FormComposer

One of the most important features in FormComposer is it’s ability to deliver leads both synchronously and asynchronously.  Increasingly, synchronous (i.e real-time) delivery of leads is an important tool in Lead Generation.

What can Synchronous do for you?

The biggest reason to use synchronous communication end-to-end, is to determine if the lead is truly successful.  If the lead is to be delivered on to the buyer’s system and it, in turn, provides feedback about the validity of a lead then FormComposer can also await the final response.  The below example is a typical setup for a LeadConduit campaign.

In the above scenario, with synchronous delivery turned on for the campaign in LeadConduit, FormComposer will await a response from LeadConduit which, in turn, is waiting for all delivery destinations to complete. Once LeadConduit’s response has been received, we can then redirect the user to either a “success” or “reject” URL.

If there are cases where your buyer is providing specific failure reasons, those reasons are made available via server side scripting.  Using the power of javascript, we can inspect the lead for particular messages and send users to any URL of our choosing based on those reasons.  Additional information on how to inspect the lead itself can be found in our knowledge base article on the subject: http://support.formcomposer.com/kb/advanced-use/programmable-request-cycle-using-javascript.

Guarding against failures

While synchronous can be wonderful when everything is working correctly, we also want to take care in guarding against slow destinations and failures.  While the connection between FormComposer and LeadConduit is reliable and fast, it’s important to understand the problems that might occur in scenarios where destinations (calls to external systems) in your campaign become slow or unavailable.  While FormComposer and LeadConduit work hard to ensure that you never lose a lead, during synchronous delivery we might “cut the conversation short” if the destinations take too long to complete.  Given the increasingly short time a user will await a response before leaving your site it’s important to be proactive about keeping the user moving along.

During lead delivery, if FormComposer detects the submission taking > 10s, it will stop and send the user on to the default URL listed for the page.  Alternatively, for those using server side scripting, you can inspect the result and determine if the lead has been delivered and take finer grained control over subsequent actions.

This feature provides the capability to carry over page parameters (e.g. query string info or submitted user data) automatically between pages.  This can happen in a number of ways but there are a couple of cases we think that’ll be useful right away.

The first is capturing source or subid information on the inbound side via query string.  If, for example, you have the following:

http://awesomeleads.hostedwebform.com/landingpage?source=trafficgenerator

In the above case the users’s session will be persisted to include that source information.  Regardless how much they click through your site, when they fill out your form and your form carries a source (hidden) field then the user data will include the original source information given in the URL above with no extra steps needed.

Additionally,  if you are hoping to run your consumers through multiple forms then you can easily add internal redirects to the page to ensure they land on subsequent pages with submitted user data in tact - providing easy pre-population scenarios.  

Session persistence also dovetails with another new feature, non-delivery of user data for forms.  With the power of persistence you can bypass our lead delivery systems so you can just keep the data around instead of attempting delivery.  This can allow you move your users through a series of forms until you’re ready to actually submit everything together on the final form.  We realize the addition multi-step forms have often been requested and we think these new features will now help towards making that easier.

For more information, please check out our knowledge base article on the subject: http://support.formcomposer.com/kb/advanced-use/automatic-session-persistence

We recently added a new feature that will allow you to automatically transform specific field types in order to adjust for any delivery requirements for your leads.  Dealing with dates and phone numbers, specifically, can be incredibly problematic.  With FormComposer, you no longer have to write any code to adjust for these.  

As an example, many organizations require you to send these field types in very specific ways.  This is often at odds with your desire to be as accepting as possible on the front end with your users; less frustration, better conversions.  FormComposer’s client side validations already allow a variety of patterns to be listed as acceptable - dates can be ‘06/27/2011’ or ‘06-27-2011’ and the system will deem that allowable.  But if you are trying to deliver leads to someone where the requirement is that the date be in the format ‘06272011’ things get a bit more interesting.  With value transformations, you no longer have to worry about collecting the data in these special formats.  Here’s the basic pattern occurring with this feature.

               user → 06-27-2011 → %m%d%Y → 06272011 → delivery

When editing a field’s settings, you’ll notice a new section that will allow you to set the field’s final pattern on delivery.  

Developers will notice that the date formatting utilizes standard POSIX-style ‘strftime’ patterns available in most standard date libraries.  The phone number formatting is based on the ‘phone_number’ library created by C. Jason Harrelson (midas).  The code for ‘phone_number’ is available on Github.

For more information on value transformations, please check out our knowledge base article on the subject:

http://support.formcomposer.com/kb/working-with-forms/field-value-transformations

At ActiveProspect, we have been serving the Lead Generation industry for over six years.  As we expand our suite of products beyond the flagship LeadConduit Lead Management System, we are making great strides in our efforts to provide a comprehensive set of tools to help drive success. 

We’ve been working tirelessly on our form building tool, FormComposer, for a while now.  It has grown vastly from it’s original intent to provide a means for campaign owners in LeadConduit to create reference forms for publishers.  Since the original private beta, we’ve grown in the number of features and scope of the original intent but continue to feel comfortable about our place among the form builders and the content management systems though we don’t consider ourselves to be squarely in either camp.  As Content Management System squarely focused exclusively on lead generation, FormComposer provides the flexibility to create almost any type of content.  Most users will find the concepts familiar but with a twist - easy form creation and management with simple lead delivery.

We’ll be posting to this blog on a regular basis, covering feature developments within the product as well as design and user experience best practices for your landing pages.  Our goal is to provide you with the tools and resources you need to get things done and succeed in an increasingly challenging space.