form landing page without email address

[Michelle_Tizian]

We're sending a targeted email to a list of 90 people who have good email address.  The form landing page that I originally created had an email address field, but our CEO wanted to do away with having the email address field.  We tested the form fill without the email address and got mixed results.  One of my colleagues filled out the form and it worked fine, she received the autoresponse email and I received the email alert, but our CFO tried it and the email alert that I received had no information about her and she obviously didn't receive the autoresponse email.  I tried to see if I can hide the email address field, using forms2.0 but I couldn't simply hide the field without adding a condition.  My question is, has anyone done this successfully?

[Elliott_Lowe1 · Accepted solution]

Without an email field, you are wholly reliant on the lead having a _mkto_trk cookie on the browser / device they use that points back to their lead record.  If your CFO didn't have a connected cookie on the device / browser that they used and they navigated directly to the page rather than via the tracked link in the email, that would explain the result you received.  You might want to display their name in the form and have a link they can click if that is not them or blank.  That link would take them to a form where they can enter their email address and connect to their existing lead record.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Thank you Elliott! You explained exactly what happened in the case of our CFO.  I put the email address field back because I didn't want this to be a mess, especially since it's an important email coming from our CEO going to CEOs.   Also thanks for the suggestion about the "not you" link.  I remember that from your presentation!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Michelle, the "Not You" link is essentially the same as a standard form reset.  You can do some pretty slick stuff by simply adding a reset button onto the form. 

In this demo, I prefill the email address but let the user clear the email address if they want input fresh info.  (Since neither First nor Last Name are mandatory, I think the email address is the most accurate way to say "This is me/this is not me.")  http://pages.vaneck.com/form-reset-button.html

[Michelle_Tizian]

That's nifty Sanford.  I'll give that one a try one day.  But I just stumbled into another issue and it's related to my question above.  I sent the email this morning as planned and added the lead.firstname token to personalize the email.  The strange thing is it didn't add our CFO's first name on the email.  It worked fine for the others except for her.  I checked her record and her first name is there.  She did create a lead record for herself yesterday when she was testing on a couple of devices and I merged 2 of the records.  But there was one person who filled out a form and everything was blank on the lead record.  But today, she received the email without the first name and filled out the form again and this time it showed that her lead record was acquired in the same program at 7:58 pm on 6/29/15.  Do you suppose that she could have been the same person who filled out the form when I didn't have the email field and it's the same device that she used to receive the email, which is why it might not have populated the first name? 

[Elliott_Lowe1]

That is likely the cause.  It's hard to say without looking at all of the records related to your CFO.