How many times have you gone to fill out a form, only to get one step in and realize that you’re missing crucial information? I’ll bet it’s happened to all of us. That’s why the “Save for Later” feature — we all know what a pain it is to start over from scratch.

Save for Later It’s a super useful function for people who are not looking to immediately submit their form, but would rather come back to it later. It allows users to save time by not entering the same information twice.

Not all web form providers will have an auto-save feature. They do however deploy different tactics to this problem. For example, the most common scenarios are: 

• “Save For Later” buttons  
• A unique link emailed to you to continue at a later time
• Auto-save with pre-populated forms 
• Email Auto-reply with link to form

Let’s go over them one by one and look at the pros and cons! 

• Save For Later Buttons 

There are usually two sorts of web form providers, web applications or plugins/add-ons. The former usually are true for Wordpress or CRM systems like Salesforce. Web applications are full-scale SaaS applications like Formstack. 

A web application has more abilities to save data from forms centrally with higher security measures then what a Wordpress plugin would have, technically.

Credit: https://indition.com/forms/save-resume

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• A unique link emailed to you to continue at a later time

When your users save their form entries, you'll be able to send them a link that takes them right back. You can customize the From address and Subject of this email as well as any message included in it! 

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• Auto-save with pre-populated forms

Credits: https://engage.activedemand.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047171173-How-do-I-pre-populate-forms-with-contact-data-

Instead of a blank form, you can have a prefilled form that includes the previously entered information automatically populated for your users. This makes the filling process much shorter and will reduce any friction. Finding a form provider with an automatic pre-filling option is not easy since most providers only have the Save For Later in combination with Email Unique Link. 

Here at Responser we recognize the need for the auto-fill function regardless if users have Wordpress, CRM system or using a web application. So if your form provider doesn't have that, you are welcome to explore the Auto-Save with built-in email responder. 

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• Email Auto-reply with link to pre populated form

Abandoned Cart Emails are the key to re-engaging shoppers who leave items in their carts without completing checkout. A recent survey of 500 leading global brands found that 44% opened this type email and 29.9 percent led back to a recovered sale. 

The recovery rate for shopping carts aligned with abandonment B2B/B2C web forms that we see at Responser. On average we see a recovery rate of 27%. That means that if you're buying traffic from paid ads, it’s the same thing as getting 27% of your marketing budget back. Just by installing the lead capture script and enabling the email auto-reply.

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