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Using Partial Submit point to improve lead capture

Using Partial Submit point to improve lead capture
john.desborough
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Lead Capture and Partial Submit Point

There has always been a debate about when to ask for an email address in a form/quiz. 

Some experts believe that you need to ask later in the form, when you are entitled to ask the user to share the email. They suggest that AFTER you provide some value to the user, then you can ask them for their email. This is really well suited for cold outreach. 

If you are sending people to a form from your web/sales page, where the user is seeking more information from you, then by all means, ask for the email up front. 

But insert a “partial submit point” in your typeform to be sure that you get the email address - even if they don’t complete and submit the entire form. You can then use a nurture sequence to foster the user into completing the form. 

 

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When the user starts the form and completes the email question (my first question), the email is already captured in the Results - Responses table:

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Note that it says “Partial” in the Response type field. 

Also note that if you Connect a Google Sheet to the typeform, the partial response will also be captured. 

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You will need to make sure that you have toggled on the required setting for the partial submits to connect to integrations.

 

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There is a  Help Centre article that outlines which integrations currently support the partial submit. 

Once the user completes the form, the Responses - Results tab shows the Response type as ‘Completed’ and the answers selected and submitted by the user.

 

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In the Google Sheet for this example, there is an entry for the completed record as well as the partial submit. 

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One thing that I would call out here, and needs some further research with Typeform Support, is the ‘duplication’ of the entries into the Google Sheet. 

For the email used in this example, the Token values for the two rows of the partial and complete submission are identical. Note the Submitted At values: the completed submission has a valid current date while the partial submit has a date value of “01/01/0001”. 

This is easy enough to filter out for reporting BUT in the Google Sheet, it doesn’t tell you WHEN the partial submit actually happened. 

You have to go back to the Results - Responses (at this point) to get the correct date/time details for the partial submit if someone does NOT complete the form. Note that in the image we showed earlier, the Response time field does have the correct date and time. 

 

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So my word of caution/advice, at this point, if you are using the Google Sheet integration to capture the partial and fully complete you need to cross-check what seem to be partial submits with the Results - Responses table. That will ensure that you have the actual capture date of the partial submit. 

Hope that helps a bit. 

Cheers

 

des


 

7 replies

Grace
Community Team
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  • July 14, 2025

Great advice ​@john.desborough thanks so much for sharing. And good call out on duplicate responses in Google Sheets 👀


john.desborough
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  • July 14, 2025

@Grace - thanks. 

 

as a follow up from Typeform Support: 

At this time, this is the expected behavior of that integration. It happens due to the integration pulling the data, but it doesn't have the updated fields to recognize this as a Partial Submit. Instead, it places a type of null value in the "Submitted at" column. We are unsure if this will be updated in the future, or if there will be a new version of this integration release. Much if this has to do with how Google performs the API request.


James
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  • July 15, 2025

Good stuff ​@john.desborough thanks for sharing! Partial Submit is a real game changer, and it’s great that it’s now available to everyone. For now another solution for the “extra” rows in the Google sheet could be to use Zapier to send the responses to GSheets and apply some filtering there (for example, only send responses that have x fields completed - or even send partial responses to a separate sheet).

Cheers for imparting your unerring wisdom once again :D


john.desborough
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  • July 15, 2025

@James - actually i think you WANT them in the same sheet so that you can have the ability to parse and seek out the ‘orphan’ partial submits

i have set up a second tab on the google sheet with an arrayformula() function to look for records where the count of a token is 1 (no completed record) and to pull them into the separate tab. then i run a Document Studio job over that list that generates a “you didn’t complete the quiz” email and sends it out to the user.(assuming the email is valid) 

i can also, periodically, extract and download the file from the Results tab into a separate google sheet and run a macro to link the typeform’s google sheet with the downloaded result and grab the ‘submitted at’ time stamp from the partial submits that exist in the download. 

that gives me all the data on the orphans that i need in this case. 

just me trying to stay with native integrations as opposed to having to figure out the zaps. 

 

des


James
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  • July 16, 2025

Smart move ​@john.desborough 🤠 Wouldn’t have thought to use Doc studio to send that to the non-completers. You could equally do this with Typeform’s built-in Follow-ups feature, I believe (setting trigger to “Any partial response”). 


john.desborough
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  • July 16, 2025

@James - from what i understand, that would kick off at the point of a partial submit. I could not recall anything that do a follow up selectively… i may be totally wrong on that but i will check it out. 

 

des

 


James
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  • July 17, 2025

hmmm, yes. I think maybe you’re right ​@john.desborough Let us know if you figure out a solution!


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