8 Ways to use a Form as a Mini Landing Page

Did you know you can use a Pardot / MCAE* form all by itself? It's sort of like a mini landing page.

Since all Pardot / MCAE native forms have an absolute URL address with your custom tracker domain, they can be used as a mini landing page. Since a form allows you full control over above, below and completion content, you can set them up more or less like a mini landing page. You can even use:

• CSS to style it like your main site

• Javascript

• Custom fonts

• Google Tag manger or Google Analytics tracking

• Post-submit content, code, or fowarding.

Even better- If you use a form layout template that has no body content other than a form itself (the %%Content%% tag), and mimics a site page, then it really can look like a page on your website without being a landing page at all, it's still just a form. I've used the import from URL feature to mimic a site page, and removed all the content, added %%Content%% as the body, and then you have a page that looks like the site it was borrowed from, with just a form as the content. Many CMS sites accommodate fairly well to this "borrowing" technique-- you just have to keep on top of any structural changes, because the scraping technique essentially renders the page as mostly static, but it could refer to CSS files that might change.

So if all you really need is for someone to just fill out a form, you don't have to embed it anywhere and you don't have to build a landing page, you can just send people directly to the form's URL which you can find right on the form page after you create it.

This is great for instances where you want to control who sees/gets the form, who knows where it is, or not have it indexed (generally google would not crawl for these forms, but you can also put a noindex tag on your template just to be safe). Here are 8 ways to use for the form-as-a-landing-page technique:

1. Use it for internal purposes in kiosk mode as a one-off "add to Pardot" data entry form, for example third party leads.

2. Use it in kiosk mode at an in-person event for people to sign up for something. Have the forwarding location be the form itself, and check "Always display form after submission" to it immediately reloads.

3. Send it in an email if you need someone to submit a request for something, like support or a demo request.

4. Use it as a signup form for an in-person event. (Remember those?)

5. Use it for internal purposes in koisk mode as a way for a staff member that's not a Salesforce user to accomplish a specific action on an email address in Pardot (via completion actions), such as signing up people for a newsletter or setting as do not email or do not call.

6. Use it as the destination from an email as the comment submission for an NPS suvey.

7. Set it to only show fields that are blank as an "update missing details" form.

8. Use it as a proxy equivalent of an email preference center that allows people to "sign up" for emails and lists without giving them the ability to unsubscribe. (would still require you use an unsbuscribe link in an email)