Create a Contact

The contact action reads a form submission the way a person would: one answer is the email, some are contact details, the rest are worth keeping. It identifies the submitter as a Contact and links the session to them, so the anonymous visitor who just converted becomes someone you can name.

It is a native SnipForm action, not a third-party integration, and needs no connection or plan upgrade.

When it does something

Only the “A form is submitted” trigger carries a submission. On any other trigger the action completes with the note “Nothing to identify - this trigger carries no form submission” and writes nothing. Likewise a Test run reports “Test run - no contact created”.

Configuration

Field	Default	What it does
Email field	Detect automatically	Name the field when a form has more than one email address. Leave blank otherwise
Save the contact as	Lead	The lifecycle stage written onto the contact: lead, subscriber, customer or user
Suspicious submissions	Skip flagged submissions	Outright spam never reaches an automation. This decides what happens to submissions the scorer only flagged: skip them, or create the contact anyway

How the email is found

In order, the first match wins:

1. The field you named in Email field, if its value is a valid email address.
2. The first field whose input type is email with a valid value.
3. The first field whose name is one of email, e_mail, email_address, emailaddress, your_email, work_email, contact_email.
4. Any field whose value is a valid email address.

No match means no contact; the run completes with “Skipped - no email address in the submission”.

Field names are normalised before matching: first_name, firstName, First Name and first-name are all the same field.

How the other answers become traits

Trait	Recognised field names
first_name	first_name, firstname, first, given_name, fname
last_name	last_name, lastname, last, surname, family_name, lname
phone	phone, phone_number, telephone, tel, mobile, mobile_number, cell, cellphone, contact_number
company	company, company_name, business, business_name, organisation, organization
job_title	job_title, jobtitle, role, position, occupation
website	website, web_site, url, site
country	country
city	city, town

A single full-name field (name, full_name, fullname, your_name, contact_name) is split on the first space into first_name and last_name.

Every other answer of 200 characters or fewer is kept as a meta entry ({key, value}) on the contact. Longer answers are message bodies, not contact details; they stay on the submission and are not copied to the person.

Choice fields (select, radio, checkbox) contribute their plain selected values, not option markup.

Linking to the session

The submitting session gets contact_id set, once. If the session was already identified (by signals.identify(), an earlier form, or the API), the contact is still created or updated but the session keeps its existing link, and the run notes “session was already identified”.

The outcome is recorded on the run: “Contact created: [email protected]” or “Contact updated: [email protected]”.

Note

Browsers that send Sec-GPC: 1 are never identified by the tracker. The contact action runs server-side on a deliberate form submission, which is not the same signal, so it is not affected by GPC. If you want to honour GPC for form contacts too, add a consent checkbox to the form and check it in your own automation logic.

Example

A “Contact us” form with fields Name, Work email, Company, Phone and Message, and an automation:

WHEN   a form is submitted: Contact us
THEN   create a contact  (email: detect automatically, save as: Lead, flagged: skip)
       post to Slack #inbound

produces a contact with email, first_name, last_name, company, phone, lifecycle_stage: lead, linked to the session that browsed your pricing page before submitting. The Message answer stays on the submission.

Contacts can also be created from the tracker with signals.identify() (Identify), from your backend with the Contacts API, and by the Shopify integration.