Embedded survey form

[Mark_Kalamaridi]

I'd like to create a survey form with multiple questions with checkbox/radio answers that will be embedded on a non-Marketo web page.

Survey results will be captured in Marketo.

I just wanted to confirm that this is possible in Marketo and if there are any restrictions to the number of form questions/answers.

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I just wanted to confirm that this is possible in Marketo and if there are any restrictions to the number of form questions/answers.

Totally possible! Marketo forms are easy to embed on 3rd-party pages, and you'll have no practical restriction on the number of form fields.

Just keep in mind some realities when using Marketo forms for this, given expectations some have of "surveys" as opposed to forms:

• Marketo does not consider fields updated via a given form + form submission to belong to that form (the same fields can exist on any number of forms). If you dedicate a set of fields to only this survey, then of course they'll implicitly belong to this survey alone, but there's no technical connection.
• If you don't dedicate fields to this survey, they'll be overwritten if you include the same field on a later form. A lead can't have a value for Favorite_Color that belongs exclusively to "2017 Survey" and simultaneously have another value for Favorite_Color that belongs to "2018 Survey."* (Of course, they can have Favorite_Color_2017 and Favorite_Color_2018.)
• There's no built-in branching logic per se, although Visibility Rules can duplicate a lot of this kind of thing and custom JavaScript can take care of the rest.
• Aggregating results for an individual form field, or pie-charting relationships between form fields, across your database is not going to be completely smooth. You'll definitely be creating Smart Lists of people and their values, then exporting to Excel.

For the above reasons, some people shy (unnecessarily, IMO) away from Marketo forms in favor of 3rd-party applications.  You can gain ease-of-use and easier reporting that way -- but you can lose [a] connections with your Marketo db and Munchkin web analytics; [b] integration with your other automation tasks; [c] scalability; and/or [d] security -- and probably spending $$$ in the process.

* By using JSON fields, you can compound results like this, but I may be the only one that does this.

[Mark_Kalamaridi]

Thanks Sanford. Great information!

[Anonymous]

Hi Mark,

If you are interested in creating surveys and saving answers in Marketo, maybe you could choose a survey tool from Marketo's LaunchPoint partners. I suggest Survicate, but there are many other options. Survicate specializes in micro surveys which you can place directly on your website or send them via for example Marketo's email. Website surveys come in the form of small, unobtrusive widgets which you can target to specific groups of visitors. In case of email surveys, you can embed the first question to email messages. Check out the LaunchPoint page and choose the best fit for you .

[John_Wallace]

If anyone is looking to create a survey, I recently created a feedback widget on our documentation site using Marketo and Forms 2.0.  I created a sticky feedback button that popped up a modal with the form embedded inside the modal.  Since this form lives on every page and you should be able to give feedback on a number of pages, I soon realized the limitations of Marketo's database.  If you entered the feedback form more than once, your new answers will override the existing ones.  To get around this issue, I created an alert email that was sent every time the feedback form was submitted with the form values inserted into the email using tokens.  After the email was sent, I NULLed all the values of the fields used to start with a blank slate if it was submitted on another page. We use Gmail at our company and I created a label inside of Gmail for all these emails to go into.

Since a report inside Marketo was out of the question, I used this chrome extension/gmail plugin Export Emails to Google Sheets, Excel, or CSV - Chrome Web Store that will take all emails from inside a Gmail label and create a Google Sheet, there you can specify the columns within the spreadsheet with the corresponding answers. In the end, you have a spreadsheet that has all the answers from your survey with links to the original alert emails.  

Hope this helps!