Populating a Form

[Anonymous]

Hi I have a question regarding a form fill for a dropdown box.

Obviously, each section in a form requires you to pick a field that aligns with your CRM. For our next upcoming campaign, when they click 'no' in the email, they will be taken to a LP and we want to create a pull down with possible answers as to why they might've clicked no (basically, tell us why you're not interested).

In the past, we have picked a random field in SFDC that we know we never use, and then just use that field to populate it (like Alert). This is fine, but we don't want to continue to do that because, for example right now, we might have to overwrite the Alert field for a lead/contact. What I'm wondering is if there's another option or way to achieve this? For example, is there any way answers from a form can populate a list or something along those lines? Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks,

Chris

[Rachel_Noble]

We have a "variable comments" field that's used for occasions such as this. It is used only for forms with differing use cases but always in situations where we want leads to provide miscellaneous information that doesn't really apply to anything else in specific.

Plus, we usually append any information to the existing data so we don't lose anything. The "contains" function is great for reporting with this data-but there is very little overlap.

[Anonymous]

By 'variable comments,' I'm assuming that is a field you've created in SFDC? (if this is true, this is a problem for us. We've maxed out of fields because we have so many business units sharing SFDC)

What do you mean by 'contains' function?

[Rachel_Noble]

Sorry, should have clarified! We do a lot of analysis in access, excel and BI so we just use the "contains" function to search for the key words in our pick lists. This saves us a bunch of time. It's great!

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you want to add people to a list based on a selection from a picklist, but you don't want to save the form data to a lead field, even temporarily: yes, this is certainly possible.

We have a grand old time adding arbitrary fields to Marketo forms (fields that don't exist in the back-end db).  You can do this using a Rich Text area.  Then (one of several methods) add those form field values to the Thank You URL using the Forms API onSuccess event. You'll then always register a Visit Web Page activity with the values in the query string, for example /thankyou.html?reason=NotMyIndustry.

[Anonymous]

Chris Kowalczyk wrote:

What I'm wondering is if there's another option or way to achieve this? For example, is there any way answers from a form can populate a list or something along those lines?

You can set up a form field as a Select box that links to a field in Marketo/CRM, and it will pass the selected value into the field (as long as it is the same field type, usually string).

If you don't want to overwrite data already in a "utility" field, try this: Append Data to a Field - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Anonymous]

We had a similar problem with RSVP forms; we wanted to capture the guest details and not have them overwritten by another form fill out.

At a high-level: we ended up creating a bunch of generic event fields on the contact/lead objects in SFDC and similar set of fields on the Campaign Member object(Campaign Member is a child of the Campaign connecting to either a lead or contact; and you can add custom fields to it). In addition we added a 'flag' field to the contact/lead objects that would be populated with the name of the campaign in SFDC that corresponded to that form fill out. When a form was filled out, we would capture the responses on the lead/contact in Marketo and in the form's flow we would populate the 'flag' field with the name of the SFDC Campaign. When that record synced over to SFDC, we would have a SFDC process watching for a value in the flag field and then copy the event field values out of the contact or lead into the campaign member--thus a more permanent record of that form fill out.

Obviously it's a little more complicated than what I described to implement but it does work.

[SanfordWhiteman]

That's a nice pattern, but the OP is maxed out of SFDC fields.