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Smart Capture

1. What Is Smart Capture
1. 1.1. Smart Capture Form Actions
2. 1.2. Tips for Changing Smart Capture Form Actions
2. Why Use Smart Capture

This document contains conceptual and procedural information that you can use when preparing to use the Smart Capture feature. This document is intended for marketers, managers, and other application users who are responsible for creating web forms for lead capture. Understanding of the microsites feature is required to use Smart Capture. Understanding of AMPscript is required to use the advanced features of Smart Capture, though you can use the basic functionality without knowledge of AMPscript.

Note: For new accounts in the process of being integrated with Salesforce, the integration must be complete before you can use Smart Capture. The Smart Capture feature cannot communicate with Salesforce if you have an incomplete integration.

What Is Smart Capture

Smart Capture is a tool you can use to create lead capture forms to include in your landing pages. When a lead completes the form on the landing page and clicks the Submit button, the Smart Capture form automatically adds the information to the subscriber list, data extension, or outside data source such as an integrated CRM system.

You create a Smart Capture form as a content area. You can create the Smart Capture type content area within your layout-based landing page or from the My Contents folder. When you begin to create the content area, you choose Smart Capture as the content area orientation.

You can include content areas with the Smart Capture orientation in landing pages only. You cannot include them in email messages or SMS messages. You cannot currently include Smart Capture forms as dynamic content in your landing pages. However, you can use the InsertContentArea() AMPscript function to include exactly one Smart Capture form per landing page.

After you select the Smart Capture orientation for your content area, you choose the target for the form data. This is the object that the Smart Capture form updates when the leads completes the form and clicks the Submit button. Currently, you can choose to update a subscriber list, data extension, or Salesforce object. You must select a target to create the Smart Capture form, but you can change the actions later in the process if you do not want to update the target. For example, if you want to trigger an email when the lead clicks Submit, but you do not want to capture the lead's email address.

Note: To select a data extension as the data target, data extensions must be enabled in your account. Currently, you can select any data extension to update. However, usually you should select data extensions that have the Can Be Sent To check box selected because these are data extensions that contain subscriber lists.

Note: To select a Salesforce object as the data target, your account must be integrated with a Salesforce account.

After you select the data target, the system generates the form and displays it in the form editor. Fields that are required for the data target that you selected appear automatically in the editor. For example, if you have set up email address, first name, and last name as required subscriber attributes and you select a subscriber list as the data target of the Smart Capture form, the email address, first name, and last name fields appear in the form automatically. You can use the editor to change the form. For example, you can add non-required fields to form.

You can control the appearance of the Smart Capture form with the same tools that you can use to control the appearance of a layout-based landing page:

Using the editing tools in the visual editor. This will not affect the font of the values the leads enter in the fields.
Changing the HTML of the form in the HTML tab of the editor.
Uploading a CSS file to your portfolio and referencing it from the HTML tab of the editor. You must have the portfolio feature enabled in your account to use this method.

You should enter a success page URL and an error page URL. If the form processes successfully, the user is redirected to the success page URL after clicking the Submit button. If the form encounters an error, the user is redirected to the Error Page URL after clicking the submit button. If you do not specify a Success or Error page, the user will receive a default success or error page.

Note: The system does not validate the values the lead enters in the form before the user clicks the Submit button. If an error occurs, the system raises an exception that is logged in the database.

Smart Capture Form Actions

The system generates the actions that the Smart Capture form should complete when the lead clicks the Submit button. For example, if you set up a Smart Capture form to add the lead information to a subscriber list, the system creates an action that tells the form to update the list with the lead information. You can use the editor to change the action or add additional actions. For example, you could add an action to trigger an email at the same time as updating a list. The actions that are currently available are:

If you are proficient with AMPscript, you can also modify a Smart Capture form to create your own actions by overriding the AMPscript that the included actions generate.

Each action must tell the system where to get the information that it uses to perform the action. Usually, the information comes from the fields that the lead enters in the form. In some cases, you may want to add a static or hidden value. For example, you could add a hidden field to the form with the static value of "webform" to populate a Lead Source attribute on the subscriber.

RequestParameter() is an AMPscript function that the system generates when selecting a form field to use when setting properties in the Processing tab. RequestParameter can also be used when you are passing a value to the Smart Capture landing page via querystring parameter. For example, if you link to your Smart Capture page via: http://pages.example.com?QS=ABCDEFGH&CampaignID=1234 - you can use RequestParameter("CampaignID") to use the Campaign ID you passed over as input in the Action

The View Code tab on the editor shows the AMPscript that is generated by the system to execute the actions you selected. If you click the Override code generation check box, you can edit the AMPscript. If you clear the checkbox, the system regenerates the default AMPscript for the form in the visual editor.

Note: If you select this check box and edit the AMPscript, you will no longer be able to update the actions using the visual editor. AMPscript is a powerful and flexible scripting language that can control many aspects of your account, and it is not possible to validate AMPscript that you write. Changing the auto-generated AMPscript should be done with caution.

Tips for Changing Smart Capture Form Actions

Actions
- When specifying a new property name in a collection of properties within Actions, do NOT put the Property Name in double quotes but DO put the property value in double quotes.
- When specifying a value for a field in the Action screen, make sure put any value that you hard code within double quotes.
- When specifying a success and error page, you must reference a microsite PURL or use a fully qualified URL including http:// as a prefix.
Checkbox that represents a required Boolean fields with a default value
- Boolean fields are best represented on Smart Capture forms as radio buttons.
- You can choose to represent a Boolean field on a Smart Capture form with a checkbox instead if the Boolean field is required (not nullable) and has a defined default value. Subscriber preferences are among this type of field. For example, if you created a subscriber preference called WantsNewsletter with a default value of No, you could represent this preference on a Smart Capture form as a checkbox.
- If a subscriber selects the checkbox and clicks Submit, the system interprets this value as the opposite of the defined default value, regardless of whether it is yes or no.
- If a subscriber does not select the checkbox and clicks Submit, the system interprets this value as the default value. For example, a checkbox representing the WantsNewsletter preference on your Smart Capture form would mean Yes if checked (the opposite of the default) and No if not checked (the default).
- When using checkboxes in this way, you should use care choosing the default values that you select and the field labels that you select for the checkbox. For example, the field label for the WantsNewsletter checkbox should make it clear that the subscriber is opting in to the newsletter if they select the checkbox.
Adding / removing form fields
- When you add a new form field, it will become available as a property and field in the Processing tab.
- When you remove a form field, to ensure the HTML is properly re-generated, click on the Processing tab and then back to the Edit tab.
Default values for form fields
- If you know who the subscriber is, for example, because the subscriber access the form from a link in an email, you can use personalization strings as the default value in the form field.
- If you do not know who the subscriber is, you can use another content area in the landing page, placed ABOVE the Smart Capture form, to read data from data extensions, populate AMPscript variables, and set default values in the Smart Capture form equal to those variables.
Editing form fields
- Form-field validation is not yet supported. For now, you can use JavaScript to handle form field validation. For example, YUI or Prototype are two open-source JavaScript frameworks that can be used for field validation.
- Differences by browser:
  - Internet Explorer 6 and 7: You can select and resize a form field by left-clicking it. To edit the properties, you can right-click and select Form Properties or you can select Form Properties from the Edit option on the menu bar. You can also move the form field by clicking and dragging it to the desired place in the editor.
  - Firefox 2: You can select a form field by left-clicking it. You can re-size the form field by editing the form properties. To edit the properties, you can right-click and select Form Properties or you can select Form Properties from the Edit option on the menu bar. You can also move the form field by clicking and dragging it to the desired place in the editor.
  - Firefox 3: Due to limitations of Firefox 3, you must edit the HTML underlying the form to move a form field. To edit a form field (other than a text box), you must drag the cursor over the form element. To edit a textbox, you can right-click and select Form field properties. Working with Firefox 3 is somewhat more challenging; we recommend Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 6 or 7.

Why Use Smart Capture

Smart Capture is a flexible and powerful tool for capturing lead information using your landing pages. You could use a Smart Capture form to:

Generate leads from people who sign up to receive a newsletter or attend an event.
Create tasks in Salesforce to follow-up with leads.
Send automated emails to people who complete the form.
Send email messages through Salesforce.

For subscribers on lists (rather than data extensions), you can use Smart Capture to create a custom Profile Center by using AMPscript to read the subscriber data and load that data into the form. Future enhancements will allow you to retrieve data from data extensions, so you can create a custom profile center for subscriber information you maintain in data extensions.

Smart Capture cannot currently be used to create a custom Subscription Center because there is no functionality to retrieve the lists that exist in your account. Future enhancements will power this functionality. However, you can hard-code lists and publication lists into Smart Capture form elements to allow leads to subscribe and unsubscribe from a static set of lists, data extensions, and publications.

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