Export Form Entries to Better Understand Your Readers

Your contact form is perhaps the number-one tool at your disposal for getting to know your audience.

However, just having the form is only half of the battle. The real value is in actively paying attention to the conversations it prompts. The payoff can be immense — especially if you export form entries and process them through a spreadsheet or another tool.

What you can do with form entries?

To give you an idea of what can be done with contact-form submissions, here’s a list of some of the possibilities:

1. You can learn about your audience — their thoughts, challenges, and values.
2. You can look through the questions that people ask to create new products or services in response to their needs.
3. If some of the questions you receive are seasonal (such as questions about your ecommerce products during the holiday season), you can learn from and capitalize on them by publishing certain types of content when the timing is right.
4. You can find out if the same question (or similar questions) are asked more often than others. If so, perhaps you should add those to your FAQ page.

The ideas above are just examples. At the end of the day, there’s no limit for what you can do with contact form submissions, or what tool you can use to process them.

But, how do you actually export form submissions?

As it turns out, there is a simple process for all WordPress.com websites.

How to export form entries

First, log in to WordPress.com and navigate to your dashboard.

Click on Feedback (along the main sidebar) and then on Feedback again. You’ll see the form submissions left by your visitors. This list includes entries from every form that is active throughout your site.

Here, you’ll find a section labeled Export Feedback To CSV.

Under that header, there’s a dropdown menu to select the specific post or page associated with those entries.

In other words, this dropdown lists your posts and pages that feature any of your active forms. If you only need to export messages that were submitted on a specific post or page, you can select them here. If you want to export all of the submissions that you’ve ever received, select All Posts.

When you click Download, you’ll receive a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file containing the entries. A CSV file contains information arranged in tables. Lifewire offers a more detailed explanation of what a CSV file is, and how to open one.

That’s all there is to it! Now you’re ready to export form entries, input them into a spreadsheet, and learn more about your audience’s preferences. Use this information to create better user experiences across your site for years to come.