What is the difference between using Form Submission Rule and Trigger Nurture for sending out a confirmation mail?

It depends on your needs. 

Adding a prospect to a nurture offers more info and possibilities (resend the email if not opened etc), but there is a 10-15 min delay between the form submission and the first email sent by a nurture. 

An autoresponder goes out immediately, but you can't trigger a resend AFAIK. 

So if reaction time is key, use an autoresponder. This does not prevent you from also adding the contact to a nurture, you just wont be able to create conditions on the autoresponder (opened, clicked). 

Hope this helps!

To add to what Damien is saying, I'd like to add an example of a situation. Let's say you created a form promoting a webinar. If you would just like to send one email for those who have filled out the form confirming their sign up and give them a link to the webinar, then you would want to choose the autoresponder, trigger email. If you would like to send them an email about the event, a day of reminder email, and a follow up email with the recording of the webinar only if their status for attending the event was yes, then you would want to use a trigger nurture. It really depends on how in depth you would like your communications with the recipients to be. 

Absolutely. 

And if it's a support request, you definitely want to send a confirmation email right away to reassure the contact that the submission worked. 

It would be great if the delay for nurtures could be reduced. 

Thanks a lot, guys!
This really helped me out interpreting the difference between these two functionalities.

Truly appreciate when you use examples :) 

Hi,

I would add there is an additional benefit to the autoresponders (i.e. field submission rule) : it enables to send the confirmation email each time the contact fills out the form. Indeed, if things have not changed, if a contact has already been added to a nurture a first time, Sugar Market will not add it again to the Nurture even if the contact fills out the form a second time.

For instance, if you create a form enabling a contact to download a whitepaper, it can make sense to enable the contact to fill out the form a second time and to send this person an email with the whitepaper. And for this, you should not use the Nurture feature as it will not send the email a second time except if an enhancement has been made.

James Brown or Jana Ferguson could you confirm this please? 

Thanks,

Jean-Philippe

Good point!

This is going to change with the new Nurture Builder that is planned for rollout in the coming days/weeks. You'll have the opportunity to setup nurtures that contacts can go through multiple times. 

Yes, in the current Nurtures that is correct. When the new version is released in a few weeks you will have the option to allow recipients to enter the nurture multiple times via form submission or lead scoring. They will not be added multiple times if they are originally included via a list. More to come on the details when Nurture Builder launches!