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A
Anonymous
November 6, 2017
Question

Create an intake form allow for free text submissions from current customers

  • November 6, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 2686 views

Hi everyone,

This might be a dumb question, but I'd like to create an intake form for existing suppliers/vendors in our database. The form would ask a series of questions, allowing for a paragraph long free-text responses per question.

What would be the best way to go about implementing this? From what I understand, the form fields are mapped to a Marketo field? In my use-case, I don't need the answers to be mapped to any Marketo field. I just want a repository of the free responses, and the ability to reach back out to them to discuss their responses. Is Marketo not the best platform to institute something like this?

Any guidance (E.g. self help videos, guides, etc) would be greatly appreciated. I guess I'm still unclear how Marketo forms work, or where the form submissions are stored. Thanks in advance!

Jay

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2 replies

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
November 7, 2017

It is not strictly necessary to have a Marketo field backing every field on a form. However, the only way to read form responses that don't directly populate lead fields is to use the API.

Thus, while you can create a "repository" of form fillout activities outside of lead data, I doubt you will find this satisfactory, unless you're a developer and are going to replicate activities to a separate db.

A
Anonymous
February 6, 2018

Thanks Sanford. I wasn't too clear on your response. Can you elaborate?

You said it's not necessary to have a Marketo field backing every form field. If this is the case, where does the response get stored? And how would I read this response? You mentioned that I'd have to read the response using the API. What do you mean by that?

Any additional guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Jay

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
February 7, 2018
You said it's not necessary to have a Marketo field backing every form field. If this is the case, where does the response get stored? And how would I read this response? You mentioned that I'd have to read the response using the API.

Marketo -- like any server that keeps a log of raw GETs and POSTs, really -- stores form data in 2 different places.

The obvious place is in lead fields: as long as field updates aren't blocked, field values are overwritten with form values.

The other place is in the raw activity log, where the entire form POST payload is stored, even if it contains fields that were blocked from updating or don't even exist in Marketo.

So, if you can use the REST Activities API to download your instance's Activity Log, you can read data that doesn't directly have anything to do with Marketo lead fields.

Casey_Henry
Casey_Henry
Level 2
November 7, 2017

Marketo form submissions write onto the leads activities table. You can then set up a triggered campaign based off the form fill. Are you synced to Salesforce? If you are, we often handle surveys and special registration types by collecting the responses in fields only set up in Marketo and using tokens to insert into activity records that are pushed to SF.  We do not use the global form fill logging that Marketo provides (in Admin). The responses will then be available to your sales team and saved for posterity.

Example: You need 5 text area fields on a form + your standard fields (first, last, email and company).

1. Create 5 fields using an easily recognizable (and expandable) naming convention. We use Formtemp_Textarea1, Formtemp_Textarea2 and the like. The goal is to make these reusable - you won't be saving the values in these fields.

2. Create your form, drop in all 9 fields including your Formtemp fields. Customize your labels in the form.

3. Set up a smart campaign triggered on that specific form fill with the flow step: Create SF task, then delete the values from those temp fields (optional). Customize the task to be Subject: Your Form Name and comments a concatenation of the Temp fields. Question 1: {{lead.Formtemp_Textarea1}} Question 2: {{lead.Formtemp_Textarea2}}...and so on.

4. To CYA, you could set the value deletion separate after sending yourself an alert to check it later. If you don't delete the values you run the risk of mixing answers from different forms or worse - having them visit a pre-populated form with their previous answers filled in.

Hope this helps.

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