What are marketing forms?

Marketing forms gather information from people interacting with your organization. For example, someone might complete a Contact Us form on your website or sign up for a webinar or newsletter through your outbound marketing. The information collected through the form is mapped to fields on lead and contact records in Dynamics 365 Marketing. Depending on the field, information can be collected through formats such as text fields, dropdown lists, and other input types. Organizations can build a collection of marketing forms and reuse them wherever they're needed. For this example, we'll create a marketing form that lets people sign up for a product newsletter.

Create a new marketing form

In the Outbound Marketing area of Dynamics 365 Marketing, navigate to Internet Marketing > Marketing forms and select New. You can select an existing template or start from scratch. When starting from scratch, you'll first need to choose the form type before the form designer finishes loading.

Understand the different form types

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides three form types:

• Landing page forms: General-purpose forms for collecting audience information and letting people opt into subscription lists. When someone submits the form, the matching strategy determines whether an existing CRM record should be updated or a new record created.
• Subscription center forms: Allow existing contacts to update their contact information and subscription preferences, including removing themselves from mailing lists.
• Forward to a friend forms: Allow a marketing message to be forwarded to someone other than the original recipient while ensuring that information submitted by the new recipient is associated with that person instead of the original recipient.

For our product newsletter, we'll use a landing page form and name it "New Product Newsletter." You'll also need to determine whether the form can update contacts, leads, or both. The right option depends on your organization's business requirements.

Get familiar with the form designer

The marketing form designer is similar to other Dynamics 365 Marketing designers used for marketing emails, customer journeys, and pages. You can:

• Edit the form's HTML.
• Preview the form at different screen sizes.
• Undo and redo changes.
• Add design elements.
• Run an accessibility check.
• Drag and drop fields, columns, subscription lists, text, images, and other elements from the Toolbox.
• Add Submit and Reset buttons.
• Add a CAPTCHA to help reduce spam and bot submissions.
• Add options such as Remember me and Do not email.

Selecting an element on the canvas opens its properties, where you can configure settings such as its label, default value, whether it is required, and other field-specific options.

Configure matching and submission settings

The Summary tab includes several important settings. A matching strategy determines how form submissions are compared with existing leads and contacts. Dynamics 365 can use that information to update an existing record or create a new one. An important rule to remember is that any field used by your selected matching strategy must also be included on the form and set as required. Other options include:

• Prefill: Displays previously entered information, such as a returning contact's name and email address.
• Double opt-in: Sends the submitter an email asking them to confirm their subscription.
• Submission behavior: Lets you configure success and error notifications or redirect the submitter to another URL after completing the form.

Once the form is live and receiving submissions, the Insights tab provides information about those submissions and allows you to export form data.

Add fields to your form

Our newsletter signup form already contains an email field. We'll make that field required because the email address is an essential part of the signup process. You can also add a placeholder, such as example@gmail.com. It's important to understand the difference between placeholders and default values. A placeholder displays an example or prompt inside the field. The submitter can replace it, and if they don't enter anything, the field remains empty. A default value is actual pre-filled data. If the submitter doesn't change it, that value is submitted with the form. For an email address, a placeholder makes more sense than a default value because you don't want an example email address submitted as the contact's actual address. You can further customize fields by adjusting options such as:

• Label position
• Character width
• Maximum character count
• Padding
• Margins
• Required status
• Prefill
• Visibility

Use hidden fields when appropriate

The Hide setting lets you include a field in a form submission without displaying it to the person completing the form. This might sound unusual, but it can be useful when you want to capture information about where a lead originated without asking the person to provide that information themselves. We'll use this functionality later when recording a contact's initial product interest.

Collect names and subscription preferences

Names are commonly included alongside email addresses on signup forms. For our newsletter form, we'll add first and last name fields and make them required. Collecting the person's name can also support future personalization, such as using dynamic content to address newsletter recipients by their first name. We'll also add the New Product Newsletter subscription list to the form and change its label to something more descriptive, such as "Sign me up for the new product newsletter!" Because signing up for the newsletter is the purpose of the form, we can set its default value to Subscribed.

Create and map a custom form field

One of the strengths of Dynamics 365 is its customizability. You can create marketing form fields and map them to fields on lead and contact records. For our example, we'll capture the product that originally interested the person signing up for the newsletter. Navigate to Marketing templates > Form fields and create a new field. Configure the field by:

• Giving it a descriptive title, such as "Initial Interest."
• Selecting the appropriate field type, such as Single line of text.
• Selecting the correct format.
• Mapping it to the corresponding lead and contact record fields.
• Giving it a customer-facing label, such as "Product of Interest."
• Adding a placeholder if appropriate.

Once the form field has been created, return to the marketing form and add it to the design.

Combine hidden fields with default values

For our Initial Interest field, we want Dynamics 365 to record the product that generated the signup, but there's no reason to ask the visitor to enter or change that information. This makes it a good candidate for a hidden field with a default value. Set the default value to the appropriate product and hide the field. The person filling out the form won't see or modify it, but the value will still be submitted and saved to the mapped record field. This gives your organization additional information about the contact's original interest without adding unnecessary questions to the form.

Customize the form design

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides additional design options to help the form fit the experience you're creating. You can adjust elements such as:

• Text color, font, and size
• Section background colors
• Overall form background color
• Field colors
• Padding and margins

Once the design is complete, preview the form and run the accessibility checker before going live.

Check for common errors before going live

Dynamics 365 automatically performs an error check when you attempt to make the form live. Common errors include:

• The form isn't mapped to the appropriate record type, whether that's leads, contacts, or both.
• Fields included in the selected matching strategy aren't included on the form or aren't configured as required.
• The Remember me option is enabled without also enabling Prefill in the Summary tab.

Resolve any errors before making the form live.

Embed the form on an external website

Once your form is live, you can embed it on an external website. Open the Form Hosting area and:

1. Select New form page.
2. Give the page a clear, identifiable name, such as "Website X Product Page."
3. Save the page.
4. Open the new form page.
5. Copy the provided HTML div.
6. Paste it into the HTML of the external page where you'd like the form to appear.

This allows you to use your Dynamics 365 Marketing form on an external website while still collecting information through Dynamics 365.

Add the form to a marketing page

You can also place your form directly on a Dynamics 365 Marketing page. Navigate to Internet Marketing > Marketing pages and open the page where you'd like the form to appear. Add the form to the appropriate location on the page, make any necessary design adjustments, and then make the page live.

Connect your form to a marketing email

Another option is to drive recipients to the form through a marketing email. Open the appropriate marketing email and add a button with a call to action such as "Sign up for more news." Link the button to the marketing page containing your form. When using the email within a customer journey, make sure the correct marketing page is associated with the email in the Email elements section. This helps Dynamics 365 properly track the links and buttons used in the campaign.

Start collecting marketing data

Once your marketing form is live and people begin submitting it, Dynamics 365 Marketing can use those submissions to update lead and contact records, add contacts to subscription lists, and provide submission information through Insights. Marketing forms provide a flexible way to collect information from your audience while connecting that information directly to your sales and marketing data. By combining record mapping, matching strategies, custom fields, default values, and flexible distribution options, you can build forms that support a wide variety of customer interactions.