What are the tradeoffs for the different ways to implement forms?

[Anonymous]

What's your best practice for using forms on your website? It is not realistic for me to create a Marketo landing page with a Marketo form for every place I have a form on my site. I really want to be able to prepopulate the form (or hide it all together) when someone has already filled it out. Can anyone give me the pros/cons they considered when deciding how to implement forms? Is my only option to iframe if I want prepopuation?

[Josh_Hill13]

Gina,
 

There are a few options depending on how you want the system to work. See a list of related articles here:
http://www.marketingrockstarguides.com/marketo-form-instructions-164/

Prepopulation happens by default on all Marketo forms.

To hide fields that are filled in already, you need to enable Progressive Form on the forms you create. These will all work using iFrames.

There are more complicated ways to embed Marketo forms into your main website using the API, jquery, or double post method. Those will require programming expertise.

[Jep_Castelein2]

Gina, not sure if you will attend the Marketo Summit next month, but there is an Advanced Forms sessions which may be interesting to attend: Wednesday, April 9th at 2:35pm.

In short, there are 3 ways to get a Marketo form to pre-populate: 
- Marketo form on Marketo landing page
- iframe that includes a Marketo form on Marketo landing page
- use the Marketo SOAP API to prepopulate your own form on your own web page (requires software developer)

There are a couple of other ways to include forms: 
- Marketo form on non-Marketo page (simply copy the form's HTML to your own web page)
- Server-side form post: your web application will capture the form submission and repost to Marketo
- Use the Munchkin API

Pre-fill of forms is most useful for returning visitors. Many forms on your website will primarily be filled out by new visitors, such as the Contact us form. For those forms, a lot of customers are using a Marketo form on a non-Marketo page, since pre-filling is not so important. 

Hope this helps, 
Jep

[Anonymous]

Hi Jep, thanks for the information. I will ask my web developer to look into the API.