How to get around the Conditional Completion Action Limitations in Account Engagement

If you've been working with Conditional Completion actions in Account Engagement for a while (here's my overview if you'd like my take on it) you may have run into one of it's downsides: there's a hard limit on the number of things you can put in completion actions now. That hard limit is what I call the 1/6/16 rule. You can have rules that apply to all prospects without condition (1), you can have up to 6 conditional groups (with a single conditional rule per group), and you can have a a total of 16 individual actions spread across the 1 and 6.

In most circumstances, that's probably fine. Until it's not. But you aren't out of luck, because here's a few tricks to help cope with the limitations.

Here's one tactic that's been a standard feature in Account Engagement forever, but people forget about, or don't know about. If one of your completion actions is adding to people to lists based on their selections in a dropdown, then you don't need to use any completion actions at all! A dropdown selection added to an Account Engagement (Pardot) form allows you to add people to a designated list based on their answer to the question. Just pull up the option values and click the icon with dots and lines and you can choose a list based on that option. You don't even have to have a list for each one, or you can use the same list for multiple different options if you like. This of course works for any type of dropdown and multiple dropdowns per form.

Incidentally, another nice feature here is the ability to have the form label and the form value be different. And this is controllable at the form level, so it can be different from the field's standard values if you want. This is a great example of the high degree of flexibility you have with Account Engagement forms.

But this isn't the best trick for getting more conditional completion actions, because it's limited to one kind of field and one action. The best trick is using the forwarding capability of a form handler, by forwarding a form handler to another form handler.

This simply involves checking the "Enable data forwarding to the success location" box and putting the second form handler's address in the as the specific URL for the forwarding location.

This will forward all the same data you used for the first form handler to the second one, making it eligible to use a fresh set of completion actions a second time. In theory you could forward more than once, but I've not tested how far you could go with it.

Note that this will have an impact on the score, so you might want to use one of your completion actions on the second form handler to deduct points.

This of course works beautifully if you are using a form handler as the primary submission method, for example, if you are using a third party form builder and submitting the data via form handler in the first place. But what about if you are using a native Account Engagement form? Can we still use this trick? Yes!

Essentially what you're doing here is using the thank you code with javascript to submit to the form handler, which means that you get the completion actions associated with the form and the form handler combined. Note that in this circumstance you only need to submit the email address to the form handler, as the rest of the fields will have been recorded by the form submission already and will be in the database to call upon with the conditions in the handler.

There are several methods of doing the form-to-handler code, with straight javascript or using conditionality in the JS itself or the form template as means to achieve the form handler submission. I'll leave that for you to determine based on your use case.

And of course once you have one handler submission, you can add another via forwarding.