Get inFORMation - The Ultimate Tips & Tricks For Your Forms

Transcript

My name is Amanda Thomas. I’m a five-time Marketo champion, a marketing technology consultant at Atumos, and I co-lead the Houston Marketo User Group. I’m going to pass it to you, Jules, to introduce yourself. Hi, everyone. My name is Jules James. I am a senior manager of marketing operations at Blue Prism. I’m a seven-time Marketo champion. I’ve been working in Marketo for around about nine years now, and we can’t wait to dive into this session about the kind of cool stuff you can do with your forms. Thanks so much for attending our session. We’re excited to talk about Get Information, the Ultimate Tips and Tricks for Your Forms. As you can tell by the title, this presentation is dedicated to Queen Bee, Beyonce, so you’ll see a lot of her gifts and references to her music within our presentation. This session is divided in four parts, our agenda laid out here. First, we’ll count down the number of fields you actually need for a form on initial form fill-out with progressive profiling. We’ll have you check on it, so validate and make sure you have those visibility rules set up within your forms. Next, we will make you feel flawless by giving you some HTML and JavaScript examples that you can implement on landing pages with forms. We will give you sweet dreams by showing you some velocity script tips that we have for post form fill. First up, we’re going to count down with progressive profiling. When you’re trying to develop your progressive profiling strategy, of course everyone is starting somewhere. I do want to touch on some questions that you can ask while putting your strategy together. The first area of concern is usually around minimizing the number of fields required on a form fill. Questions that you can ask yourself around trying to minimize is what are your conversion rates currently today? Are you striving for a better conversion rate? That’s what’s starting this conversation. What basic information is needed to get a lead over in a Salesforce or your CRM? Of course, upon lead creation, the best thing you can do is have that sync from Marketo to your CRM to make sure information is shared in between teams. The third question is what are the basic data points needed to route to BDRs or your sales team? You want to make sure that information is there and you’re collecting it as easy as possible through form fill outs. Next up is prioritizing. Having these conversations, you’re getting a lot of answers and you definitely want to prioritize your strategy around what you actually need to do next in the next moment. The first question is what are you actually hoping for? Hopefully you answer that question in the minimize that you’re looking for higher conversion rates. That’s the best outcome of implementing progressive profiling. But second up is actually getting more data that you can use to market in a better way. What questions need to be on that form fill for the initial visit? What can you actually move to a little bit later on to have them outlined for subsequent visits? Once you have those questions determined for your initial form fill, then you should prioritize the questions that are going to follow up for subsequent visits. And then the third part is to optimize. After you actually have this running and you feel good about your progressive profiling initiative, make sure that you have a way to report on that success. It’s not just a feel good feeling, but that you can actually see the numbers increasing the way that you hoped for. Also understand that you will have to evaluate what questions that you have on your forms multiple times throughout them being live on your website. So if you get tools like data enrichment or the criteria changes for routing to BDRs or even the questions that the BDRs ask during their demos, if anything like that changes, it’s a great moment to pause and revisit your progressive profiling strategy. So this slide here, we’re going to show you how to implement progressive profiling. As you can see, you have your form here. Go into form settings and under progressive profiling, switch that from disabled to enabled. Head back to your field settings. You can now drag and drop fields that you would initially ask into the progressive profiling text area. You can also add in different fields to make sure you are actually incorporating those data points that you need to collect for subsequent visits. And then if you click on the entire box itself, it’s going to show in just a second. Click on this entire box. You can actually set how many fields will show upon the subsequent visits. So just set it to one here and then go back to your form settings. Make sure again, double check that it’s enabled for progressive profiling and then you are done. Another consideration just to have in the back of your mind when they’re actually visiting that landing page, the fields that are going to be shown on that initial visit are going to be what’s above progressive profiling plus the very first field within progressive profiling. So you could even minimize this a little bit more and drag and drop your company name field into that because that’s going to be shown on the first visit. The third area to consider for progressive profiling is to use it and leverage it for personalization. You’re getting this data and hopefully now more people are filling out your forms and just at a higher rate. So you can use that data and leverage it within Marketo to really personalize the experiences you lay out as a marketing team. A screenshot here is to personalize your actual emails. We asked for job function on the form and now we can actually use that information to target the message that we have within an email. Other areas that you can personalize are like web banners, managing your ABM lists if you have Marketo ABM. And then also your LinkedIn ads. So with that LinkedIn integration you can manage who gets on those lists and then who gets targeted through LinkedIn based on the information you’re collecting in the fields. All right. Next up we are going to heed Beyonce’s words and check on it. So we’re going to make sure we have proper data from these form fills using validation and visibility rules. So first up with validation, super simple way to make sure you’re actually getting an email address when you ask for that on a form. All you have to do is just enable that validation message and in the next screenshot here you can see what this actually looks like on the form. So if it’s missing an at symbol or a dot, Marketo will pop up this error message and make sure that you’re getting the information that you’re actually looking for. The next way to use validation we have here is around phone numbers. This is definitely helpful to make sure when you’re handing leads over from marketing to sales they have a proper phone number to actually use. So Marketo’s validation here, you can actually customize this. This is their standard. What it looks like is just like that American or North America way of entering in your phone number but you can actually customize this. If you see the highlighted section of the screenshot on your left you can see that you just select custom and then you can actually format the phone number. So say you have your form on a site where a may have visits a lot or Great Britain, you can have it customized where you’re requiring the plus symbol and like the two digit code before the actual phone number. And on top of customizing the actual message that’s displayed you can customize it even further with switching out the language. So in that example of like having a form on an email website if it’s in France you can actually make sure that that validation message that error message is showing up in the proper language. I’ll pass it to you Jules to talk about visibility. Awesome. Thank you Amanda. It’s really cool to hear about all of the different ways in which we can do our validation rules and on top of that the next thing we want to start looking at is the visibility. So I’m sure some of you have seen GDPR and email opt in versions that we have to start looking at with more and more rules and regulations we really have to make sure we’re honing in on providing the right message based on the country or even the state that someone is working in. So using visibility rules we have the ability to be able to show things like state if they pick United States as a country, province if they pick Canada as a country, all the way down to showing individual check boxes. So just as it shows in this example that’s playing on the video if I go through and pick a particular country it’s showing a set of opt in regulations because Albania is an email opt in country or if I pick another country which is the Aland Islands it is showing just the standard opt in message versus a check box. So some of the ways in which we do that is we can set up our visibility rules in Marketo and it is fairly straightforward which is nice to know. So as you can see this has states showing for everyone no matter what country I’m selecting and obviously we don’t want that to happen because if someone is in the United Kingdom they don’t have states they have counties but if they’re in the United States they do have states. So the really simple way to do that is when you go into your forms you will go into the edit section and then when you can actually go and pick your state field down on the side you can have this option that says visibility rules and right now you can see that it says disabled if you click on it and the little pop up box will show you can show it to make sure it says that show state if country is United States. So we’re kind of starting to pick which types of values we want to show when particular fields are being chosen which particular values are being selected. So it is really kind of a nice straightforward thing to do especially when we have these visibility rules for more and more comprehensive GDPR reasons. The other way in which you can start to do that as well is we can actually do some double and multiple selections as well. So this example just shows really simple when country is selected it will go back to just showing the states when United States is selected it shows the state visibility but not for any other country. On this next slide you can see that we can actually also select multiple values in a field if we want to show certain check boxes certain text fields certain field labels depending on multiple country selections. So as I mentioned earlier GDPR email opt in there are multiple countries have different rules every country has its own set of rules. So you can actually go through the drop down list and you can select all of the countries where you want this particular pick list to show. One thing to remember when you’re doing pick lists in forms is when you’re working through the visibility rules make sure you don’t have one you don’t have to hold down the control of the command button to select those options and two one thing I’ve learned from doing it many times of forgetting you cannot just paste or copy the copy the options from the drop down field. You have to go into every single form and you have to select the countries every time when you’re first setting up those forms because just copying and pasting the values that are showing in the field does not auto select them. Just one little tip that I’ve learned over the time of working in Marchetto. The other thing that you can play with visibility rules is rich text so it doesn’t just have to be a field. You can also have rich text sections available so on some of the fields that some of the forms I work in we have two different opt in statements based on if they’re an opt in country or an email opt out country and then a checkbox purely if they’re an email opt in country. So this example on the on the other side of the slide you can see it says show rich text and it works in the same way you pick the rich text section that you have on your form and you go into your visibility rules and then you can just decide when you want to show them. And again as I said you can see it’s showing a selection of different countries if you want to do the additional forms you have to make sure you go in and select those additional countries every single time you can’t just copy paste across. So that was some kind of more basics around the visibility and validation rules that we have on some of the forms. Now we’re going to move into leveraging HTML and JavaScript to kind of taking it that next level up and how we can use JavaScript and HTML and forms to kind of take us to new heights. So the first example I’m going to take you through is having multiple forms on a page. Now not everyone would want to use multiple forms. I like using multiple forms for things like event registrations or it could be for subscription preferences etc. You could have a form at the top that just asks someone to opt out with an email address and you could have a similar form underneath that has someone subscription preferences. So Marketo allows you to use multiple forms on a page and not everyone realizes that. The one thing you have to be aware of is making sure that you are using different form IDs so you can’t put the same form twice on a page. You can but it won’t work. It will look at one submission through the form. You end up with multiple forms on pages. I’ve seen three or four forms sometimes when the codes have accidentally been put in the wrong places. So really take a look at the blog. I’ve linked out to one of Sandy’s amazing blogs of how he’s implemented the multiple forms on pages. But it is really as simple as just having different form IDs and if you have different form IDs you can have them used for different use cases on your website. The other way in which I like to use multiple forms on a website is being able to have forms hidden behind buttons. So the example I’m going to show you is actually for someone. We had an ambassador program and the page actually allowed the ability to nominate yourself or nominate someone else for this particular ambassador program. It’s a fairly simple thing to do but I think it’s actually a really cool feature and again it’s a really good one to do for subscription preference centers because you could have one button that just says unsubscribe me. You can have another button that says I want to update my subscription preferences or I want to update my email address because not everyone wants to see a ginormous form when they come onto a subscription preferences center page. So the way in which we do this is we start off with just some simple custom head HTML. So you just put the standard JavaScript HTML into the head and you can see this was done on a Marketo landing page. And then when you’re pulling in the buttons into your actual landing page itself you need to put some additional script in. So you can see here we have some coding that says div style and then we have the Marketo form launcher. That is the little section that tells me when I have that particular form when someone clicks one of these two buttons that it’s going to launch a particular form. So when they do the self-nomination form it’s going to launch form 1079. When they click the nominate someone else form it’s going to launch form 1489. So again these are pop-up forms that come up so then when you are registering people filling in the forms you’ve only got to look for the form name. You haven’t got to look for form fill on certain pages. This doesn’t work great when you’re using global forms because again global forms are going to be used in many different places so this is really good for using custom forms, local forms. But it’s a really cool way to customize the pages so you haven’t just got one a ton of all forms showing and you can give some multiple options based on the type of site or the type of page you’re launching for them. I’m now going to pass it over to Amanda who’s going to talk about some of the really cool things that we can do on forms with JavaScript. Thanks Joel. Those were some awesome tips. Next up we have tips around JavaScript and leveraging JavaScript within the landing pages that host your forms. So in this first video our use case is filling out a form or pre-filling it for the person based on what’s in that URL. So you can see here where that yellow circle is. We have code in that URL. As soon as the page refreshes you can see down there it’s a pretty quick video. That URL is going to contain some codes that usually come off of the backslash in the URL after UTMs as well. You can add this in here and it’s going to then pre-fill or pre-select some dropdown choices in a form based on what is actually in that URL. So here you can see the contact topic within that URL equals OS. That is then translating into pre-checking or pre-selecting organizational strategy as that field value. Same thing with CA and Canada you can see on the form. These are really useful of course when it comes to countries. It’s really useful when it comes to areas of interest. Let’s say you have an ad on LinkedIn or something and it’s for a very specific industry or area of interest. You can put this code, this JavaScript on the landing page that holds the form you’re promoting and make sure that that form is now even easier for the prospect to actually fill out. Here we have the unsubscribe use case. I think people have seen this a lot but there is script out there that you can put on a landing page where you select the don’t email me anything and it automatically unchecks all the boxes above that that you can see here in this video. So again I selected all of them again. You check that last box that you have so in most cases it’s going to be unsubscribe from all and you just select it. It’s going to deselect everything above. This is going to eliminate basically any conflicting interest that can come over from your preference center forms. So if you didn’t have this button and they’re selecting other things and they go to unsubscribe from all, it’s sending over information that they actually subscribe to things at the same time that they unsubscribed. It’s conflicting information and this eliminates that issue. And the third piece of JavaScript that I have here is confirming email address. So this script when it’s on your actual landing pages it’s going to allow you to have one field try and match the previous field that’s right above it. So in this case it is email address and then confirm email address. It’s going to make sure what you have in the confirm email address actually does match the field value for email address. And then that way you’re actually just another safety measure for you to actually get the information that you actually need into Mercado. All right I’ll pass it back to you Jules to give us sweet dreams around using velocity scripts post form fill. Awesome. So thank you very much Amanda. This is where I get started really nerdy about things that we can do with forms because this is kind of that final level of customization that you can do with your forms that moves you away from the standard marketer forms that most of us see today. So the first example I’m going to give you is about real time content delivery. So this was kind of more akin to when we had trade shows and people were printing out collateral handing out pieces of paper and brochures and infographics etc. This was a really good example of how you can have someone select the pieces of content that you actually want to receive and have them emailed directly into their inbox so they have to take home piles of piles of paperwork and brochures that we know are just going to end up in the trash. It can still be used today especially if you have virtual booths for example if you’re sponsoring an event and if you’re part of an event and you have a virtual booth you can do exactly the same thing because you can just put this form on one of your landing pages. This example as you can see right here has three different types of content that were available for a user to be able to select so they can actually go into this form they could pick maybe piece of content one and three. They would then underneath the form underneath this section there was a form that asked for your first name email the standard things we ask for and then we’ll send them out a really cool email that just says thanks for attending the event we noticed you selected these pieces of content. So what it does it starts to increase engagement in our users because they’re only receiving what they’re actually asking for versus at the end of the event us sending out a generic email that says thanks for attending here are fifty five pieces of content that we think might be useful. So it’s actually fairly straightforward thing that we can start implement. There’s a couple of things you have to be aware of first. You need to make sure that you’re setting up some custom Boolean check boxes in your admin section your field management. I named them for this example just trade show content. Very very simple. And then you can come into your email to your follow up campaign where your forms are setting and just say to them in the velocity script you can actually pull in a velocity script token that then says if trade show content one so the first piece of content is true so they basically just hit that little check box they’ve they’ve clicked on the button that says yes it’s true. Then we’re going to send out in the email this piece of coding. This is just some kind of simple you’ll see just table code that just has some design elements in there just some formatting so it’s just a straight text. And I then start to do five or six different pieces of content on the same form. You can put all of these pieces of content all these pieces of tokens into one token if you’d like to. The reason I keep it separate is because when it starts to get really long and you have five or six or seven pieces of content on a form it can get a little bit unruly and difficult to read. I like to just do it individually because one I can track it easier and two I can make sure I put the right content in the right places. And then all you do in your email is as you would normally do with a token is you just put your tokens in there. I always keep them all together so that if someone receives someone selects on the form content piece of one and three they actually won’t see the tokens that say Trayshow content two and four they will be completely hidden. They’ll only see the information and the actual formatted links that we’re sending out to them. The other way in which I’ve been using VelocityScript to do these kind of customized emails is doing event session selection. So you can see in this video as it’s playing someone is going through and they’re picking events and sessions they would like to attend. So what we don’t want to do is if we have a session or an event that has maybe 16 or 17 different sessions we do not want to send them out one email for every single session that’s there. The other thing we don’t want to do is send out 17 confirmation emails if they can’t pick the custom sessions that they would like to attend for an event. So by using this kind of the same scripting we can then send out a custom email that says OK we have 17 sessions or 25 sessions. I think the biggest event I did was 36 sessions. But people are only selecting one or two or three sessions the ones that fit their schedule. So when we send them out one confirmation email they’re only getting the links to the events that they would like to attend. Again another couple of caveats in Marketo you must make sure that you have the Gen Boolean checkboxes. The way that this was set up this was actually all set up by different webinar programs. So I had this version with 16 different webinar programs with one big request campaign in the parent program. So when they came in and picked those sessions they picked the sessions the checkboxes got checked. In the back end the script would be basically firing as soon as they saw that the session one was true or session two or session three was true. It then pushed them all into the webinar programs they got registered for events. I then put a wait step of a few minutes to just make sure that event registration for the webinar platform came back. And as you can see on this script I then had the webinar actual event URL built into the script as well so that when they receive the email this first image is actually what the email looks like when you’re building it. As you can see this had 16 different sessions. It’s not the best looking email in the world because it has all of these tokens. However when I went through and just selected a couple of sessions I wanted to attend I’m only being served up those five or six sessions that I think are useful. As I said it’s a really cool way of actually avoiding having to send confirmation emails for every single event that someone may attend. It’s a really nice way to make sure that people are only registering for sessions that they want to attend as well. And yet it’s one of those types of scripting I think are really really useful especially if you’re doing more and more larger digital events that happen especially at least for the next year. So thanks everyone for joining us. Now we’re going to hop into our Q&A session so if you do have any questions please just let us know and we will answer them for you. Thank you Amanda and Jules for your expertise on Marketo Forms and who doesn’t love Beyonce? All right well I love the questions that are coming into the chat box and yo Amanda and Jules I’m gonna let you finish but this tips and tricks video was the best tips and tricks video of all time. Of all time. Okay that was my Kanye West impression of the day. So now I’m gonna let Amanda and Jules take it away with Q&A. Awesome thank you Badshah. We hope you enjoyed our session so far and we have lots of questions coming in so I’m gonna jump in straight away and start with one of the questions that we have and then between me and Amanda we’ll try and work our way through everything we have. So one of the first ones that came in was does Marketo integrate with Microsoft Dynamics? I know it’s not really a form question but just a real quick one to answer. Yes it does. It’s a native integration. There’s some great set of guides on how to do that. So I’m gonna pass straight across to Amanda now with one of the first form questions which is how do you translate how do you do translations for Marketo forms dynamically depending on the customer’s EU country? Yes really great question. Actually no surprise really. Sanford who you just heard from has a blog on this. So there is some code and I’m sure we can send it out to you but you just put some JavaScript on the actual landing page with the form and it should pick up following in through I think the IP address that will try to dynamically change the language based on where that person is located. Next one I’ll pass to you Jules. I believe it’s around progressive profiling with the webinar that we had that question come through. Yep so the full question and just in case you didn’t see it was when implementing progressive profiling forms we wrongly assumed that Marketo would pass the data it knew across to the webinar provider resulting in some errors. Progressive profiling will always know the data that’s in those fields so it should pass the correct data across. The beauty of progressive profiling is obviously only going to show the fields that it doesn’t have data for so that if there is data for those fields Marketo already knows there is data for those fields and then that should be passed across to the webinar provider to make sure the registration is happening correctly. If you’re not sure if that’s working correctly the other way to do it is the fields that are required for the webinar just don’t put them in the progressive profiling form so put them at the top make them required fields and then the progressive profiling section maybe add a couple of other additional questions you may want to answer but as I said Marketo does have the data in the fields already it won’t show the fields if it already knows there’s a value there so if it wasn’t passed across to the webinar provider I would double check to see what values were being passed because it may be an issue with the integration that you have set up right now. I’ll take the next one that I saw come through. Progressive profiling getting that box in those fields to appear before your actual privacy policy checkbox. So again there is some code for this there is a CSS that you can apply directly to the form itself that will manipulate that progressive profiling box and put it before that privacy policy and again I’m sure we can send out a link to that code that is I believe through the marketing nation community. And there are tons of different ways in which you can order forms or order fields on forms using the code from Sandy the code that’s on nations so there are tons of ways in which you can start to personalize the forms the example I showed was on a third party site but there is JavaScript that helps you move those fields around. Another question that came through was how can you use the visibility rules when embedding a Marketo form on an external landing page. It’s exactly the same way as you would set up a standard Marketo form. The landing page the external landing page takes the form code obviously the embed code that you’re using so as long as you have the progressive profiling I’m sorry the visibility rules set up on the form it will pass through onto your external website. There are plenty of examples of how this looks and how this works out there so if there are any other issues again I would look at the code that you’re seeing coming through from sorry the embed code that you’re using on the third party and also double check if there’s any additional CSS that may be forcing those visibility rules to not work because some CSS code could affect what fields are showing and what fields aren’t showing. So that’s the big thing embedded forms with visibility rules with progressive profiling it all works in exactly the same way as long as it’s set up on the form. One more I saw here is there a way to actually block certain email domains from filling out forms and yes there is. So in that JavaScript that I shared with email confirmation it’s basically kind of like the first portion of that. You’ll just list out basically all the domains that you want to block whether that’s like at AOL or Yahoo or something you can definitely have that and make sure that you are blocking that email from actually finding the submit button and actually clicking to go on to the next phase of the journey on the website. Cool okay Jules I think you found another one. Yep I’m just scrolling through them all. So there was one coming through saying how to hide forms for known visitors but still require some additional fields. So if you are kind of if you are requiring additional fields you can’t really hide the form so the biggest thing obviously is just making sure that when you have your progressive profiling set up I would recommend that you just have your email address as the only required form the only field showing and then everything else is progressive because obviously if there is some additional data I would make sure that if they all like if you already know first name last name company you already know obviously their email address and that will pre-populate if they’re coming from an email link through onto a marketer landing page or if you have the code set up on your embedded website to make sure that you have that pre-fill enabled. The only other way you’re going to do that is by having those additional fields that you need to gather information from. The problem with the kind of a known user option that you have on Marketo forms is it will literally just show you a button and obviously underneath it will then just say if not Julie please just show and basically show the full form. So it’s a bit of a difficult question because you can’t have a known user set up with showing additional fields so the one thing I would say is just have that one email address field because that’s always a required field and then make sure everything else is a progressive field and then maybe pick just one or two questions or one or two additional fields in there. I think that kind of brings up something that’s kind of I don’t know I’ve been asked a lot with like forms and the tracking really going from the links and the actual email and how can you actually do this with people just visiting their website and I think there are a lot of conversion rate optimization tools out there that can sit on top of your website and actually handle some of this progressive profiling that they kind of project this before or not solely relying on just the email link itself. You go to the website if it’s your second time visiting it’s kind of sitting on your website and looking at what you’ve actually filled out before maybe offering a different Marketo form in the place of what you normally have there as well as additional like progressive profiling fields so definitely recommend checking out CRO tools conversion rate optimization tools. Awesome and we just have another one popping about the form pre-fill functionality which I know I just mentioned and the question was is there any plan to bring back the form pre-fill functionality and also just implement Sande’s JavaScript as far as I’m aware Marketo obviously in April 2019 they said that obviously due to compliance reasons and to make sure that obviously no data was getting in the wrong places that they have removed form pre-fill so I don’t believe there is any reason that they’re going to bring it back using the if you’re using an embedded form on an external page and using the JavaScript that Sande has put out there I would definitely recommend that because it’s definitely it’s very very helpful. The one thing that is interesting about progressive profiling is form pre-fill technically works with progressive profiling because it will only show if they don’t have if Marketo doesn’t have the data in that field so even though form pre-fill won’t show the data if you already have requesting company name and a lead already has company name in that field in Marketo it won’t show the company name field so form pre-fill works with progressive profiling because it will stop showing those fields that are that do already have data value populated in them as well. So I think we have just a minute left Amanda do you want to take one of the last questions? Sure, yeah what hidden fields do you recommend on all forms this is a very popular question that we get definitely all UTMs that you could possibly gather you definitely want to know your source your medium any campaign that you’re running or related to that link I definitely recommend those and Jules I’m sure within the last like minute we have you have a few to recommend as well. Yeah I mean a really good one is if using unsubscribe form I always just have the unsubscribe field and automatically set to yes because if they’re filling in the unsubscribe form as soon as they fill in that form it’s going to automatically unsubscribe as late they don’t have to run through any smart campaigns obviously we still have them running through smart campaigns to set unsubscribe reasons but the value is set with the minute they fill in that form so that’s always a pretty cool one to have in there I love when if you’re working with Salesforce using UTM campaigns use the campaign ID that’s my last tip. Yeah that’s a good one definitely all right I think that wraps up our question thanks so much we will pass it back to Bajaw.