Re: Form Building questions

Anonymous
Not applicable

Form Building questions

I'm a fairly new Marketo user and I'm trying to rebuild our website's "Contact Us" page as a Marketo LP to support 3 basic functions...contact customer support requests, Free trial requests, and login credential requests. So the landing page would just have "I would like to:" and 3 radio buttons, one for each value. Depending on the value selected, a form for each value would be displayed. I understand how to build one master form with each of the variations displayed using the visibility rules, but then when I'm building the trigger/flow steps, I'm not sure how to distinguish between the 3 values...each value displays a variation of the Contact Us form and each variation type is routed to a different email for follow-up.

example: Contact Customer Support value selected, fields displayed using visibility rules and form is submitted;

trigger: fills out form: Form name is Contact Us; I need to specify somehow value selected is Contact Customer Support

Flow: Send Alert: Email: Contact Customer Support form alert; Send to: email#1@gmail.com

versus

Qualify for a free trial value selected, fields displayed using visibility rules and form is submitted;

trigger: fills out form: Form name is Contact Us; I need to specify somehow value selected is Qualify for a free trial

Flow: Send Alert: Email: Qualify for a free trial form alert; Send to: email#2@gmail.com

Am I navigating this in the wrong way? If I built out 3 different forms, 1 form per each of the 3 values, how do I build the initial "I would like to:" with 3 values radio buttons? Hopefully this isn't too crazy confusing and someone can offer some insight. I'd really appreciate any suggestions!

5 REPLIES 5
Rachel_Noble
Level 9 - Champion Alumni

Re: Form Building questions

Hi Jamie,

So you only have one form, correct? I'm assuming you're using a field, "I would like to," to determine the initial selection. You can use visibility rules to determine the additional fields that display after the initial selection (e.g. if "I would like to" = "Qualify for free trial" then show fields A/B/C, and so on).

You will need 3 distinct smart campaigns:

  1. Trigger = Fills Out Form, Form Name = Contact Us. Add a filter to the smart list where field I would like to = [Contact Customer Support]. Then you can have your flow to send the alert to email#1@gmail.com
  2. Trigger = Fills Out Form, Form Name = Contact Us. Include filter I would like to = [Qualify for a free trial]. Then you can have your flow to send the alert to email#2@gmail.com
  3. Similar approach for your third radio button
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Form Building questions

Okay so I would create 3 smart campaigns, one for each value and my smart

list would look as such for each value...?

Trigger: Fills out Form

Form Name: is Contact Us

Filter: I would like to

I would like to: is Contact Customer Support

Jamie Robertson

Marketing Analyst II

Inventory Locator Service,® LLC

Tel: 901-433-1452

Cell: 1-901-500-5792

JRobertson@ILSmart.com

www.ILSmart.com

Rachel_Noble
Level 9 - Champion Alumni

Re: Form Building questions

That is what I would do. Sanford has a good point, but I have found this to be reliable in the past, even for very large volumes of form fills.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Form Building questions

But you wouldn't really know when it failed, that's what makes the problem so pesky.  Same with all the data race conditions (filters on data values that aren't committed to the db, etc.).

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Form Building questions

Glad you realized this is tricky -- though perhaps you didn't realize why.

The standard answer to this, but not necessarily the best (sorry, Rachel!) is to filter the trigger SC on the form value.

However, that won't work as reliably as people think, because the filter is not actually acting as a constraint on the form data. It's looking at the field value at the time the trigger runs. That may not be the value posted with the form, and IMO that's too fragile for a multi-purpose form like this.

The more reliable way to capture the data is to add a #hash to the URL on submit, indicating the "sub-form" they filled out. Then you can constrain each Filled Out Form activity on that value, without any confusion due to data changing in the background.