Forms and surveys don't get much love from interactive marketers. They are usually an afterthought, "Oh yea, we need a form." The degree of thought that goes into the form or the survey usually pertains to what the fields are. Which makes sense - interactive marketers shouldn't care if it's some custom PHP thing or built using a tool like SurveyMonkey. Just get the damn thing up.Forms and surveys are used for all sorts of things. People opt-in with them, provide very detailed information about themselves, and tell companies when they’re not happy. All super important. But the data that’s collected usually ends up in an Excel file on somebody’s desktop, which makes it very difficult to use for follow on, targeted communications. With our integrated form and survey building tools, it’s all done automatically.
We’ve had integrated form and survey building capabilities within Concentri™ for quite sometime. But, in the latest release, we:
- Reworked the form designer to make form editing easier while providing more layout flexibility
- Made it super simple to add opt-in elements that tie form information to Concentri’s profile environment
- Streamlined the process for posting forms on external, non-Concentri web pages
- Make it simple to use form data to drive targeted marketing communications
The following screenshots show some of our latest work:
Instead of creating many of the same fields over and over for your forms and surveys, choose from standard opt-in elements that tie the form data to a profile in Concentri.
Mouse over any field to edit.
After clicking on the edit link, Concentri pops up a little window to edit the field properties and values. In this example, I added a set of checkboxes.
This is the new form field I added.
I can grab the source code for the form and post it on a non-Concentri webpage. I can also add my form to any Concentri-hosted page in Concentri’s content system.
This is my personal favorite. I can now go into Concentri’s segmentation builder and create a condition based on how someone responded on the form. I can use form data to define display rules for onsite targeting and dynamic email, mailing lists, etc.
In an upcoming Concentri release, we’ll allow forms to interact with web services, but that’s a post for another day. If you have any questions or comments please let me know via the comments box below.
