Implementing form data validation for email?

Andy_Varshneya1 · ‎04-12-2016

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 · ‎04-12-2016

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.

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