Salesforce stands out as one of the leading CRM system on the market, empowering businesses to effortlessly automate all types of lead nurturing and customer management processes.
There are many ways to engage with leads online: Forms, Third-Party Forms and Landing pages. In this guide, we´ll walk you through key simple steps to optimise your Salesforce setup, using forms to create more effective lead generation strategies that attract, engage and convert prospects, helping you supercharge your campaigns and drive conversions in no time.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Forms
1. MCAE Form Builder
Effective lead generation and nurturing are essential to a successful marketing automation strategy. MCAE forms are powerful tools to help you achieve your lead pipeline objectives.
Form design is an essential component of lead generation. To create a form that your visitors will actually want to fill out, it will need to have the following attributes:
- The form should be on an aesthetically pleasing landing page
- The form must be intuitive and easy to fill out with relevant information
You can easily implement this with the native MCAE Form Builder. Forms are created with a user-friendly interface and you can do so by following the below steps.
- Simply open the MCAE Forms page (In the lightning app select Content and then Forms)
- Name your forms and choose the campaign you want them to be associated with.
- Add, delete, edit or rearrange your fields
- To achieve the desired look and feel of your form, you can create layout templates and select the one that best suits your needs. To customize the appearance of your form’s elements, you can either apply CSS to the layout template or utilize the advanced tab to adjust your form’s functionality. Remember, simplicity is key, so collaborating with a web development team to create reusable layout templates is highly recommended.
- Add your completion actions and save your form.
Within MCAE native forms you’ll also have access to features such as progressive profiling, email validation, bot protection, and personalisation.
Form content plays a crucial role in lead generation. Your forms must gather the right information to personalise the prospect experience. To achieve this, ensure your forms meet the following criteria:
- Keep your forms short
- Show only relevant questions
- Make it easy for returning visitors to update their information
- Allow subscribers to opt back in
- Add a ‘thank you’ or confirmation email for the autoresponder
- Take action with automations
- Reduce spam submission.
Watch a short video on how MCAE forms can be used to support your lead pipeline goals here.
2. Stop spam with the Honeypot Technique on your MCAE forms
A simple, but highly effective way to avoid bots filling up your forms and getting non-genuine leads is through utilising the Honeypot Technique. This is an MCAE built-in feature that creates a hidden field on your forms designed to catch spam bots as it is visible to bots but not humans. When a bot fills out a form, the bot sees the hidden field and fills it out. Honeypot automatically blocks form submissions when this field has been modified. Genuine leads will get through with no problems.
Using a honeypot field on your MCAE Forms is extremely easy as all forms hosted by MCAE have built-in bot protection through the use honeypot. MCAE will reject all forms submissions when the honeypot field has a value.
It’s important to remember that while the honeypot technique can help, it doesn’t eliminate the need for reCAPTCHA entirely. Some advanced bots can identify the honeypot field, so it’s advisable to use both methods for better protection.
3. Capture URL parameters to see the path to conversion that leads take
UTM parameters are essential for tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, helping you understand how clicks from your messages lead to actions on your website. By attaching UTM parameters to your URLs, you can identify the source, medium, campaign, and content linked to each click, which aids in evaluating which campaigns drive traffic and conversions.
In the context of MCAE, certain UTM parameters can be automatically sent to Google Analytics. This integration simplifies data analysis and allows for better assessment of campaign performance based on user behavior.
However, relying solely on Google Analytics’ default UTM parameters can be limiting, as they often focus on the “first digital touch” attribution model. This means they only capture the initial user interaction, potentially missing out on the full customer journey, especially when users engage with multiple touchpoints.
Furthermore, it’s important to note that while Google Analytics automatically populates UTM fields during the first touch, supplementing this data with custom fields which can capture additional data such as subsequent interactions and demographic details allows for a more complete understanding of user behavior and engagement over time. This combined approach ensures you track not only initial interactions but also ongoing engagement, leading to more effective marketing strategies.
Google establishes five main parameters, however when you frequently use a marketing method that does not necessarily align with the key five parameters, you should use custom fields. Here are some examples of custom fields you can use:
- Influencer or Agencies: Suppose your business collaborates with influencers or agencies A, B, C, and D for a Black Friday campaign, and each shares a post on their Instagram Story. How can we track which influencer generates the most revenue? – You can provide each influencer with a link that includes a custom parameter like “&influencer=theirname.” For example:
- Geo Location: Lets say you have a new product launch and you want to display ads only in locations where you have stores—VIC, NSW, and QLD. To track performance by area, we use the custom UTM parameter “&geo=thelocation.” For example:
This method also helps verify the ad network’s accuracy. By comparing UTM data with user location data in tools like Google Analytics, you can see if ads are being shown in the right areas.
Building on our last hack, we’ll take this a giant leap further by capturing each form submission with UTMs hidden fields on your MCAE forms. You can use this technique to map out the journey they took prior to converting.
If you want to know what page someone is on when they convert, you can also capture the page URL as a hidden field (not a URL parameter).
Some examples of ways we can capture with URL query strings:
- You can capture URL parameters on a MCAE landing page by adding your UTM field to your MCAE form as a hidden field with some specific settings.
- You can capture URL parameters on a web page with an MCAE embedded form (iFrame) by passing the URL parameters from the parent page (your website) to the embedded (iFrame) form.
Before you can implement this, you’ll need to add these parameters to your URLs. For instance, you can add something like utm_source=email to the URLs for traffic that comes from your email campaigns. Thus, the URL for a lead who lands on your product page from one of your email campaigns could look like this:
https://yourwebsite.com/product/?utm_source=email
On the other hand, the URL from an organic visit would look like:
https://yourwebsite.com/product
After you’ve added these UTM parameters to your URLs, you can create corresponding hidden fields on your forms that automatically grabs them and tags them to your leads’ information. So you’ll know exactly which path to conversion every lead took and you can use this information to map out customer journeys in Salesforce and send leads tailored messages, which will be based on the path they’re taking. This is particularly valuable if you have the same form on different pages.
Third-Party Forms – Linked to MCAE via a Form Handler
1. Integrate third-party forms into your campaigns with MCAE form handlers
Form and form handlers serve different purposes. With MCAE forms you create and manage hosted forms within MCAE, while with MCAE Form Handlers they link your external forms to send prospect information into MCAE. We advise you to check both features to decide which type of form is best suited for your business.
You can enhance your customer’s journey by directing prospects to a form embedded on a custom landing page or website by funneling data from external forms into MCAE with a form handler.
You can use a form handler instead of an MCAE form when you want to:
- Have complete control of the look and feel of your forms
- You can have documents uploads via a form (something MCAE forms can’t do)
- You can post form submission data to more than one database
- Integrate MCAE with your existing forms
- Use a third-party form tool (e.g. Gravity Forms or WordPress Form Plugins)
Key to note that with form handlers you can still take advantage of MCAE completion actions, conditional completion actions and automations. You can also use form handler submissions as matching criteria to trigger other automations, such as controlling how prospects move through engagement studio programs and/or are added or removed from dynamic lists.
Watch a short video on how MCAE form handlers can be used to support your lead pipeline goals here.
2. Stop span with the Honeypot Technique on your form handlers
You can implement a honeypot field in your form handlers through a specific code. Key to note however that, the code depends entirely on the third party form in use. For example, if a Gravity Forms is being utilised then it already has a built-in functionality to add hidden fields, so the above code would not be needed.
3. Capture URL parameters with your form handlers
When it comes to UTM parameters and Form handlers. You can capture URL parameters by adding your UTM fields to your MCAE form handler and add them to your form as hidden fields.
These hidden UTM fields are the ones that you would have on the third-party form that is being added to the form handler. Fields need to be mapped between the external form and the form handler which can be done by specifying the field name or ID of the external form in the form handler. This is done on a field by field basis, which included both default and custom fields – Custom fields would incorporate the UTM parameters.
Although the UTM fields will be hidden in the third-party form, mapping them in the form handler settings will allow them to pull through as usual. You can then use these fields for segment reporting.
You can learn more about how to capture leads with forms and form handlers here.
We hope these hacks have given you an idea of the lead generation potential MCAE forms and form handlers have to offer and a few ideas on how to improve the results for yourself.
Need a hand?
Our team of experts are ready to help you with all your Salesforce and MCAE needs. We can help you supercharge your lead generation efforts with Digital Marketing Strategies, MCAE forms, integration of your third-party forms, plus more! Send us a message by filling out the form below.
Need a hand?
Our team of experts are ready to help you with all your Salesforce and MCAE needs. We can help you enable and set-up ABM marketing campaigns, plus more! Send us a message by filling out the form below.
