Forms and Picklists - Solving for Frequent one-off Form Picklist Creation and Data Storage

[Chris_Thomas]

Hello,

Before posting, I looked and couldn't find any advice so I thought I'd start a new thread to see how the community suggests solving for the following issue.

Frequently, our forms will contain one-off pick lists that pertain to specific events or data points we are trying to capture in addition to standard data points.  Example:  Select the three top technologies which are most important to your digital strategy, what is your biggest challenge in adopting a digital strategy, which ERP platform is your organization on, how many users do you have, etc.

The organization's existing approach is to create new fields in MKTO for each of these and use a form field type of select and to edit the select values in each case as appropriate.

This isn't scalable as requests for new pick lists are constantly requested for new purposes.  The flat file is continuously expanding and custom fields cannot be deleted after being created.

How is the community handling this type of thing?  Has anyone found an approach which is particularly effective?  We need to have the ability to create custom pick lists on any form but are worried about the ever expanding file layout..

Any advice is much appreciated!

Cheers,

Chris

[Josh_Hill13]

Would suggest looking up scalable slides from previous Marketo Summits.

Most firms will say No to these kinds of requests. some solutions:

• use temp fields
• create Marketo only field for multi select options
  • Product Interest
  • Meal Type
  • etc
• ask Why do you really need this?
• Use Survey Monkey to manage these "survey" like requests.

[Jay_Jiang]

Have previously just used a few custom fields e.g. Qualifying Question #1, Qualifying Question #2, Qualifying Question #3 etc... and prefix each picklist value (not label) with some reminder of what question you're asking

e.g.

<select name="qq1">

<option value="">Which age bracket do you belong to?</option>
<option value="age-18-35">18 to 35</option>
<option value="age-36-54">36 to 54</option>

</select>

<select name="qq2">

<option value="">Whats your favourite colour?</option>
<option value="fav-colour-black">Black</option>
<option value="fav-colour-white">White</option>

</select>

[Natalie_Kremer]

We do something similar to what Jay suggested. For most of our requests, we're just capturing the information in the short term to populate into an alert email, so there is no concern about over-writing the field in the long term.