Managing the integrated contact form

You can streamline how you connect with prospective clients with our secure, integrated contact form. Instead of relying on email, you can receive prospective client inquiries in your SimplePractice account. You can display the contact form directly on your Client Portal, Professional Website, and Therapy Finder profile, or add the contact form widget to your external website. All prospective client inquiries can be managed conveniently from the Inquiries page.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Enabling the contact form
• Customizing contact form settings
• Adding the contact form widget to your external website
• Previewing the contact form.
• Managing contact form inquiries
• FAQs

Note: While you can use the integrated contact form on all plans, the contact form widget for external websites is only available on the Plus plan. To learn more, see Comparing SimplePractice features by plan.

Enabling the contact form

Note: To allow clients to submit inquiries via the contact form, your Client Portal must be enabled. If the Client Portal is disabled, prospective clients won’t be able send a message via the contact form. To learn how to enable the Client Portal, see Turning on the Client Portal.

To turn on the contact form for your practice:

1. Navigate to Settings > Scheduling and inquiries > Contact form
2. Toggle the Practice Contact form on

Note: Only Account Owners, practice managers, and clinicians with entire practice access can manage contact form settings for a group practice. For more information, see Clinician roles available for team members.

Once enabled, the Practice contact form will appear on your Client Portal and Professional Website. 

If you use the Therapy Finder Directory, you can also toggle the Therapy Finder contact form on for your profile.

Note: You can also manage your Therapy Finder contact form at Marketing > Profile, and your practice’s Professional Website contact form from the website editor. For more information, see Customizing your profile for the Directory and Professional Website and Setting up your Professional Website.

Customizing contact form settings

After enabling your contact form(s), you can customize the settings for both the Practice and Therapy Finder contact forms from the same page. These settings let you choose how inquiries are routed and which client types can submit the form.

Note: The Practice contact form appears on your Client Portal and Professional Website, if enabled. The Therapy Finder contact form appears on your Therapy Finder profile.

You can decide who receives notifications when a contact form inquiry is submitted:

• Send Practice contact form inquiries to
  • Specific team members: Choose from a dropdown list of team members
  • One email address: Enter a single email address (defaults to your practice email)
• Send Therapy Finder contact form inquiries to
  • Clinician receiving inquiry: This sends the inquiry directly to the clinician listed on the Therapy Finder profile (default option) and doesn’t create a prospective client
  • Specific team members: Choose from a dropdown list of team members
  • One email address: Enter a single email address

Tip: You can select more than one option. If multiple are selected, all chosen recipients will appear in the To field of the inquiry email.

Additionally, you can determine which types of prospective clients can submit a contact form inquiry:

• New individual clients
• New couple clients
• New contacts (on behalf of someone else)

Note: All three options are selected by default. At least one option must remain selected.

If you’re part of a group practice, you can choose a default preferred clinician for new Practice contact form inquiries.

Click the Default preferred clinician dropdown to select:

• Not assigned, which allows your team to review and assign the inquiry to a clinician later, or
• A specific clinician in your practice

Selecting Not assigned can be helpful for group practices where administrative staff review new inquiries and match prospective clients with the most appropriate clinician. This allows your team to triage inquiries before assigning them.

Note: This setting applies to Practice contact form inquiries only and doesn’t affect Therapy Finder contact form inquiries.

To send an automatic confirmation email when a prospective client submits a contact form inquiry, select Yes under Send contact form inquiry confirmation email.

This confirmation lets the prospective client know their inquiry was received. To update the contents of this email: 

1. Navigate to Settings > Client notifications > Email
2. Click the pencil icon next to Contact form inquiry confirmation

Note: To learn more about customizing email templates, see Explaining client email and reminder macros.

Adding the contact form widget to your external website

If you have an external website for your practice, you can add the contact form widget to your website. This way, when prospective clients reach out to you through the form on your website, you’ll receive these submissions within your SimplePractice account.

Note: The contact form widget is only available on the Plus plan. If you're on the Starter or Essential plan, you can display the integrated contact form on your Client Portal, Professional Website, and Therapy Finder profile.

To locate the code for the contact form widget:

1. Navigate to Settings > Scheduling and inquiries > Widgets
2. Select Contact form at the top
3. Click Copy code

Note: The contact form widget displays a general practice contact form. If you're in a group practice and want clients to reach a particular clinician directly, you can use a clinician-specific contact form link instead. For steps on finding these links or copying clinician-specific widget codes, see Embedding appointment request and contact form widgets.

Next, you can add the code to your external website. For instructions on adding this code, select the website builder you use below:

• Brighter Vision
• TherapySites, GoDaddy, and Wix
• Squarespace
• Weebly
• Webflow
• WordPress

Note: If you edit your Client Portal default domain, you’ll need to update your contact form widget. You can do this by removing code for the contact form widget from your external website, then re-adding it.

The contact form widget is meant to be used for external websites only. If you use the SimplePractice Professional Website, you can turn the contact form on/off by following the steps in Enabling the contact form.

Important: Our Customer Success Team can’t help with troubleshooting non-SimplePractice products. If you have questions about adding the widget to your external website, please reach out to their support team directly.

Previewing the contact form

Note: The contact form is intended for prospective clients only. Existing clients will be redirected to sign in to the Client Portal, where they can send you a Secure Message.

To preview your contact form:

1. Navigate to Settings > Scheduling and inquiries > Contact form
2. Click the link under Share your practice’s contact form

Alternatively, navigate to Settings > Scheduling and inquiries > Widgets, select Contact form at the top, and click Preview Widget.

The contact form collects the following information from prospective clients:

• Legal first and last name
• Name they go by (optional)
• Date of birth
• Email
• Phone 
• Gender (optional)
• State

It also includes an optional free text field which prospective clients can use to share additional information, such as what they’d like to focus on, insurance or payment questions, etc.

Note: There’s no way to edit the content of the contact form at this time.

Managing contact form inquiries

When a prospective client submits an inquiry through the contact form, you'll receive an email alert. You’ll also see a notification in your account next to Inquiries in the left navigation menu.

To view your contact form inquiries:

1. Navigate to the Calendar
2. Select Inquiries

Tip: Prospective client profiles created from a contact form inquiry will say via contact form in the Date added column. Entries on the Inquiries page are sorted by newest at the bottom.

3. Under Actions, click the three horizontal dots > View Profile

The submission will appear on the client’s Overview page as a prescreener.

After reviewing this message, you can return to the Inquiries page and click the three horizontal dots next to the prospective client to take a follow-up action:

• Share intake documents
  • You can share intake documents with the prospective client through the Client Portal
• Schedule an appointment
  • You can schedule an appointment for the prospective client on your end
  • To learn how to set up an initial consultation service for prospective clients, see How do I set up my availability so that new clients can book an initial consultation?
• Send a link to schedule
  • If you have online appointment requests enabled for new clients, you can send a send the prospective client a link where they can schedule an appointment based on your availability
• Make client active
  • You can move the client to your active Clients list
• Archive client
  • If a prospective client isn’t a good fit or is no longer interested in receiving services, you can archive their profile
• Delete client
  • Deleting the client will permanently remove their history and record, and cannot be undone
  • To learn more, see Deactivating and deleting a client profile
• View their profile
  • You can navigate to the prospective client’s profile to review their contact form submission, documents they’ve completed, or send them a Secure Message through the Client Portal

Note: To learn how you can use the Inquiries page to track prospective clients, see Managing prospective clients on the Inquiries page.

FAQs

• Can I customize the contact form?
• Can my existing clients use the contact form?
• Who can view contact form inquiries in a group practice?
• Is there a way to share the contact form on social media or other platforms?

Can I customize the contact form?

You can’t edit the information that's captured through the contact form. However, you can adjust certain settings, such as email distribution and which client types can submit a contact form inquiry. For more information, see Customizing contact form settings.

If you’re adding the contact form widget to your external website, you can customize the look of it to better match your website’s design. To learn more, see Customizing your appointment request widget.

Note: We don’t recommend customizing your contact form widget unless you're comfortable with HTML and CSS.

Can my existing clients use the contact form?

The contact form is intended for prospective client inquiries. When an inquiry is submitted, a prospective client profile will be created in your SimplePractice with the details captured through the form.

If an existing client tries to send you a message through the form, they’ll be directed to sign in to the Client Portal. From here, they can send a Secure Message or request an appointment.

Tip: For information you can share with your clients, see our client-facing guide to Getting started with the Client Portal.

Who can view contact form inquiries in a group practice?

Account Owners, practice managers, practice schedulers, clinicians with entire practice access, and clinicians with full client list access will be able to view all contact form submissions and manage prospective clients from the Inquiries page.

Clinicians with billing access and clinicians with basic access can view their own prospective client inquiries only. This includes:

• Prospective clients for whom they’re listed as the primary clinician
• Prospective clients who requested an appointment with them
• Contact form inquiries submitted through their Therapy Finder profile

Note: To learn more, see Clinician roles available for team members.

Is there a way to share the contact form on social media or other platforms?

Yes, you can copy a contact form link to share directly with prospective clients and referral sources. To locate this:

1. Navigate to Settings > Scheduling and inquiries > Contact form
2. Next to the shareable contact form link, click Copy

You can then paste this link to social media or any other platforms where prospective clients may find you.