Contacts and forms: a record for everyone who says yes

People email you their details. You scribble them somewhere, and by the time you need them, the notebook is in the other bag. It is one of those problems so ordinary nobody calls it a problem.

Your website can do this job. On bernard, every person who fills in a form, buys something, or asks a question lands in one contact book, kept by the site itself, with everything they told you attached to them. This piece explains how that machine works, and there is a three minute film of the same story above, shot on a real site.

The book that keeps itself

The contact book is the spreadsheet you never have to maintain. Sign-ups, enquirers, buyers, students: one list, one record per person, added the moment something real happens. You open it. You do not feed it.

Each record holds what that person told you and what has happened since: which form they came in through, the answers they gave, the consent they did or did not tick, tags and notes you add yourself, and the trail of what followed.

Any form, just by asking

There is no form builder to learn, because there is no form builder. You say what you want to collect. "A registration form for the October workshop: name, email, dietary needs, experience level." Bernard writes the form onto your page, in your site's style, with exactly those fields, and it lands on your draft first, so nothing is public until you approve it.

The fields are whatever you ask for, and every answer stays with the person who gave it. Ask Bernard who has registered and it reads the answers straight back: who is vegetarian, who is brand new to this, who has done it all before. By the time someone walks through the door, you already know.

Four kinds, and the two you cannot fake

Forms come in four kinds, one for each kind of relationship: a waiting list, a lead form, a registration form and an enquiry form. The kind tells your site what should happen next, which welcome goes out, which category the person joins.

Two categories are missing from that list, and the gap is deliberate. Nobody becomes a buyer or a student by ticking a box on a public form. Those are earned, by actually buying something. It is a quiet piece of engineering with a loud consequence: your customer list stays true, because there is no form on the internet that can forge an entry into it.

Name a form, get an audience

Give a form a name and its people become their own category. The workshop form makes a workshop audience. The waiting list stays the waiting list. Run three different things and each form's people stand together, counted live, ready to be spoken to as a group.

That is what makes the last step honest. When you email the workshop registrants, the quote names that audience and the exact number of people it will reach, and nothing sends until you approve it. Not your whole book. Not a guess. Exactly those people.

Consent still rules

One distinction runs under all of this: having someone's details and having permission to email them are different things. The form collects the details. Permission needs the tick in the consent box, and then the click on the confirmation email that follows, because the click is the yes. The exact wording each person agreed to is kept as evidence, and anyone without that yes stays in your book and out of every send.

What you do with a lawful, well-labelled audience, the drafting, the templates, the quote, the allowance, is the other half of the story: email campaigns, explained, with its own film.