Marketo Form Best Practices

Marketo Forms are a key building block to your lead generation efforts, allowing you to request your audience to provide their contact details in exchange for something. That something could be a Road Show registration, dinner at a trade show, your next webinar, an important white paper, or requesting help. The possibilities are only limited by your ability to market…and your ability to program.

Marketo provides the capability to add nearly any field from your database to a Form. The Form Designer permits all the typical form options you see elsewhere, however, it does have some limitations on the look and feel. The good news is you can customize nearly everything about the Form if you know where to look and how to use Javascript.

Planning and Organizing Forms

Creating a Form is a key skill in Marketo because it helps drive the Email > Page > Form > Database flow of collecting names and activities from Leads.

It is recommended to keep your Forms in Design Studio because you should always have a set of 5 or so standard forms. While it is tempting to allow local asset Forms for Programs, doing this tends to cause issues when less skilled team members create Forms that are not consistent with data rule and don’t bring in the right data. Because so many firms use customized forms and JavaScript, it is crucial that you restrict Form creation to specific power users or heavily train your team on proper use.

Now that you had a chance to try out a Form or two, take a few moments with your team to decide on 3 to 7 standard forms you will use in various situations. Here are some recommendations:

Form Name	Why	Level of Detail Requested
Trade Show Form	For a registering leads for Trade Show meetings.	Medium
Standard Form	Any content sign up (Content Program)	Low
Standard Form Progressive	A progressive version	Progressive
Roadshow Registration	Event sign ups require more detail in most cases.	High / Progressive
Webinar Registration	Quick form for online events.	Low /Progressive
Newsletter Sign Up	For a newsletter or blog email sign up.	Low
Subscription Management	The enhanced and required email preferences form.	Special
Unsubscribe	Marketo’s default Unsubscribe Form	Default, email.

Of course, the fields and names are up to your unique business requirements. Just remember your audience is filling these out, so treat them the way you would want to be treated in the same situation.

As discussed in Naming and Organization, it’s good to keep a solid folder structure and naming scheme for Forms, especially since everyone can see them across the system. Here are a couple of examples:

Trade Show Event – Production
Webinar Registration – Dev (not for use)

Here’s a good example of the folder structure you should use for Forms. This also works well for Landing Pages and Emails.

Refrain from using Forms in Programs, mostly because there’s a tendency for less technical marketers to not use Forms well. Forms are critical to the success of a landing page and data collection. If a step is missed or a form doesn’t ask the right questions, there is a ton of extra work to do.

Social Sign On Forms

Marketo added social sign on where a Lead can use LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter to login, providing you with key details from that network automatically. This data can be fed back into your CRM instead of using another service to pull it. Interesting fields are available to you;

• Gender
• Display Name (Social Displayed Name)
• Photo URL
• Profile URL
• Reach (number of connections)

To do this, you need to Enable Social Sign-on. In the form, just select the option:

Forms and Data Appending Services

A number of firms like DemandBase, ReachForce, and RingLead allow you to pre-populate fields based on the lead’s company. These services are surprisingly accurate. If you can afford it, data appending up front is a great addition to your forms. Marketo has used these services with great success.

Auto Populating Source Data: Hidden Fields and URL Parameters

Often you will have a situation with multiple lead channels coming into an event or webinar. You may need to pay a vendor on a per lead basis or you want to know which promotion channels are working for that event. In Marketo, you have at least two options:

1. Multiple Landing Pages – one for each source.
2. Hidden Fields and URL Parameters, one URL per source, pointing to one page.

Multiple Landing Pages per Partner: One way to keep your data clean is to have 1 page per channel partner or paid referrer. Each page will collect conversion data, allowing a clean audit trail. For example:

• LinkedIn Ad Page
• LinkedIn Discussion Link Page
• Main Webinar Schedule Page
• Facebook Ad Page

Limitations: you will have a lot of forms and pages. It will be hard to manage.

Hidden Field for URL Parameters: In this system, we use the same two fields, but now we set them to use URL Parameters. We can generate a long list of URL combinations for each channel partner. There will be 1 page and 1 form for your Program. To report on this system, you will use a Smart List to pull Leads from this Program who meet Lead Source and Promo Source criteria from the URL Parameters.

In this method, we will add a field to SFDC or Marketo called “Promo Source.”

Note you can use dashes if you like. Here’s an example URL for the field PromoSource (PS) and Lead Source (source).

http://go.yoursite.com/some-page/page-name.html?PS=some-referrer&source=LEADSOURCE-NAME

Setting up URL parameters can be a tedious process, but once it is done, it works very well. The basic steps involve:

1. Set up a table that maps the promotion source to a code you choose “PS=XXXX”.
2. Select the fields that should be hidden, such as Lead Source.
3. Set  Input Type to Hidden.
4. Edit Settings: Default Value=X; Get Dynamic Value: URL Parameter; Parameter Name = source
5. Save
6. Test this form to make sure the values from the URL are being inserted properly.

Caution! Make sure fields like Original Lead Source are field blocked to avoid overwriting data.

Limitations: You may need to setup workflows to manage this and keep a record for each Program. You can make this a bit more complicated, so read up:

• URLs and Hidden Fields
• URL Parameter Creator (xlsx)