Information about Form data feasibility (email domain detection)

[SophieGast]

Hi there,
We would like to simplify our form as much as possible. Therefore, we were thinking of reducing the number of fields but before, we wanted to know how feasible is to delete the company name field and get the company name thanks to the email address field. In other words: is it feasible to detect and extract the company name from the email domain later in Marketo?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Kind regards

[uditmathur]

Hi,

I will suggest instead to parting away with the important field like company name, you should try using Progressive Profiling.

This way you can shorten your form size & also get additional data as your client interaction with your company extends. 

Usually majority of clients keep at least 3 form fields (Name, Email & Company name) which is with no standard a long form.😊

you can get further details on progressive profiling here

[Darshil_Shah1]

While removing the company name field and relying on email domain parsing in Marketo is tempting, it's not a foolproof solution. Email domains don't always reflect the company name. Freelancer emails, personal accounts, and generic domains like "@gmail.com" wouldn't provide company information. Even for company emails, the domain might not capture the full name (many companies use the shorter version in their email domain).  Inaccuracies or missing company names can negatively impact Marketo's segmentation, reporting, and personalization efforts.

There are some alternatives you can think of:

1. Consider making the company name field conditional. It can be pre-populated with the extracted domain name (if available) and allow manual edits for inaccuracies.
2. Go for Progressive Profiling, available OOTB in Marketo, to shorten your forms (as Udit mentioned above).

While the idea of automatically extracting company names from email domains has some appeal, the drawbacks can outweigh the benefits, and that's probably the reason we still see Company Name as one of the fields used by most users. A well-placed conditional field or a progressive profiling strategy might be better solutions for your needs. I hope this helped. Please let us know if you have questions.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Two vendors that offer firmographic enrichment on the form side, and have reasonably reliable integrations with Marketo forms, are ZoomInfo and Clearbit.

With these tools, you can only show Company fields if the auto-enriched data is incomplete. Otherwise, the data is written to hidden fields.

But you need to do in-depth testing of the UX for such tools before rolling them out — the form experience may be a bit “jaggy” depending on your default form layout, which can be smoothed over with JavaScript. AB testing vs. manual forms is a good idea.