Tips and Tricks

Create a Form on your Website

The discussions so far have assumed that the form in question was sent in an email or at least as part of an email campaign. Since the recipient in this case already has an entry in the database, when they submit the form, EM knows where to put the data. But what if you want to put a form on your web site? The idea then is to create an "anonymous" form.

Create your form and send it to yourself as a 'Single Recipient' deployment. This way, there is no record in the database associated with the form. When you receive the email, you can cut and paste the form HTML onto your web page.

Create a link to your form on your Web Site

Create your form as described in the above example. Create a second template in the same Creative. Insert a 'Viewlink' into the second template that points to the template that contains your form. Then send it to yourself as a 'Single Recipient' deployment. When you get your email, copy and paste the link onto your web page.

Create a List to Collect Data Into

If you don't already have a deployment list that you want to collect data into, you can create one yourself from scratch. In Excel, create a table with all the data fields you are going to collect - don't forget a Primary Key field (usually the email field). Create 1 row of data. The data can be made-up, you can delete this row later. Just make sure that if you're using a Primary Key that you've used before, you could be overwriting data. Now, upload the file you have just created into the List Manager.

Create a form that pre-populates itself with the recipient's own data

If you would like to create a form that shows recipients the current information stored in the database, and allow them to add new data or change their existing data, use this simple technique. Create a form with the proper {addlist} and {setfield} tags, then add variables to the "value" parameters of your form fields. When you set up your deployment, map the variables to their corresponding list fields and you are ready to go.

Create a secure 'User Preferences' form

The example above works great when sending a form directly in a template, or as a Viewlink. But what if you have a form you would like to use over and over, in several different Creatives? And what if you also want to make sure that only the recipient of the original email can open and see the form? Here is what you do.

Build a new Creative with three templates in it:

Your form - use variables in the value fields to pre-populate the form.
A template with a Viewlink to your form.
A second from that asks only for a user's email address.

Here is what happens - a recipients gets one of your emails and clicks a link that says something like "Click here to modify your user preferences". Clicking this link will bring up the form asking for the recipient's email address. When the user fills out and submits this form, an email is sent to the email address they entered. That email will be the Viewlink template we created with a link to the main form. When the user clicks on the link to the form, they are taken to your form. If the user exists in your database, the form will be pre-populated with the recipients data. If they are a new user, they will be presented with a blank form and will be added to the database when they submit the form.

The benefits of this workflow are that a recipient must have a legitimate email address that they have access to in order to see or modify their data. Second, life is easier for you because the form will be in its own Creative and therefore there is no need to reproduce it each time a new Creative needs to use it - the only form you will re-create is the email address form.

Here's how you do it. Create a deployment with the Viewlink form above. This is the template that will be sent to a recipient once they fill out the email form. Make sure this deployment is a "List Deployment" and the email field is mapped to your list (See 'Understanding Deployments' in the Introduction topic). Add a {sendmessage:deploymentid} tag to your email form template using the deployment id you just created. Copy the email form into a new Creative. Now, when you add another template to this new Creative, add a Viewlink to the email form template.

You can add a link to the email form to your web page as well. First, create one more template in the Creative that contains the main form and other two templates. In this template, all you need is a Viewlink to the email template. Then, simply send a 'Single Recipient' deployment to yourself of this Viewlink template. When you receive it, copy and paste the link onto your web page.


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