Lead Consultant - EMEA & APAC
4/4/2023
Marketo forms are a great way to capture data from your marketing campaigns – whether sending people to your website or Marketo landing pages.
Let’s take a look at some of the Marketo form best practices we have learnt over the years to help you utilise them as efficiently as possible.
Focus on global forms
Global forms are an incredibly useful feature that save valuable time in Marketo. Instead of creating a new local form from scratch for every program, you can utilise the same form time and again.
You may think that this could get confusing, if the same form is used in many different places. But that’s where creating a smart list constraint for “referrer contains” comes in, so you can distinguish which specific webpage is using that form. That way, you know your form fills won’t end up as members of all programs by filling out one form!
Collect more data with progressive profiling
Progressive profiling takes advantage of global forms to collect more information about leads over time. There’s no point in asking for the same info over and over again – it’s tedious for your audience and not useful for populating your database.
Progressive profiling lets you add different fields to a form to ask additional questions to your leads, if / when they revisit or interact again with your website.
In this way, progressive profiling lets you collect more information to help you build a better profile of your lead and tailor your marketing messages accordingly. At the same time your leads have less fields to fill in, so are more likely to convert!
Use “thank you” pages after a form fill
Taking leads to a thank you page after they complete a form serves a number of purposes.
Firstly, it simply confirms to the user that the form is working correctly and signposts them with next steps e.g ‘download here’ or ‘we’ll be in touch shortly’ etc.
Secondly, a landing page is a good way to set up goals and track conversions in Google Analytics.
Finally, thank you pages offer an opportunity to direct visitors to other webpages or resources on your site that may be relevant and useful for the visitor’s interests or needs.
You can take this to the next level by linking your thank you pages to the type of content your lead might be interested in, based on the data they’ve entered. That can be content that’s similar to the event or download they’ve signed up for, or even focused on the type of job role your content is geared towards.
Taking time to add additional personalisation on thank you pages following engagement increases the chance of visitors engaging further with you and your content. That’s an easy win for minimal effort.
Make it easy and skip the form!
Like progressive profiling, the idea of having prefill options on your Marketo forms is to avoid leads having to populate fields over and over with the same information when they want to engage with your content.
Unlike progressive profiling, prefill on non-Marketo pages (usually your website) allows known visitors to complete a form e.g send an enquiry or engage with content without filling in a form at all. Instead they can simply see a CTA button which is created via custom HTML from your form settings in edit mode.
Use hidden UTMs to improve lead attribution
UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules) are often added to URLs to track the source of a lead. By making use of custom fields in Marketo and adding hidden fields to your forms, you can capture UTM parameters to feed attribution data into Marketo (and even your CRM) to track the success of each marketing channel.
Personalise with visibility rules
Marketo form visibility rules are a great way to personalise the form completion experience, based on the information the lead has already entered on the form.
For example, if your lead has selected the United States as their country, you could then add a field for State.
Or you could use visibility rules to show location-specific data protection/consent opt-ins that are relevant to their country.
Marketo forms can be a win-win for you and your web visitors!
Marketo forms are incredibly versatile tools that can help you streamline data collection and gain valuable insights into your target audiences.
By leveraging some of the more advanced features, such as progressive profiling, UTM fields, personalised thank you pages, prefill functionality and visibility rules, you can optimise the amount of data you collect on your leads, whilst making it simple for them to engage and also creating personalised experiences.
Whether you’re just getting started with Marketo or you’re a seasoned pro, these features will definitely help take your marketing efforts to the next level!
Get in touch to find out how we can help you with Marketo forms.