Best Practises on creating a Master Form Template

[Andreia_Norsa]

Hi all,

I want to create a single Master Form Template to be used in different campaigns, so I don't have to keep creating different forms.

I didn't find many articles here in the community. Could you please share your experience including best practices?

Thanks.

Andreia

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hello Andreia,

I am not sure you can really work with only 1 form in a real world. You should adapt the number of fields to the position in the funnel, for a start.

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

As Greg mentions, since Marketo doesn't really templatize forms, it can be difficult -- though not impossible, depending on your business -- to use only one form descriptor across every single campaign. ("Form descriptor" means a single form as defined in Form Editor, with the widest set of possible permutations.)

The fundamental requirement for a template-ish form is a String field in your database called LastFormMode or LastFormVariant.

This field is not used on the lead level, but it it needs to exist in the db so you can add it to the template as a hidden field. You use it as a master field for determining visibility of other fields. Without this in place it is impossible to have required fields that show/hide based on the form variant, since -- very important! -- hiding required form fields using CSS will mean the form cannot submit.  You have to show/hide using the built-in Visibility Rules feature.

I've been using this technique with some newer clients and it's working out OK, I won't say it's ideal but it's probably saved a lot of hours and a lot of screwups, so there's that.

[ChristinaZuniga]

I agree with Sanford and Greg that this isn't standard, but there are things you can do depending on your set up. You could create one form that has:

• standard fields you always include such as "company". This would be really helpful for things like country where you want a picklist and might have made some customizations to it like putting United States first
• progressive profiling set up in the correct order that you've agreed upon internally
• settings aligned with your branding - having your button CSS completed, font selected, etc.

While these things won't be perfect, it may make it easier or slightly faster for you to create a new form with the right base, required fields and branding.

[Andreia_Norsa]

Thanks Christina. This is very helpful.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

HI Andreia Norsa​!

We use a combination of 6 master forms for content on our website and we just create a new form for each event registration. But I agree with the above, one form to rule them all is not really feasible. Our master forms are set up based on content category (Awareness Basic, Awareness Extensive, Interest Basic, Interest Extensive, Evaluation Basic, Evaluation Extensive). The content category form dictates the scoring. Then we populate more fields with campaigns in Marketo (like lead source detail which gives more description of the content ex. "2018 CSR Report"). Those are ran by using filled out form filter with the web page constraint. You can also use a personalization tool, like Evergage to populate hidden fields on the actual act of filling out the form. (Just depends where you want your campaigns that populate information to exist). Hope this helps!

[Andreia_Norsa]

Thanks Amanda for sharing your experience...