Deconstructing How to Choose a Marketing Form for Your Business

The customer is the heart of a business and their data is the most valuable asset in an organization. In every sense, data is the new oil. It is with this information that sales, marketing, product, and service teams drive insights to build and deliver the right experiences at the right time. Forms are one aspect of collecting this information. These are essentially important touch points to build user profiles for leads,  which can be potential business later on. It is with the forms that a team learns everything they need to know about thousands of leads and customers to turn this valuable information into insights that lead to tangible outcomes. Marketing forms can store everything from ‘contact us’ information to ‘download resources’ and ‘newsletter subscriptions’.

For something as important as this, it is essential to use the right platform to capture this information and maintain and update customer information accurately, which in the future enables delivering personalized interactions at scale. Selecting the most appropriate solution defines the success of your business. But which form do you actually need? How does it store the information? and what's the secure way to use it? In this blog, we answer all these questions and more.

Decoding the Approaches - Embed vs Form Handler

One of the common approaches is to simply integrate a third-party marketing form with the websites. Generally, these forms are customizable to some extent and are a quicker solution with minimal technical assistance. 

Other than this, there are two essential approaches for integrating forms: 

1. Embedding marketing forms via iframe: Here the form is built within the marketing automation tools like Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, etc, and the iframe code is embedded into the website.
2. Form submission via form handlers/Form POST: Here the form is built into the marketing tool as well as into the website. The form field is mapped in the website and set the website form to POST data to the marketing form handler.

Out of the above options, there is no right or wrong approach. It mostly depends on the use case based on the following parameters:-

• Data Ownership: With different regional data protection laws and compliance it becomes critical to strategize data ownership for user-submitted data.
• With the embedded approach, data ownership and security are offloaded to marketing automation tools but at the same point it becomes critical to ensure marketing tools adhere to data security laws.
• On the other hand with the form handler approach, the onus of security and data ownership is on the website development team as well as the need to comply with data laws.
• Bot Protection: Despite being critical, forms are one of the vulnerable touch points to receive spam. Hence, they should include spam protection techniques like a captcha, a form submission limit, etc.
• With the embedded approach, businesses can rely on a marketing automation tool to enable this. In fact, some of the large marketing tools use specialized algorithms to stop spamming.
• With form handler the same can be achieved as well, however, it will require development efforts to integrate with spam control services like Recaptcha.
• Duplicate/Invalid Records: While user submissions are important, businesses would require vetting these to avoid flooding spam leads.
• Some of the marketing automation tools do provide automated vetting of user data. These can filter spam requests, which enables the business team to focus on potential leads with higher chances of converting.
• With a form handler, it might not be feasible to implement a native solution as above. It will require exploring third-party services, which can have a process in place to vet the data and development effort to integrate it with the website.
• The team’s technical prowess: Often websites would require to add new forms or update existing forms by adding or removing fields.
• With the embed approach, the marketing team can easily add new forms to the marketing automation tool and drop the embed code into the website. Similarly, existing forms can be updated on the marketing tool and changes will automatically start reflecting on the website. This reduces dependency on the development team.
• With the form handler approach, however, it depends on form building capability of the website. Most CMSs provide the form-building capability but the process of building and managing forms at two different places, mapping fields, and attaching form handlers is very cumbersome. It is not an editorial-friendly workflow and hence requires high developer assistance.
• Form Design: Forms, like any other site-building component, requires to adhere to brand design guidelines.
• Embed forms allow managing styling on marketing tools but with limited control over styling. Hence with this approach expect to have certain design compromises.
• With form handlers, editors have complete control since forms are natively built in websites. It provides full control over the styling, look and feel of forms.
• Performance: It is critical for any website.
• Embed form is actually a resource request to a third party. Thus, it will be slightly slow and also depend on the marketing tool’s performance. With lazy loading of iframe, overall page load performance can also be improved. However, users may experience a small delay in loading the form.
• Form handlers involve native forms, thus fewer network calls and better performance. The load lag might be insignificant to the end users. 
• Progressive Profiling: In cases when a prospect returns to your form, it is important that only newer form fields, which the prospect has not previously completed, are shown. This is where progressive profiling can be really helpful. It helps in collecting more data from prospects as they continue to engage with you via form submissions. This ensures a higher form conversion rate because you are not bombarding the prospect with a long, repetitive form to complete. 
• Most marketing automation tools provide such functionality with their embedded forms 
• Achieving this with a form handler is certainly possible but would require additional development efforts.
• Legacy Forms: The website may have legacy forms that might require support to work. 
• In such cases embed approach will not work.
• With an additional development effort, the new form handler can be added to legacy forms without disturbing the existing workflow.
• Multiple Integrations: Your form submission might require data flow to various downstream systems along with the marketing tool.
• In that case, the embed approach would not work 
• However, with a form handler, multiple integrations can be added for support.
• Data Loss: This could be because of various reasons including data loss because the third-party system is unavailable, or in some cases, end users are unable to submit the data in the first place.
• With the embed approach, it is possible that the forms might not load on certain browsers. Especially those, which have js blocked, or are using AD blockers, or iframe blockers from a third party. This can be mitigated to avoid blocking forms by various AD blockers or iframe blocker plugins by having a subdomain for the marketing automation tool. Most marketing tools will support this. By doing this iframe source would be under the same root. Hence, it will not be treated as a third-party content like AD. However, for browsers with js disabled the forms will not work but it’s less likely to have end users with js blocked.
• With the form handler approach since forms are all native it automatically reduces the chance of data loss. However, in case if the marketing tool is down this can lead to data loss.

• In such cases, monitoring is an important aspect to detect potential data loss. The analytics tool can help monitor how many users visit the page vs how many are actually submitting the forms or issues reported by users.

• Time to market: How soon the feature needs to be rolled out to market
• The embed approach would enable a much faster rollout as it does not require any complex development activity.
• Form handlers on the other hand will require more development effort and will take a longer time to market.

The above functions could be one of the parameters required to decide what marketing automation tool to go with since not all tools will support all these functions. Your decision can also be based on any of these as well: out-of-the-box function, design, time to integrate, possible chance of data loss, editorial, or developer control. In fact, you need not chose only one way of integrating and can go with a hybrid approach as well.

As a digital experience company, we understand the significance of these decisions and have helped several companies navigate more complex issues for faster and long-term results. To understand what we can do for you, let’s get talking!