How to Set up a Web Form in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Websites today have evolved from acting as a static company information board to a two-way street in terms of communication. You can identify who has visited your website, the pages they viewed, time spent browsing and more. But where things have really changed is having the ability to give your anonymous visitor a persona using web forms.

Web forms are designed to initiate communication with a prospect and possibly convert them to a customer (or) be used as a gatekeeper for company content i.e., eBooks, access to academy’s and more…

With Dynamics 365 Marketing, your organization can build three types of forms: 

• Landing page form: This is a general-purpose form for collecting contact information on a marketing page. Landing page forms can also offer mailing-list subscriptions for opt-in, but they can't show the visitor their current subscriptions or allow them to opt out of any. 

• Subscription form: Contacts can view and edit their contact details and make changes to their subscription preferences. 

• Forward to a friend: Allows us to give contacts an easy way to forward marketing emails to friends

Step 1: Create a marketing form

To create a new marketing form, do one of the following actions:

Go to Marketing > Internet marketing > Marketing forms to go to the list of all forms currently available on your instance. Select New in the command bar. You'll first be asked to choose a template, which establishes the form type, column layout, and sample content.

The form designer is like other types of digital content designers in Dynamics 365 Marketing, but only provides design elements and settings that are appropriate for marketing forms. 

Step 2: Edit the marketing form 

The settings to edit the form are available at the top of the page. To edit them, select the More header fields button (which looks like a down-pointing chevron) at the side of the header to open a drop-down dialog with the following settings: 

• Name: Enter a name for the form. This is the name you'll see in the forms list and when adding the form to a marketing page.
  
• Form type: Choose whether the form should function as a Landing page, Subscription center, or Forward to a friend form. This setting affects the requirements of what your form must contain and where you can use it.
  
• Update contacts/leads: Choose which types of records can be created or updated in response to a form submission.
  
• Status reason: Shows the current go-live status of the form. A form must be live before you can use it in a marketing page or embed it on an external site. You can't change this setting here; use buttons on the command bar instead.

Step 3: Design the Marketing Form 

To design the form, use the drag-and-drop interface. Once your element is placed, you can change the column layout and/or design options. To edit and configure a section element:  

• Select the section element on the canvas. It will display a blue border and tabs showing the element type and buttons for deleting or moving the element. 

• The Properties panel opens to show the settings for your selected section. 

Edits Form Settings on the Summary tab 

The following settings and information are provided on the Summary tab beside form designer: 

General information: Assign a name to the form record, set the owner, and see when the form was created and last modified. 

Content 

• Contact and lead matching strategies control which incoming form-field values are matched against existing contact and lead records. If an existing record has matching values in all the specified fields, then that record will be updated with the incoming values (for the other fields); if no match is found, then a new contact and/or lead record will be created.  

• Generate leads without matching controls whether the form will attempt to match an existing lead (using the specified Lead matching strategy), or if instead it will always create a new lead for each submission. Set to No to apply the matching strategy, or to Yes to create a new lead every time. 

• Purpose and Visual style affect how the form can be found on the Purpose and Visual style tabs of the template gallery. These settings don't affect the actual layout or functionality of the form in any way. 

• Prefill fields enable prefilling for the form if set to Yes. 

Submission behavior: These settings establish how the form interacts with people who submit it.  

• Success notifications show a message right after the form submission. 

• Success image URL is a small graphic. By default, it shows a green circle with a check mark. A custom graphic can be uploaded. 

• Error notification informs the lead/contact when a temporary error has prevented the system from accepting the form submission.  
• Error image URL includes a small graphic. By default, it shows a red circle with an X mark. A custom graphic can be uploaded.  
• Limit exceeded notification: Enter a short message announcing that the system has stopped processing new submissions temporarily and inviting the user to try again later. 
• Redirect URL sends the submitter to a re-directed location immediately after they submit the form.  
• Store all form submissions allows you to keep a record of all successfully processed submissions. You can set to No to keep only pending and failed submissions in the list. Either way, all successfully processed submissions will be applied to your database, and you'll always be able to see these submissions on the Insights > Submissions tab (but will not be able to edit or resubmit).  

Step 4: Make your marketing form available for use 

When the form is ready for use, you must publish it by selecting Go Live. Your design will be checked for errors and moved to live state (if no errors) making it available for use on a marketing page or to be embedded on an external site. If a problem is found, read the error message, address the issue, and try again. 

You can edit a live form by selecting Edit in the command bar. While you are editing it, it remains functional on all live pages where it is already being used, and available for use on new pages. After editing, select Save to go live with your changes. Your design will be checked for errors and then, provided it passes, your updates will be published. 

You can prevent a live form from being available for use on new pages by selecting Stop in the command bar. 

 To learn how to generate leads using webforms within Dynamics 365 Marketing click here 

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!