Important Change to form Prefill

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I suppose most of you have seen the warning about form prefill when login in to Marketo today. If you have not read the related article, you should do it as it has a major impact on one of the most used feature in Marketo...

Honestly, I am surprised by the suddenness of the announcement. Has any of you been warned ? Obviously, the issues with prefill on computers that are shared or when people forward emails to each other have been known for a long time. But yet, why such a sudden change with such a short notice ? I suspect there are some legal concerns behind this, a far consequence of the GDPR and similar regulations, as all actors in the chain might become liable in case of data theft.

if you want to keep getting the same behavior as before, it will be time for everyone to master Sanford Whiteman's technique described here : https://blog.teknkl.com/pre-fill-any-site-any-form/ as it will become necessary on Marketo landing pages as well.

- Greg

[Denise_Greenb12]

Thank you, Greg! I bookmarked the article and put it on my "To read" list but your post elevated it in importance.

Denise

[Albert_Alvarez]

Thank You, Greg! Peronsally, I've been pretty vocal about this issue, publicly on the original thread and privately directly to my reps and product support and yet they still wont address the elepahnt in the room. Our subs center relys on this feature to show people what they have already subscribed to from a content prospective. While the functionality will work when they click on our subs center link at the bottom of our emails, we also use the subs center externally on diff points of our site. Now people that are navigating to that subs center not from a Marketo link will not know what they are subscribed to. We just redid our subs center as well (spent dozens of consultant hours on it) to now have to redesign it or implement a fix. Really infuriating.

[Jessica_Biblis]

Hi Albert Alvarez​ -- We also have points of entry to our email sub center from places other than an email link. Would love to hear how you and your team have decided to solve for this.

[Albert_Alvarez]

Hi Jessica,

Giving Sanford Whiteman​'s code a try for the short term (Thank you, Sanford!) We're thinking of moving our subs center completely off of Marketo as a longer term solution.

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you want the old behavior, use my code that everybody's been linking to.

[Jessica_Biblis]

I wish we would. I suggested it to my dev team but they weren't on board with it because, while it may be a sound solution, it is technically a hack that isn't supported by Marketo.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Even Velocity code isn't supported by Marketo (as in: you can't open a Support case). So that's not really grounds for rejecting it IMO.

In any case, the only other way to work this is to detect whether the window.mktoPreFillFields object contains the Email field, and selectively hide/show 1 of 2 forms. One form shows all the fields for the user to manage (as native Pre-Fill is functional), the other form just has the Email so they can submit it and get an email that they in turn click. (All this, by the way, also won't be officially supported as it uses JS!)

[Ayan_Talukder]

I really appreciate Sanford Whiteman​'s blog and will be looking at it carefully to implement the solution for our company.

At the same time, I am really disappointed that Marketo is not being transparent about this issue. Why the sudden change? Companies have to scramble to fix forms that rely on form pre-fill (for forms such as preference centers).

[Luben_Solev1]

Hi Gregoire,

I was reading through the threads and came across an apparently simpler solution:

https://nation.marketo.com/docs/DOC-6909-form-pre-fill-feature-upgrade#comment-39984

Will this solution work in your eyes?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Embedding tokens directly in the form descriptor (a) doesn't work for all data types and (b) breaks on some data values, if that's what you're referring to. It's not a true substitute. Works fine for <input type="text"> variants.

[Luben_Solev1]

Thanks Sanford,

Are you saying that the "Using lead tokens as default values" method will only work for text fields, but will not pre-fill dropdown or other type fields (e.g. Country, Industry, Tickboxes) whilst your JS method will prefill all?

Thanks in advance for the clarification

Luben

[SanfordWhiteman]

Are you saying that the "Using lead tokens as default values" method will only work for text fields, but will not pre-fill dropdown or other type fields (e.g. Country, Industry, Tickboxes) whilst your JS method will prefill all?

Correct. As you can see in the Form Editor, you can't directly use a lead token to set values in a Checkboxes group, among other gaps (and some particularly prickly value conflicts).

You don't need to write any JS yourself to use the code Greg links to: its default behavior is to find and Pre-Fill Marketo forms on the page (you can use it to Pre-Fill non-Marketo forms on non-Marketo pages, too, but that requires dev work).

[Ayan_Talukder]

Thank you for the helpful replies Sanford. Just to clarify, for the guided landing page template HTML, we can use "token" values for checkboxes?

So for example for a preference center, we would just enter the Marketo token as such:

<mktoField inputName="Newsletter">{{lead.Newsletter}}</mktoField>

[SanfordWhiteman]

No (when would you ever be hand-creating the inputs anyway?).

Use my Pre-Fill method, like lots o' people are noting it covers all these areas well.

[Ayan_Talukder]

Oh yes I was referring to your method. I noticed in the landing page template you had the mktoField inputs, I'd follow the same for any type of field (including checkboxes). It sounds like it should be fine. I'll give it a go.

[Luben_Solev1]

That's great. Much appreciate the info!

Have a great day Sanford.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Luben,

What simpler solution are you referring to ? Using lead tokens as default values ? It will work but relies a lot on user making no mistake and forgetting nothing when creating the forms. The other solution in the comments is the same one as the oneI refer to and requires some JS.

-Greg

[Luben_Solev1]

Thanks for the speedy response Gregoire,

Yep. That's the one I was thinking of. We use about 6 global forms 95% of the time, so I'm not worried about setting the forms up properly.

I'm not proficient in JS and don't have control of the website, so was just seeing if the "Using lead tokens as default values" method could do the trick for us.

Luben

[Jay_Jiang]

I have to step in and correct you by saying that the aim of my post was mainly to show Marketo how pointless and how much of an inconvenience the "upgrade" was.

I would be careful to use it as a solution to the problem because if your forms are placed outside of Marketo landing pages, the forms will show the token text literally, i.e. {{lead.First Name}}, as the default value

[Ayan_Talukder]

This is good to know, so if someone who is not cookied shows up to a form embedded on a non-Marketo page, it will show the default token values?