submit questions, ask to buy ads on your site, and suggest guest post ideas.

You might want to:

• Send the questions to your assistant.
• Receive the advertising requests yourself.
• Send the guest post ideas to your editor.

With WPForms, it’s easy to do this.

First, go to the ‘Fields’ view of your form. You’ll need to add a field that lets users choose between two or more alternatives. You could pick either the Dropdown or the Multiple Choice field for this.

For our example, we’re going to use the Multiple Choice (radio button) field. Drag and drop the field onto your form. Next, click on it to edit the different choices.

Once you’ve set up the field with various choices, go to Settings » Notifications.

Next, click the ‘Add New Notification’ button to create additional notifications that you need. You will need to fill in the details as appropriate for each notification.

Here’s a notification that’s being sent when a guest post is submitted:

As you scroll down, you need to click the checkbox next to ‘Enable conditional logic’. This will show you few additional settings.

You need to select your multiple-choice field from the dropdown. After that click on the appropriate choice for this notification.

You can then continue to set up new notifications for each of your options.

Tip: You can use this method along with the methods we’ve already looked at.

For instance, you could enter two or more email addresses in the ‘Send To Email Address’ box. That would send copies of the same notification to those people.

You could also set up an email confirmation message to go to the user. If you want to use different confirmations for the different options, you’ll need to enable conditional logic for these too.

4. CCing Others on a Notification Email

Sometimes, you might want to copy people in on your contact form notifications. For instance, you might want to copy in your site’s editor and lead writer when you get a notification about a new guest post submission.

The advantage of using this method is that you can easily ‘Reply All’ to the notification email. Instead of everyone receiving a separate email, as with the first method, there’s one email with multiple recipients copied in.

To add a CC field to your form notification settings, go to WPForms » Settings page and then click on the Email tab.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and then check the box next to ‘Carbon Copy’ option. Don’t forget to save your settings.

Now, when you’re editing any of your form’s notifications, you’ll see a CC box. This lets you enter any addresses you want that notification sent to.

Tip: Don’t enter more than one email address in the ‘Send To Email Address’ box if you’re using this method. Otherwise, the people being CC’d will receive multiple emails.

Troubleshooting Email Delivery Issues for Your Forms

If you are having trouble sending email notifications from your WordPress contact form, then this section is for you.

By default WordPress uses PHP to send emails. This method can be easily misused by spammers and is limited or blocked by many WordPress hosting companies.

Since it is not a secure method, it is also blocked by popular email providers like Gmail and Outlook. This means your emails never reach the users inbox.

Luckily, there is an easy solution to fix that. You can either use a professional SMTP service provider or use your hosting company’s free business email address feature to securely send your emails.

For step by step instructions, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

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