Progressive Profiling Unspecified & pURLs

[Jen_Flom]

I am working on a campaign where we are sending out a direct mail piece with pURLs associated with it. Not everyone who is on the list to have a unique pURL has an email address associated with them. The intent of the campaign is to get the lead to their unique landing page and begin asking a series of questions. The sales team wants insight into whether or not someone visits their pURL, answers one question and leaves, two questions and leaves and so on. To do this, I have mapped out a series of landing pages with one question per form. I was hoping to utilize progressive profiling to be able to tie those who don't initially have an email address associated with pURL back to the original record. In progressive profiling, I am asking for email, first name and last name.

When testing, once someone enters in an email address, a new record is being created in my database. I also wanted to obtain their name so we could manually merge the records together. Not ideal, but I'm not sure of a way around that without an initial email. Where I am running into an issue is when the email address is collected and the user moves on to question #2 where they would potentially enter their first and last name, last name is not an option because Marketo is automatically populating the last name field with Unspecified. Is there a way around this field being auto populated with Unspecified? Or perhaps another way that I would be able to tie the record with the pURL back to the same record once we obtain their email address?

[SanfordWhiteman]

First, pURLs don't work the way you expect unless you follow the directions at Fixing Marketo pURLs. Maybe you already have that code on your page but you didn't mention it.

Second, you don't need multiple forms on distinct pages to accomplish this, that's a lot to manage with no upside.

What you do need to do is have a secondary proxy field, not the system Email Address field, as the visible field on the form. Then a Change Data Value flow step is used to copy the {{Lead.Email Address Self-Service Proxy}} (an example field name) to the system Email Address on the server side. (Not on the client/browser side.)

This is how you set up a "Change of Email Address" form in Marketo without creating a new lead, which is what you're doing (the change being from empty to something).

[Jen_Flom]

Thank you Sanford Whiteman. Yes, I did go through your Fixing Marketo pURLs​ as I was building this. Thank you for sharing that information. The proxy field makes sense. I am a little sad that it didn't occur to me to do this!

I did want to ask, however, what do you mean by "you don't need multiple forms on distinct pages to accomplish this"? If I only had one form, how would I know if someone answers one question, but doesn't move on to the next if they don't submit the form. Basically, our campaign is about potentially acquiring their business and each question gets a little more in depth as they progress. I didn't think that I could capture information from a form if they didn't submit their answer. Is there a way to do this all on one form?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Is there a way to do this all on one form?

Yes: you can use Visibility Rules in conjunction with some Forms 2.0 JS API code to continually submit the form as they move forward.

But what I meant more specifically is that you don't need multiple pages. You can use multiple forms if you want, but they can easily replace each other on the same LP instead of having to chain together and manage multiple pages + Thank Yous.

[Jen_Flom]

Thank you, again, Sanford. I was not aware that you could easily replace forms on the same landing page. I will need to look for additional resources to learn more about this as well. I appreciate your time!