Implementing form data validation for email?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Hi,

I'm facing a slight dilemma and could use everyone's collective brain power to work through the issue in case someone has addressed it already.

My demand gen team is trying to make a case for why we need email validation on our forms so that leads cannot fill out forms with their personal email addresses (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc). This could be an easy problem to solve with a script or a service like BriteVerify or Etumos, except for the fact that we didn't do this before so leads who may have filled out forms and be directed to forms with their personal email address will no longer be able to fill out those forms because of the script. This would essentially lead to us creating duplicates in our database, one for andy@gmail.com and one for andy@company.com, not to mention the terrible UX.

One option I'm considering is having a hidden checkbox to see if it's an existing lead in the database already and based on that, enable or disable the script. This would probably work somewhat consistently but not be bulletproof.

If someone else has navigated this project before, how did you handle it? Is it still possible to launch the project without creating an operational nightmare? I want to make sure I've considered all options before I go back to the team with an answer.

Thanks in advance,

Andy

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Great question and @Edward Unthank​ and I have talked about adding preliminary verification against a Marketo instance to Etumos Verify. The reasons it hasn't been rolled out are, to be totally frank, Edward's concern about demand (solved!) and my by-now-predictable concern about API calls and service resilience. If it's key to your application, I see no reason to not add it. 

As for doing this all client-side: if you're using Marketo-hosted LPs, I probably could help you make the "existing lead bypass" pretty close to bulletproof.

[Edward_Unthank_]

Touché, Sanford.

Edward

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Love that you guys are thinking about this too!

It's probably an 85-15 split between Marketo hosted LP's and corporate website embedded forms. How much of a problem does that create?

Andy

[Edward_Unthank_]

If it's an embedded Forms 2.0, then that'd create no problem at all for the script. The Email Verify Javascript is based on Forms 2.0, not Marketo-hosted landing pages versus non-Marketo-hosted landing pages.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Got it, then I'll have to look into that. I know some of the forms have been around for ages so they'll need to be dusted off and updated. I'm glad there's something available that addresses this specific issue we're facing though.

Mind if I reach out to one of you directly for more details?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Sure, follow and DM either of us!

[SanfordWhiteman]

The advantage of having prefill easily available is you can, with some ugly/fanciness, use a background form as your lookup method: pre-post a form, check for fields that would only exist if the lead were merged with an existing lead (like your checkbox), return true/false, delete the pending lead.  To get that to work on an external site requires something more ugly/fancy.

Like Edward said (just saw that update come in!) this wouldn't make any diff for Etumos Verify, it would only be relevant if you tried to do it using all-native functionality.

[Robb_Barrett]

Couldn't you send out an "Update your address" email to all of your leads with personal email addresses (and here's a list: Free email provider domains ) and then lead them to a form with a temporary field designated as an Email field with a rule against having it be one of the email domains in this list?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Definitely an option, but historically I've seen very low response rates for campaigns like that where they don't have an incentive to participate.