Choose the right audience for your marketing form

Marketing forms in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys can target contacts, leads, or both. The right audience depends on the purpose of your form and how your organization’s sales and marketing processes are structured. By default, a form may begin with the Contact audience, giving you access to fields associated with the contact record. You can also choose Lead or Lead & Contact when the form needs to collect information for those record types. One important consideration is that changing the audience type resets the fields currently on the form. It’s a good idea to determine your audience before spending too much time building the form.

Why Lead & Contact forms require field mappings

When you select Lead & Contact as the audience, the form can collect information for both record types from a single submission. However, Dynamics 365 needs to know which contact fields correspond to which lead fields. Without those mappings, only a limited number of combined fields may initially be available. For example, adding Contact First Name alone only maps that field to the contact record. You cannot simply add Lead First Name as a second First Name field. Instead, you need a mapping that connects the corresponding fields so one form field can populate both records.

Generate your Lead & Contact mappings

To configure the mappings:

• Go to the Settings area.
• Navigate to Customer Engagement.
• Open Form Settings.
• Select your default marketing form settings.
• Open the Lead and Contact Mapping tab.
• Select Generate Mappings.

Dynamics 365 uses the existing relationship between lead and contact records to generate mappings between corresponding fields. Once the mappings have been generated, return to your marketing form and refresh the page if necessary. When you select the Lead & Contact audience again, additional mapped fields should become available.

Create custom mappings with Power Apps

Automatically generated mappings may not cover every field, especially if your organization uses custom fields. From the Lead and Contact Mapping area, you can use Edit in Power Apps to create additional mappings. This lets you select a contact field and associate it with the appropriate lead field. For example, you could map an Address 1 City field on the contact record to the corresponding City field on the lead. This gives you additional flexibility when the standard mappings do not meet your organization’s needs.

Add mapped fields to your form

After generating the mappings, fields such as First Name, Last Name, and Email can be added as Lead & Contact fields. If you inspect the settings for one of these fields, you can see that the same form field maps to corresponding fields on both records. When someone submits their first name, last name, and email address, that information can therefore be used for both the lead and contact records.

Understand why some fields cannot be mapped one-to-one

Not every field has a direct equivalent between a lead and contact. Company is one example. On the lead record, Company can be a basic text field. On the contact record, the corresponding company or account information is a lookup that relates the contact to an account record. Because those fields represent different data types and relationships, they cannot simply be mapped directly to one another. In situations like this, consider whether the information actually needs to populate both records. You can still include a field that applies specifically to the lead or contact rather than forcing every field into a Lead & Contact mapping.

Use record-specific fields when they make sense

Some information belongs specifically to a lead because it describes a particular sales opportunity or inquiry rather than the person themselves. Examples include:

• Company Name
• Topic
• Description

Fields such as First Name, Last Name, and Email may make sense on both lead and contact records, while Topic and Description can remain specific to the lead. A Lead & Contact form can contain both mapped fields and record-specific fields, giving you flexibility to collect the information appropriate for your sales process.

Configure how form submissions handle leads and contacts

Field mappings are only one part of configuring your audience. In the form's audience settings, you can also determine what happens when someone submits the form. For leads, you can decide whether the submission should:

• Always create a new lead.
• Attempt to match an existing lead using your matching rules.

You can configure contact behavior separately, including whether the form should:

• Match an existing contact.
• Create a contact if no match exists.
• Update a matched contact with the newly submitted information.

Matching commonly uses the submitted email address, although matching behavior depends on how your environment is configured.

Consider creating new leads while matching existing contacts

One approach discussed in this Fast Class is to always create a new lead while attempting to match an existing contact. This can work well because a lead may represent a specific new inquiry or sales opportunity, while a contact can serve as a more persistent record of the individual. With this approach, repeated interactions can generate new leads for the sales team without unnecessarily generating duplicate contact records for the same person.

Decide whether submitted information should update contacts

If a form submission matches an existing contact, you can also decide whether the submitted information should update that record. For example, someone could submit an existing email address while providing a different spelling or capitalization of their name. Depending on your data management processes, you may or may not want that form submission automatically changing your existing CRM data. Organizations that carefully control or standardize contact data may choose not to update existing contacts automatically. Other organizations may prefer to allow form submissions to keep contact information current. The right choice depends on your organization's data management process.

Build Lead & Contact forms around your business process

Lead & Contact marketing forms can help you collect information for both record types from a single form, but setting up the mappings correctly is an important first step. Generate your standard mappings, create custom mappings where needed, and then determine which fields truly belong on both records. Fields that describe the individual may be appropriate for both lead and contact records, while information specific to an inquiry or sales process can remain lead-specific. Finally, configure your audience settings so new submissions create, match, and update records in a way that supports your sales process and data management requirements.