Choosing the Best Marketing Form Solution for Your Business

Customer data enables insights that your marketing, sales, product and service teams all use to deliver the right experiences at the right time. An important touchpoint for collecting this data is the marketing form. Marketing forms not only gather contact information but also tie users back to specific content they’ve downloaded, subscriptions they’ve agreed to or service issues they’ve raised. This makes forms a great start to understanding and better serving your prospects and customers – and makes it extremely important to choose the right kind of forms.

What kinds of marketing form solutions are there? What are the options? How do they capture, store and update the information? And how do you ensure your customer data is secure and compliant? Below, we’ll answer all these questions and more.

Marketing Form Approaches: Embedded Forms vs. Form Handler

One common approach is to integrate a third-party marketing form into your site. These forms are usually customizable, relatively fast to roll out and don’t require much technical ability.

In addition to these third-party integrations, there are two primary approaches for integrating forms.

1. Embedding marketing forms via iframe

With this approach, you build forms within marketing automation tools like Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, etc., with the iframe code embedded in your website.

2. Form submission via form handlers/Form POST

With this method, you build the form into both your marketing tool and your website. The form field is mapped in your website and you set the website form to POST data to the marketing form handler.

Both options are valid, with the best choice depending on your use case and a variety of parameters.

Data ownership

With a variety of regional data protection laws and regulations, it’s critical to create a data ownership strategy for user-submitted data.

With the embedded approach, data ownership and security are offloaded to marketing automation tools, but it’s still critical to ensure your marketing tool provider adheres to data security laws and best practices.

With the form handler approach, the responsibility for data ownership, security and compliance lies with your website development team.

Bot protection

Forms are a vulnerable touch point for spam. They should include protection techniques like CAPTCHA, form submission limits, etc.

With the embedded approach, businesses can rely on marketing automation tools to enable these methods. In fact, some large marketing tools use specialized algorithms to prevent spamming.

These methods can also be used with the form handler approach, but integrating with spam control devices will require development efforts.

Duplicate or invalid records

Businesses should vet for duplicate or invalid submissions to avoid a flood of spam leads.

Some marketing automation tools provide automated vetting of user data. These are able to filter spam, freeing your business team to focus on legitimate leads and improve their conversion rates.

With a form handler, it may be more difficult to implement one of the above solutions. You may require third-party services and a development lift to integrate it with your website.

Your team’s technical prowess

Will adding new forms or updating existing forms by adding or removing fields require technical or development ability?

With the embedded approach, your marketing team can easily add new forms to your marketing automation tool and drop the embed code into your site. Similarly, existing forms can be updated on your marketing tool and changes will automatically be reflected on your site. This reduces dependency on dev teams.

With the form handler approach, however, you will rely on the form-building capability of your website. Most CMSs provide form-building capability but the process of building and managing forms at two different places, mapping fields and attaching form handlers can be very cumbersome. It is not an editorial-friendly workflow and typically requires a lot of developer assistance.

Form design

Like any other site component, forms should adhere to your brand design guidelines.

Embedded forms allow you to manage styling within your marketing tools, but with limited style options and control. With this approach, you’ll likely have to compromise some of your styling and branding within the form.

The form handler approach gives editors complete control over the branding look and feel of your forms because they’re natively built into your site.

Performance

Fast loading speeds are critical to ensuring good customer experiences and keeping visitors from abandoning your form and your site.

Loading an embedded form requires a resource request from a third party. This can slow down form loading times and makes you dependent on the marketing tool’s performance. Overall page loading performance can be improved with a lazy loading iframe strategy, but users may still experience a small delay in loading the form.

Form handlers involve native forms, requiring fewer network calls and typically delivering better performance. Load lag should be insignificant to your end users.

Progressive profiling

When a prospect returns to your form, it’s important that the form only displays newer fields – ones the prospect hasn’t previously completed. This kind of progressive profiling collects more data from prospects as they continue to engage through form submissions but doesn’t force them to re-enter information they’ve already shared. Avoiding lengthy, repetitive forms can reduce abandonment and increase conversions.

Most marketing automation tools provide this functionality within their embedded forms. Progressive profiling is possible through form handlers but requires added development efforts.

Legacy forms

Your website may have legacy forms that require extra support to work with new or upgraded systems.

In these cases, the embedded approach won’t work. With some additional development effort, your new form handler can be added to legacy forms without disturbing the existing workflow.

Multiple integrations

Your form submissions might require data to flow to various downstream systems along with your marketing tool.

If this is the case, the embedded approach won’t work. With a form handler, multiple integrations can be added for support.

Data loss

There are a lot of reasons for data loss, including third-party systems being unavailable. In some cases, end users may not be able to submit their data.

With the embedded approach, it’s possible that forms might not load on certain browsers. Especially those that have js blocked or that are using third-party ad blockers or iframe blockers. This can be mitigated by having a subdomain for the marketing automation tool. This would put the iframe source under the same root as the site, so it won’t be treated like third-party content. Most marketing tools will support this kind of solution. But, even with this fix, forms won’t work in browsers with js disabled; it’s less likely, though, that you’ll have end users with js blocked.

With the form handler approach, forms are all native, automatically reducing the chance of data loss. However, data loss can still occur if your marketing tool is down.

Monitoring is an important way to detect potential data loss. Analytics tools can help you monitor how many users submit forms compared to how many visit the page.

Time to market

How soon do your forms need to be rolled out?

The embedded approach enables a much faster rollout because it doesn’t require any complex development effort. The form handler approach, on the other hand, requires more dev effort and takes a longer time to get to market.

Make the Best Marketing Form Choice with Material

Out-of-the-box functionality, design flexibility, time to integrate, possible chance of data loss, editorial/developer control – these are all important considerations when you’re deciding how to approach marketing forms.

Neither embedded forms or form handlers may fully address your needs and preferences – but you don’t necessarily have to pick just one. You can also integrate forms through a hybrid approach. And if you’re unsure what might work best, Material can offer guidance and expertise.

Material can also show you how to use Salesforce to ensure that all your data makes it seamlessly into your marketing workflows – enabling effective automation and boosting customer engagement. Our team of Salesforce-certified experts can help you implement these solutions and optimize your marketing automation strategy for maximum impact. Reach out today and let’s start the conversation.