Data, Data, Data with Pardot Forms

Data is one of the most important aspects of marketing. But do you trust your data? Are you making guesses when running lists on what you think is your target audience? Having a sound data collecting strategy can benefit not only your marketing campaigns but can help you build a stronger relationship with your Sales team.

With Pardot forms you can focus on collecting information that aligns with your Sales Team’s ideal prospect, progressively profile your leads as they go through the nurturing funnel, and ensure quality control.

Pick Your Fields

To begin, identify what data points are the most important to your company. Is it job title, industry, department? Working with your Sales team to find out what types of leads they are typically prospecting into can help you prioritize how to build out a prospect’s profile. You should also take into consideration what data points are required for you to segment for sending targeted communications. Being able to identify those buyer personas in your messaging can increase the likelihood of conversion. But you need to actually have and collect those data points.

By knowing the attributes that are most important for your company for an ideal prospect profile should be brought into consideration when building your forms. Those fields should take prioritization when developing your form strategy.

Progressive Profiling

Once you know what attributes are the most important to your company, you need to apply them to your Pardot forms. But, being in Marketing, you probably want to know everything there is to know about all of your prospects to ever come into your Pardot orgΓǪ Ever. That’s the typical problem – marketers want to know as much about their audience as possible to strongly tailor their messaging. But, by wanting to know everything, runs the fear of accidentally adding too many fields to your forms. This lowers conversion rates when forms become too long. Prospects could become frustrated and abandon the form because it takes too much time for them to fill out.

Instead of asking for all of your fields at once, you can progressively profile your prospects and gradually collect more information on a prospect over time by showing other fields based on data you’ve already collected. Once a value for a field is known, that field will not be shown on a form unless you specifically designate it to appear. The only exception is the email field.

To simplify it, think about it as an equation: When Field X has a value, show Field Y. So if you already know a prospect’s department, you can set up the form to show the field industry when a value for department is known. 

Instead of showing a field you already have data on, you can collect data on another important field gradually. Therefore, create your Top, Middle and Bottom funnel form strategy with progressive profiling and ask for new fields as your other fields get populated with values.

Quality Control

Putting data controls in place will help you automate if a person meets your company’s ideal profile and increase the confidence in your segmentation. When in doubt, don’t allow fields to be free form text. If you can proactively list values in your form fields, you not only can speed up the process of filling out a form, but eliminate human error with spelling mistakes. Let’s be honest, it’s super easy to fat thumb and add letters to common words or accidentally rearranging letters if you are quickly filling something out. 

So make it easy for your prospects and provide dropdowns, checkboxes or multi-select. That way, you know exactly what values could be in that field. Don’t let an extra “N” in Minnesota be the reason someone doesn’t get your email.

Happy Pardoting!