Intake rules
An intake rule is what happens when a form submission arrives. It watches one form (or every form), looks at the answers, and if they say what you told it to look for, it acts: put a tag on the person, move them into one of your stages, or e-mail somebody.
Budget over 50,000 → tag them Big deal, move them to Quoted, tell Ayşe.
That used to be a habit somebody had to remember. Now it is a rule.
Open Intake rules from the left sidebar, under Data & automation.
Writing one
A rule has three parts.
Which form. One form, or Any form — useful for "always tell sales", whatever came in.
When the answers say. A list of conditions, each one an answer key, a comparison and a value. They are joined with and: every condition has to hold.
The comparisons are is / is not, contains / does not contain, is greater than /
is less than, and is empty / is not empty. Numbers are compared as numbers when
both sides are numbers, and as text otherwise, so a budget written as 10k does
not silently stop matching.
Leaving the list empty is how you say always. The rule then runs on every submission of that form.
Then. One or more actions:
- Add a contact tag
- Move to a stage
- Email this address — the conditional counterpart to a form's own notification list, which goes to everybody every time.
Two things to know about how they run
Every rule that matches runs. There is no first-one-wins. Write one small rule per outcome rather than one big rule that tries to cover everything, and know that adding a rule never quietly switches an older one off.
Nothing here can lose a submission. The submission is stored before any rule runs. If an action cannot be carried out — a tag you have since deleted, a stage that is gone, a mail server having a bad morning — that action is skipped, the rest of the rule carries on, and the answers are safe either way.
When a rule seems not to fire
Check the answer key, not the label. Conditions match on the field's key
(budget), not on what the visitor reads (What is your budget?). Choosing a
single form in the rule makes the form's keys available as suggestions.
Tagging and stages need a person. They act on the contact a submission creates, so a form that does not create one has nothing to act on and those actions are skipped — the e-mail action still runs. Turn on Create or update a Contact in the form's Destination settings.
A switched-off rule is inert. The toggle on the list is the first thing to check.
Who can use this
Intake rules have their own Intake rules permission, separate from Forms: the form builder decides what is asked, a rule decides what follows, and the two are often set up by different people.