Feature Spotlight: Forms & Landing Pages

The purpose of this article is to highlight recently added form & landing page functionality to boost your product knowledge and allow you to take advantage of some major benefits of using these features to personalize your subscriber experience. We designed this article to help you leverage key tools available to improve form conversion rates and subscriber experience through forms and landing pages. In this article we will:

1. Review recent improvements
2. Provide general use case examples

Using the tools outlined here today will allow you to personalize your subscriber’s experience with your brand, which directly improves email engagement long term. 

 

Forms

What did we work on?

Forms were a major focus of product development in the last year. During that time we incorporated multiple direct-from-the-customer requests. These requests included providing a better design experience in the form editor, adding new display options to make forms stand out on web pages, improving data collection to help customers grow the data available for their contacts, adding support for interactive forms, and providing easier ways to manage form updates. Wow! That is a lot of form work.

Form Design Updates

Up first, let’s tackle all of the form editor updates made to improve the design experience and display of forms on web pages. Highlights include:

• Pop-up, banner, and floating forms.
• Drag-and-drop editor enhancements.
• New general form style options.

1. Form Styles 

The subscribe form designer has been enhanced to provide more flexibility in terms of how a form will display on a web page. When creating a new subscribe form you will specify a style. Thumbnail images are shown in the setup step of your form creation process and they demonstrate how the form will be presented on a web page.

Currently, we offer the following form styles:

1. A Hanging banner (which drops from the top of a web page)
2. A Floating box (which will appear in the bottom right corner of a web page)
3. And a Pop-up (which is a modal displayed in middle of a web page)

When a style is chosen, the form editor’s design mode depicts a “your website” backdrop to aid in visual design of forms.

Note: pop-up, banner, and floating form styles are available for the subscribe form type only. The classic style is available for preference centers and unsubscribe form types.

2. Drag-and-Drop Editor Enhancements

The drag-and-drop form editor received several improvements to provide you more control over designing individual fields, general form styling, and more.

• Now you can adjust field width & height, change the text box radius, apply a border, include placeholder text in the field, and add background color.
  
  
• Also, you can now control the Asterisk placement for required fields to be displayed next to the field or above the field. 
  
  
• And lastly, when using a list of values displayed as drop-down or radio buttons, you can now set one of those values to be the default selection and you can easily drag to reorder the display of the values presented.

New view for “form style” when designing your form:

• We moved the form width and border settings into this view and added two new styling options for backdrop color and opacity when a form is viewed on a web page. 
  
  
• The settings for backdrop color and opacity are applicable to hanging, floating, and pop-up forms and not apply to classic subscribe forms.

Use the new style features to bring attention to your forms, ultimately increasing conversions from web page visitor to an interested subscriber.

 

Form Data Capture

Next let’s tackle new functionality for capturing data. Highlights include:

• Setting up conditional fields
• Progressive data collection over time
• Collecting the contact’s unsubscribe reason 

1. Conditional Fields

What are conditional fields? Conditional Fields are fields setup with conditional criteria will display other relevant fields based on previous selections in the form. This functionality gives you the ability to customize the subscribe form experience, which will lead to gathering more meaningful data for targeting without impacting form completion rates.

Example use cases for conditional fields could include:

1. • Displaying relevant information like a selection menu, sub-categories, or additional questions based on the Industry value entered by the form visitor.
     
     
   • Or, display SMS permission fields after a mobile number is entered into the form.

 

2. Progressive Fields

What are progressive fields? Progressive Fields enable you to design forms that capture important information as visitors progress in their journey whether this be the same visit or a span of several visits to your website. This technique will help you gather better subscriber data over time, qualify potential leads, improve conversion rates and at the same time reduce the risk of form abandonment. 

Example use cases for progressive fields could include:

• Collection of data from visitors as they progress through the pages on a website, or when they access gated content, pricing pages, etc. Let me walk you through a scenario: 
  • I’m a visitor to your website. I browse a few products & services pages and am presented with a pop-up asking for my name & email. I enter that information and then move to gated content pages like whitepapers and other resources and at that point the pop-up presents again to ask for my company name & telephone. I go ahead and supply that information and then I move onto pricing pages where the pop-up presents a 3rd time to ask for my purchase timeline and budget.
  • With this example you can see how a single form using progressive fields allows for the gradual collection of information rather than an upfront ask that may seem invasive to the form visitor.

3. Unsubscribe Reason

What is unsubscribe reason? Forms now offer a new field to record a reason for the unsubscribe action. This new form input allows you to collect valuable opt-out feedback; why they unsubscribed. Create this field as a fill-in text box, drop-down, radio selection, etc. 

Additional functionality for collecting this information:

• You can create segments based on this collected feedback.
• Generate a custom report with this information in Analytics.
• And, this data is viewable on individual contact records in your account.

 

Form Visitor Handling

Next let’s look at new functionality for form visitor handling. Highlights include:

• Managing domains that submit forms
• Creating leads and sending lead alerts
• Configuring settings to determine when a form should display

1. Domain Management

What is domain management for forms? Domain management allows you to define special rules for handling form submissions from identified domains. This means that you can strategically handle preferred visitor traffic over competitor traffic in a variety of ways to keep your content secure.

These domain management tools easily allow you to tailor the end-user experience by dropping them into an automation, navigating them to a special landing page, or presenting a special message (and more than one may be chosen). You can even block a competitor from joining your email list.

Example use cases for domain management could include:

• When visitors from identified preferred domains submit the form, drop them into a nurture automation and redirect to a special landing page.
  
  
• Identify & suppress competitor domains from actually subscribing but display a special “thank you for subscribing message”. I have to admit, this one is pretty fun to play with.

2. Leads & Lead Alerts

New capabilities are available in form settings that allow you to create a lead record in Delivra’s basic CRM dashboard and assign a Lead Alert campaign to be sent upon a form submission to an internal team member. These new form features automate a few steps in your lead creation process, saving you time and eliminating the need to create a separate automation to send a lead alert notification when new contacts or lead records are created from form submissions.

Form Display Triggers

What are form display triggers? Form triggers determine when a form should display on your web page. These new form triggers allow you to control exactly when and how frequently your forms will display to web page visitors. These options include:

• Triggers – Should the form display at launch or at a time delay?
  
• Frequency – Should visitors be presented the form with every visit to the web page or only the first time?
  
• Dismiss – Should the form display again if dismissed by a visitor? And If so, when?

A few use case examples for display triggers could include:

• Set the form to display when a visitor has scrolled halfway down the web page to avoid bombarding visitors immediately, at the moment they arrive.
  
  
• Set the form to display when a visitor has come to the web page three times in an effort to gauge interest level before asking them to sign-up.
  
  
• Set the form to display once with every visit to serve as a reminder to the page visitor to register for an upcoming event.

Going Live with Your Forms

After you update your Delivra forms to incorporate one or more of the improvements outlined today, you’ll need to get them in front of your audiences. Next, we'll cover the variety of options you have to make your forms public. These options include:

1. Link to a hosted form

The forms you design in Delivra are hosted on our servers. This means that there is a unique URL that can be used to access that form from anywhere external. We call this a host URL and it can be found in the form editor, under the INFO tab.

In the INFO tab you can customize the filename that will be visible in the URL. A quick tip, drop the merges at the end of the URL if you are linking to this form from an external location because the merges will be invalid.

We've seen customers use this URL to directly link to subscribe forms from social media pages and posts, independent landing pages, from multiple pages on their website, within their emails and more. Using this quick & easy method allows you to very easily increase exposure of your forms to your audiences.

2. Embed html code on pages of your website

The most common method is to design forms in Delivra with our drag-and-drop editor and then export the HTML code to embed it on external web page.  You can access your form HTML code in Step 4, the Finalize step of the form creation process.

Some people see a bit of a drawback in this method because any changes needed to the form design or inputs would need to be made in Delivra, a re-export and re-embed must occur for changes to be reflected on your web page.

3. Form publishing

Our newest method, publishing, was released in May, and offers an alternative to the two traditional methods we just covered. Form publishing requires a code snippet to be placed on your web page(s). When present, that snippet will make an ajax call to the Delivra account to grab the most recently published version of the form to display to the page visitor. 

Publishing removes the need to coordinate with your web developer for each and every form update, which in some cases, requires updating multiple web pages and/or websites. And, once the code snippet is out there, you can update your forms seamlessly by needing only to make changes to the saved form in your Delivra account and re-publishing it.

 

Forms Wrap Up

These advanced form tools allow you to be targeted and timely in the collection of data from web page visitors, which will increase conversions from a web page visitor to a subscriber. Our Client Success team would be happy to talk with you about your form needs. Drop them an email at success@delivra.com.

 

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Landing Pages

What is a landing page? Delivra's landing page feature allows you to design independent hosted web pages. Landing pages can be used in emails as a redirect for a link or they can be used in forms to redirect the subscriber to another page when the form is submitted.

Once designed, landing pages can be used in a variety of ways. For example:

1. 1. Create a custom unsubscribe page for contacts who choose to opt-out.
   2. Link buttons, text, or images in an email to a landing page for exclusive email-only content.
   3. Redirect new subscribers from your web form to a personalized page after sign-up.

You will find Landing Pages in the Assets dashboard and they use our standard drag-and-drop editor. 

Recent Enhancements

• Improved design experience: new workflow & preview capabilities. 
• Save your customized landing page as templates.
• Upload HTML file to design your landing pages.
• New personalization capabilities with merge tags and dynamic content.

We improved the overall landing page design experience with a new workflow and new preview capabilities. And, we released new functionality to upload your HTML file to design a landing page, insert contact field merge tags, build dynamic content within a landing page, and the ability to save your own landing page templates.

New Workflow

We streamlined the landing page creation workflow to be consistent with other dashboards. This includes three distinct steps for Setup, Design & Preview. Along with this update we incorporated familiar concepts for draft and complete status landing page files, as well as file versioning when edits need to be made to completed status landing pages.

Personalization

1. Merge Tags

Next, we added functionality to the landing page drag-and-drop editor to allow our customers to personalize their landing pages using merge tags. These merge tags can be used to personalize the landing page with the information submitted in the form to serve as confirmation of submitted details or to personalize a thank you page with the subscriber’s first name. Simply click the tag icon from the editor toolbar and choose the data field to merge into your landing page. Please note that you also want to ensure this data field is included in your Form!

2. Dynamic Content

In addition to merging data, a second personalization tool was added to the landing page editor to support dynamic content based on the data submitted by the form visitor. Use this new functionality to build dynamic profiles to display an image and text based on the preferences chosen in the form.

Templates

Once a landing page file is designed, you can easily save it as a template in your library to reuse in the future. Find the template option in the Edit drop-down on the landing page library page.

Upload HTML

If you prefer to design your emails and landing pages externally, we now offer an upload option to design landing pages, similar to uploading HTML files to start email designs for campaigns.

 

Wrap Up

At Delivra, we believe that achieving great results with form and landing page personalization should be simple. With the tools outlined here today you can immediately start grabbing the attention of web page and form visitors and personalizing their experience. 

 

Resources

Watch our customer webinar on Forms and Landing Pages here.

Notes

Availability of the features covered here vary depending on your license. Please contact our Client Success team for details about what's included in your license.