Response Emails and Gated Downloads

Two settings on a form decide what the person who filled it in receives back: an email template, which is what the response email is sent as, and a Gated asset, which is the document they get for handing over their address. Both live on the After submit card of the Form Details tab, and between them they produce four different outcomes depending on what you have set and whether Leed already recognizes the visitor.

Setting it up

Open Design → Forms, pick the form, and scroll Form Details to the After submit card — “The email the submitter gets, filled from this form.” The Notify the team card below it mails your own team and is covered with the rest of the form’s settings.

Email the submitter with is a dropdown of the templates in Design ▸ Emails, with None at the top to switch the email off. A form that still answers with an older raw-HTML layout also offers Current legacy template, and a note under the dropdown says that choosing a template here takes over from it. Once a template is chosen, the card header offers Open template and Send test email, which mails the template to you filled with this form’s asset, pages, images and words. The card’s status sums it up: Off, Legacy email enabled while the form still answers with a legacy layout, N things to set, Ready to send, or Template unavailable when the chosen template has since been deleted — in which case submissions are not being answered until you pick another.

While no template is chosen, New template for this form sits beside the dropdown. It starts a template from the download starter, attaches it to the form, and opens it in Design ▸ Emails. Creating templates is a Growth feature: below Growth the button is replaced by an upgrade banner, but attaching a template that already exists works on every plan.

The Gated asset is not a free-standing setting. It appears as a row in the card’s This template needs box, and only when the chosen template refers to the asset — a button that links to {{asset.href}}, say, or a subject that names {{asset.name}}. Choose asset opens the asset picker on documents only — the PDFs, office files and archives in your library, not images, video or audio. If the file you want to gate is not in the list, it was uploaded as another type; video, audio and document assets covers which is which. The same box lists one row for every other block the template takes from the form: a page for a story row or a button, an image for an image block, the words for a heading or paragraph. Each is a required setting while the template has that block.

Both settings autosave as you change them, and the toast reads Form Saved. Publish to use. — the reminder that the form on your live site still has the old configuration until the next deployment goes out.

What the visitor gets

Two questions decide the outcome, and they interact. Does Leed already recognize this visitor? And does the form have a template, an asset, or both?

flowchart TD
  S["Form submitted"] --> Q0{"Email supplied, or<br/>visitor recognized?"}
  Q0 -- no --> STOP["Row stored.<br/>Nothing else happens."]
  Q0 -- yes --> C["Contact created or updated"]
  C --> Q1{"Asset set<br/>on the form?"}
  Q1 -- yes --> Q2{"Visitor<br/>recognized?"}
  Q2 -- yes --> DL["Download starts in the browser.<br/>Nothing is emailed at all."]
  Q2 -- no --> Q3{"Email template<br/>set?"}
  Q3 -- yes --> MAIL["Button reads Email Sent!<br/>Response email carries the document link"]
  Q3 -- no --> NADA["Thank you! — and nothing is sent"]
  Q1 -- no --> Q4{"Email template<br/>set?"}
  Q4 -- yes --> CONF["Thank you! — plain confirmation email"]
  Q4 -- no --> NONE["Thank you! — internal notifications only"]
  MAIL --> ONCE{"Already emailed this<br/>contact from this form?"}
  CONF --> ONCE
  ONCE -- yes --> SKIP["No second email. Ever."]
  ONCE -- no --> SEND["Sent"]

Two rows in that table deserve saying out loud.

The first row is a genuine short-circuit: when a recognized visitor submits a form with a gated asset, Leed hands the file straight back in the response and stops there. The contact is created or updated first, so nothing is lost from your records — but no response email is queued and no internal notification is sent for that submission. If your team relies on being emailed about every fill of a gated form, they will not hear about the returning visitors.

The third row is a dead end you can reach by accident: switching Email the submitter with back to None clears the template but leaves the gated asset on the form. An asset with no template gives a new visitor nothing: there is no email to attach the link to, so they see the thank-you state and the document never arrives. If a form gates a document, give it a template too.

The button tells the story

The submit button is the only feedback the visitor gets, and it swaps through named states as the request runs. Sending … while the request is in flight. Then one of: Downloading … with a spinner while the file transfers, followed by Thank you!; Email Sent! when the document is on its way by mail; Thank you! for everything else; or Try again! if the request itself failed. If you are debugging a gated download, the button distinguishes the three success paths without your having to open the network tab.

The once-only rule

Each form keeps a single email batch of its own, named Form <formId> Submissions. A contact is added to that batch the first time they submit the form, and never again. On top of that, the send itself refuses to mail an address that already has a send recorded against it in the batch.

The rule is scoped to one form, so a contact who submits three different forms with three different templates gets three emails — one from each.

When the email is not sent at all

Four situations produce no response email even when the form is set up correctly:

• The contact has opted out. Opt-out is checked at send time, and an unsubscribed contact is never mailed regardless of what the form says. Unsubscribes and opt-outs covers what a contact can and cannot switch off.
• The address hard-bounced. A contact carrying a hard bounce is skipped silently — the send is abandoned and logged, not retried. Bounces and deliverability explains how an address gets into that state and how it gets out.
• They have already had this form’s email. The once-only rule above.
• You set an asset but no template, and the visitor is not recognized. There is nothing to send the asset with, so nothing goes out.

There are two more, and they are hard failures rather than quiet ones. A template send fails when the template is missing, or when it still has a required block the form has not filled — both show on the card’s status before it happens. And if the rendered email does not contain its unsubscribe link, the send is rejected outright: a template from Design ▸ Emails always carries one in its footer, but a legacy layout that has had {{unsubscribe}} edited out will never deliver a single response email.

What the email itself looks like

The response email is your template — rendered from its blocks with your email branding, and Leed wraps it in nothing else. It is sent from no-reply@<your site domain> with your site title as the display name, and its subject comes from the template, so the same merge fields that fill the body fill the subject too.

A template is filled from four sources: the contact ({{firstName}}, {{lastName}}, {{email}}), the submission ({{submission.company}} and the rest of the answers), the page the form was submitted on ({{page.title}}, {{page.href}}), and, when the form gates one, the asset described above — plus whatever the form sets in its This template needs box. The open pixel and the unsubscribe link are added at send time. A legacy layout is still rendered the old way, with firstName, lastName, email, a formatted name, homepage and unsubscribe as tracked links, a tracking pixel, three recommended pages and the asset block. Either way, every link to your own domain is rewritten as a tracked link on the way out, which is how the download and the click-throughs show up on the contact’s activity. Email layouts documents the design and the mandatory unsubscribe link.

Internal notifications are separate

Everything above is the After submit card: mail to the person who filled the form in. The Notify the team card — a list of your own addresses, mailed from forms-noreply@leed.ai with a table of the submitted values — sits just below it and is covered with the rest of a form’s settings. The two are independent: a form can have one, both or neither, and the once-only rule applies to the response email alone.