Our Shiny WordPress PluginTM to retain progressive profiling within custom Marketo forms
So, look. Marketo is a fantastic marketing automation platform. A bunch of our clients use it to make their great content work as hard as possible, through things like:- Content analytics
- Lead nurturing
- Persona profiling
- Automated email campaigns
- Funnel dynamics
Progressive profiling and form pre-filling
The more you know about your prospects, the better you can understand their challenges, meet their needs, and ultimately, move them down the sales funnel. That’s what progressive profiling is all about. Rather than just using a form to capture a name and an email address (or worse, asking for all their information up front in one gluttonous mega-form), Marketo’s progressive profiling supports the intelligent, incremental capture of new lead information as your prospects engage over time. Or maybe you have the opposite problem – you’ve learnt so much about your most engaged web visitors that asking them for more information (or worse, asking them for the same information twice) would actually hurt the relationship you’ve built. Marketo can pre-fill form fields based on the information already in your database, and even surface content immediately for the people you’ve already learned enough about. Smart features like these make forms friendlier and less intrusive – visitors feel way less weird about submitting one piece of information at a time, especially if the transaction feels like part of an ongoing relationship. The thing is, while Marketo’s form features have a lot of potential, they’re hard to use effectively outside of Marketo’s tightly locked ecosystem. And that’s a problem for us. Because while Marketo’s great for some things (like email automation), we prefer WordPress for others (like managing web content). So we decided to bridge the gap between two technologies in our Martech stack with a custom integration. But first, let’s take a look at why.Marketo Forms: three not-so-great options
There are two places Marketo forms can live. Well I guess technically three. Two main places, and one kinda janky, frankensteined, worst-of-both-worlds situation. One is embedded within a page on your site. The second is on an external landing page hosted on a Marketo subdomain. The third is to embed a stripped back Marketo landing page onto your main site using an iframe to make it look like a native form. And as it stands with a vanilla Marketo implementation, all of them have pretty significant downsides. Most people’s immediate preference would be to host forms on their main site, for all the obvious reasons: everything sits under one roof, so you retain total control over the styling and responsiveness, as well a consolidated base of analytics data. But there’s a huge catch with this: you lose all the swanky form features described above. That’s because in order to pre-fill (and progressively profile through) a form, you need to pull all known lead data from the marketo database. This requires an API call, which the embed script doesn’t support. The second option – using an external Marketo landing page to host your forms – provides the required API call out of the box, but incurs a bunch of other penalties. For one, Marketo’s UX can be pretty convoluted. Standing up a single piece of gated content requires seven individual, time-consuming actions involving multiple templates (and instances of those templates) that over time represent a lot of duplicated effort. Another major issue is that Marketo can be quite brittle – it doesn’t handle change super well. So once you’ve finally made a landing page (with a form) that points to some content hosted on your website, if that content ever gets updated and moves to a new URL, Marketo can’t find it anymore. You need to manually redirect it, or else – thanks for your data, don’t let the 404 hit you on your way out. And that’s for the people actually trying to read your stuff. Manually updating one landing page is fine. Doing it for a whole content library is a huge waste of your web team’s time. The third, Jankensteined iframe option is actually a really common workaround to retain Marketo’s progressive profiling on your main site. But it’s also pretty painful for everyone involved. Here’s why:- iframes aren’t responsive, so consistent UX is suuuper hard
- The form styles are still in two separate places, which makes designers cry
- You still can’t use the cookie data on your main site because it’s from a different domain
- You still have to go through all Marketo’s convoluted steps to stand up content
- The links to content are still brittle
- iframes slow your site down, which makes users cry (or more likely, leave)
The Solution: a better WordPress integration
We knew our solution needed to:- Streamline form creation so it was easier, faster, and could be carried out by anyone
- Keep the process in the same place as the rest of your site
- Keep the forms natively on your site to retain styling, responsiveness and consolidated analytics
- Perhaps most crucially, preserve progressive profiling and form pre-filling
And here’s what progressive profiling looks like to web visitors, before and after their first interaction.
- The initial overhead for setting up forms is comparatively tiny
- Updating Marketo forms is super-fast and easy (and anyone can do it)
- Your web information all lives under one roof, so you update and maintain your site all in one place
- Your analytics work like the rest of your site – no more landing page silos
- Your forms inherit styling from the page they reside on
- No stinkin’ iframes
- You can properly validate email addresses though a tick-box on the lead record that withholds content from unverified, dummy (or worse, competitor) email addresses
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