Streamline your operation: collect & manage data directly from your blog with FormSpring

At the Small Business Center we have been talking to many great companies who create tools to help small businesses save time and hopefully make money. They believe the closer they can bring their services to the customer the less the business owner has to do to manage it all and the more efficiently things can run. And, to be honest, when you are a one man/woman product-marketing-sales-design-finance team, you need all the help you can get.

Removing tech and IT support, to as great an extent as possible is often a good way to save time and hassle. Many companies, even large ones like Rubbermaid, Photobucket, and Patagonia have decided they would rather have TypePad handle the IT side of things so they can focus on their core businesses.

So here is another tip for streamlining things a little further. FormSpring.These guys have built an app that allows you to build custom forms that you can integrate with your TypePad blog. You can use these forms for

• building your customer database
• customer surveys
• event registration
• contests/competitions

All are excellent ways to engage a customer further to complete the cycle from visit to sale.

FormSpring have integrated with some of our favorite services too like FreshBooks, Email Center Pro, Mail Chimp, SalesForce and many more so you can put the customer data straight to good use. Find out more about FormSpring for Typepad

Let us know what you think in the comments

Comments

[Account Deleted]

Sounds very interesting, but the only thing I can't seem to find on their website is how it integrates with email services (AWeber is missing from your own list of favourite services it should be possible to integrated with).
If someone can tell me it also works with AWeber I would be very tempted to start using it for multiple purposes, but email marketing features high on our wish list.

Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)

[Robert Hacker]

These types of useful, high quality third party apps that integrate into the blogging platform should become a much more important part of the TypePad business strategy.

[Claire Alcock]

Hi Robert, we think so too. We're working on it so watch this space. Thanks for your feedback

[Claire Alcock]

Hi Karin, we are always open to suggestions like these. We already have integrations with Vertical Response. You can find that in the widget gallery here

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/widgets/publishing-tools/vertical_respon.html

The FormSpring integration will allow you to integrate with Mail Chimp, Exact target, Campaign Monitor.

We are committed to connecting with services you are using so keep the feedback coming!

[Mo]

This looks like another fine app from the fine folks at Typepad. Question. Can you put this form on a page instead if the sidebar? Thanks.

[Claire Alcock]

When we do a widget integration with a partner we try to simplify the process so that any one can get the widget in a matter of clicks, without dealing too much with the code. The widgets are optimized for placement in sidebar.

However all our partners allow you to copy the code from their sites, which you can then embed into a TypePad Page in html view on the compose screen.

In the case of FormSpring click on a form then go to Use > Embed (instead of TypePad) and then paste the Java script.

Equally, you can "view source" on the widget on the page and then cut and paste that into a TypePad Page.

[Account Deleted]

Hi Claire

(I love the fact I'm writing this reply as email and it will show up as comment ;-))

Many businesses use AWeber for their email marketing. AWeber can already be integrated with many other programs through the email parser - like Paypal and other shopping carts.
The FormSpring widget looks very effective for other uses too, so if you (and AWeber) could get the integration working, that would be fabulous (for both programs I think)

Karin H

At 17:46 02/09/2009, you wrote: