Sitecore Forms Send Email Campaign message

Sitecore Forms 9.0 Update-1 rev. 171219

Sitecore release it's Update-1 version of the platform. In this version they included EXM (Email Experience Manager) as out-of-the-box part of the product. No more separate module..  like they did with Forms before. This change also had some (expected) changes to the Forms module. In the initial release version there was no submit action that could send an email. We expected this to be introduced together with EXM and that was a correct assumption.

So.. we have a "Send Email Campaign message" submit action now.

Send Email Campaign message submit action

I tried to do a quick test on a vanilla install of the platform:

1. Create an automated campaign in EXM (how-to)
2. Test the campaign - yes, the test mail arrived perfectly.
3. Create a form (any form will do), added a few fields and all wanted save actions, amongst which the "Send Email Campaign Message" - place it before the redirect ;)
   The save action will allow you to select a campaign - my newly created campaign was in the list so I selected that one.
4. Add the form to a page (we had to create/generate an mvc layout for this*)
5. Publish everything and let's try this...

Submit the form with some test data.. and.. damn..  "Failed to send email!" 

In the Sitecore logs I found more information:  ERROR Contact id is null.

As I am not that familiar with EXM (yet), as probably quite a lot of others, I was not aware that I could only send a mail to a known contact. Sitecore Support helped me on this one, so now I figured out that I do need to identify my contact first.

To send an email with the "Send Email Campaign Message" action, your contact needs to be identified.

Sound reasonable, but the (first) problem is that there is no out-of-the-box submit action to do this. Luckily all you need to do this yourself has been documented on the official doc site.  (still weird that they can document it, but not put it in the product...).

Documentation on the submit action could have saved me some time, so hopefully this small post will help someone.

Further usage

We did not find a way to send the form data in the message (without customizing the save action) - unless the form data is all in the contact data, which probably is not the case.

We also haven't found a solution to send the email to someone else - not the person who submitted the form. The mail will be send to the identified contact.

Conclusion

I must admit I was hoping Update-1 would have more impact on the Forms part of the product. I was also hoping the "Send Email" functionality would be in there. One could say it is, but without custom code is useless. Let's get our hopes up for Update-2...

Questions?

For questions on the topic, please find me (and many other Sitecore folks) on Sitecore Slack or Stack Exchange.

Is your custom automated campaign is not showing in the Send Email Campaign Message Action? See https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/a/11511/237

* Sitecore Forms is MVC only - and the vanilla setup of Sitecore still comes with a default WebForms homepage 😞