Effectively generate leads into your CRM using Web Forms within Dynamics 365 Marketing

Collecting contact information from potential clients is the first step to knowing and growing your customer list, and, with it, your business. Lead generation forms are crucial as they help collect information from anonymous web visitors and convert them into leads. Besides collecting information on potential clients, they are also intended to update one or more database records—especially contact or lead records within your database.

With Dynamics 365 Marketing there are two basic methods for integrating an external form page with Dynamics 365 Marketing:

  1. Embed a Dynamics 365 Marketing form on an external page
  2. Use Form Capture to integrate Dynamics 365 Marketing with an external form
Another way of publishing a marketing page is to place a native marketing form on a native marketing page on a portal created with Power Apps portals.

Option 1: Embed on an External Page 

An embedded form is a marketing form designed within Dynamics 365 Marketing and placed on an external page using the JavaScript code. To embed a form: 

  1. Select a form that is Live and open the Form hosting tab. 

  1. In the Related marketing form pages column, select Add New Form page (select the ellipsis button here to find this command if you don't see it). Use the quick-create form to set up form options.  

  1. Select Save to create the new form page and go back to the form hosting tab for the form. 

  1. Select the form page name in the Related marketing form pages column to open its settings and view the embed code. 

  1. Copy the embed code and paste it onto the page of the website.

Option 2: Use form capture to integrate a form created externally 

Form Capture makes it possible for external forms to submit information directly to Dynamics 365 Marketing.  

To enable Form Capture, you will require a form-capture JavaScript from Dynamics 365 Marketing to add to the external form page. This code will load the external page into Dynamics 365 Marketing to map the appropriate fields to marketing fields.  To use form capture:  

  1. Design a page with an input form that has the required fields and features. 
  2. Go to Marketing forms - Marketing > Internet Marketing > Marketing forms and select + Capture form. This will start the form capture wizard that will take you through each step, starting with tracking script placement into your webpage. 
  3. Enter the form location: Enter the URL of the third-party page where the form capture wizard will check if there is a valid tracking script inserted. Your webpage will open in a new tab where the wizard will continuously check for tracking scripts. This enables the wizard to detect dynamically injected scripts. Leave this tab open until you're finished capturing your form. 

  1. Select the button in the new tab to proceed to the next steps in the Form Capture wizard. 

  1. Check for a tracking script: If this is your first time capturing this form and you need to generate a script for your website, select “I need a new script”. This will create a website entity, which you can access in the Marketing websites section and rename later. If you already have a script, use the dropdown list to find your script for the form’s webpage. 

  1. Place the script into the external webpage: Copy the tracking script and place it at the top of your webpage HTML code or share it with your developer to do so. After adding the script to the external webpage, refresh the tab that so that the update is visible to the form capture wizard. 

  1. Choose the form: All the available forms will now become available. Select the form to capture. 

  1. Map the fields: Before exiting the wizard, map the fields from the form to the Dynamics 365 fields to ensure so that the entries can be logged and stored under the entities in your Marketing environment. 

  1. Overview and go live: After you exit the wizard, you'll see an overview of the mapped fields. Make sure the fields are mapped correctly before going live to ensure that the form capture is successful. 

  1. Go to the Summary tab to finish setting up the marketing form just as you would a native marketing form. Be sure to provide a Name, decide whether to update contacts, leads, or both; and choose the appropriate matching strategies for finding existing records to update. 

  1. Select Save on the command bar to save the marketing form and select Go live to activate the form. 

If this article was helpful to you, consider checking out some of our other blogs about Dynamics 365 Microsoft Marketing. If you need further support and training with Microsoft Marketing – speak to one of our CRM experts today!