Understanding Real-time marketing forms

Marketing forms are interactive collections of fields used to gather information from your audience. In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, submitted information can be used to create or update lead and contact records and can support other marketing processes such as email marketing, customer journeys, behavioral analytics, and lead scoring. Because Customer Insights – Journeys is part of the broader Dynamics 365 ecosystem, the information collected through forms can also be available to other applications, such as Dynamics 365 Sales.

How Real-time forms differ from Outbound Marketing forms

If you're transitioning from Outbound Marketing, some parts of Real-time forms will feel familiar, while others work differently. Outbound Marketing includes several form types:

• Landing page forms
• Subscription center forms
• Forward to a friend forms

Landing page forms are essentially the standard marketing form in Real-time Journeys. Consent and subscription management are handled through preference centers in Real-time marketing. Unlike emails and templates that can be imported from Outbound Marketing, existing Outbound forms cannot be transferred to Real-time. Forms you plan to continue using must be recreated.

Hosting Real-time forms

Outbound Marketing forms rely on marketing pages and Power Pages for hosting. Real-time forms simplify this process by providing built-in hosting capabilities. For external use, you have two primary publishing options:

• Use a JavaScript snippet to embed the form into a website or another hosting page.
• Generate a standalone page containing the form and use its public URL.

You can use both publishing methods for the same form if needed.

Creating a new form

In Real-time Journeys, navigate to Forms under the Channels section and select + New. You'll be prompted to name your form and select its target audience. The audience determines the type of record created or updated when someone submits the form, such as a contact or lead. Be careful when selecting the target audience because it cannot be changed later in this version of the form creation process. If you select the wrong audience, you'll need to start over. After providing the required information, you can select a form template or skip the template and begin building the form yourself.

Working with the form designer

The form designer includes several areas for controlling your form. The Fields tab contains the fields you can add to your form. These fields correspond to attributes on your contact or lead records, including custom attributes you've already created. The Elements tab lets you add design and content components such as:

• Text
• Images
• Buttons
• Sections and layouts
• Purpose and consent options

The Theme tab lets you manage visual elements such as colors, fonts, and text sizes, making it easier to align the form with your organization's branding. The Form Settings tab contains submission-related settings, including success and failure messages, redirect URLs, and options for handling repeated submissions.

Managing duplicate records

It's important to consider what should happen when the same person submits a form more than once. For example, you can configure a contact form to update an existing contact based on the submitter's email address. If someone submits the form two or three times with the same email address, their existing record can be updated rather than creating duplicate contact records. This helps keep your contact and lead lists cleaner with less manual oversight. If your business process requires a new record for each submission, you can configure the form accordingly.

Adding and mapping fields

Real-time forms use a drag-and-drop designer similar to the email designer. Because many fields may be available, searching for the specific field you need is often the quickest way to build your form. When you add a field, you can see how it maps to the corresponding field on the contact or lead record. For example, a First Name form field can map directly to the First Name attribute on a contact. When the form is submitted, the information entered by the user populates that field on the corresponding record. You can also configure field properties such as:

• Placeholder text
• Whether the field is required
• Validation settings

Sections can be used to arrange fields into different layouts. For example, you could place First Name and Last Name next to each other in a two-column section, followed by Email Address, Phone Number, Organization Name, and other fields.

Adding consent to your form

You may also want to collect marketing consent as part of a form submission. Purpose and consent options can be connected to compliance profiles, helping your contacts manage what types of communications they consent to receive and through which channels. You can add the appropriate purpose to the form and make the consent field required when necessary. Consent configuration is an important part of supporting your organization's privacy and data protection requirements, including requirements that may apply under regulations such as GDPR.

Reducing unwanted submissions

Consider adding CAPTCHA to your form to help reduce spam submissions. Along with the appropriate required fields, matching rules, and consent settings, CAPTCHA can help you build a cleaner and more manageable form experience.

Using hidden fields to capture additional information

Not every piece of information you want to collect needs to be entered manually by the person completing the form. For example, you may want to know where a new lead originated. You could add a lead source field to the form, assign a predetermined value, and hide that field from users. The person submitting the form doesn't have to answer an additional question, but the resulting record can still indicate that the lead came from a landing page rather than another source such as a referral or trade show.

Customizing the form design

For most forms, it's best to complete the majority of the build with the drag-and-drop designer. If you need additional visual customization, you can then work directly with the form's HTML and CSS for final design adjustments. Building most of the form through the standard designer before modifying the code can help maintain compatibility with Dynamics 365 and reduce formatting issues that could occur when bringing in code built entirely from scratch.

Checking your form before publishing

Before publishing, use the Check content feature to review your form for common configuration problems. The system can check whether:

• Required fields for creating or updating the selected record type are present.
• A submit button has been included.
• Form fields are linked to editable attributes.
• Duplicate fields exist.
• A target audience has been configured.
• Required fields are correctly marked as required.

For more complex forms, consider using Check content throughout the build instead of waiting until the very end.

Publishing your Real-time form

Once you're satisfied with the form, select Publish. You can then choose how you want to make the form available. You can copy the provided JavaScript code and embed the form into an external website, or generate a standalone page and share its URL directly. You're not limited to one option. You can return to Publishing Options later and retrieve either the standalone URL or the JavaScript embed code.

Reviewing form analytics

After your form is live and begins receiving submissions, you can review its analytics from the form. These analytics give you a convenient way to monitor activity and understand how your published form is being used. By combining thoughtfully selected fields, record matching, consent controls, hidden values, content checks, and flexible publishing options, Real-time marketing forms can become an important part of collecting audience information and connecting it to your broader marketing activities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.