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Web Forms for Marketers 2: Customisation

The latest version of Sitecore CMS includes a new forms module, Web Forms for Marketers 2. As part of the marketing team here at ClearPeople, I can attest first hand to the benefits of forms on our own website and the improved capabilities of this new release. Particularly beneficial for me are the reports I am able to run such as; dropouts, usability and conversion tracking. Although I can review the data in Sitecore, I always find it’s easier to download the report to excel so I can play around with it a little bit, save and send it to colleagues.

Interestingly, I was able to sit down today with our resident web forms expert here at ClearPeople and have him explain to me some of the customisations we have done for clients on this new forms module. If I do say so myself, we have done some pretty cool things to extend the out of the box capabilities of web forms, to meet client specific requirements.

The customisations we do can be fit into two categories “actions” and “fields”. A typical default action is to save the user information into a database and send an email to notify the host organisation that a form has been completed. Sitecore CMS has many out-of-box actions, which can be seen in the image below.

However, one of our clients requested that we develop a way for an email to be sent directly to the visitor that completed the form to either confirm or thank them for the submission. This custom action engages the visitor. This is done by pulling the information from the completed form and inserting it into an email template that corresponds with the action.

The field customisations have provided clients an way to improve data collection and web analytics. The custom fields we have built include:

• IP Text Box—when a web visitor fills out and submits a form, this hidden box reports the IP address that the user used to the host organisation. This assists security and helps to understand the user profile
  
• Pre-populated text box- our Sitecore expert explained this to me as a “dynamically generated default value.” When my face went blank, he gave me a very good example that seemed so much easier to understand! The example was of someone visiting a product page on a website, if they wanted to enquire about a product, they would click on a button that would bring up an email template; the template would already have the product ID inserted.
  
• Check box—Web Forms allows content managers to set certain fields as required, however it doesn’t allow this for check boxes. With customisation, a check box can be a required field, of particular use when it comes to posting a disclaimer or user agreement.
  
• URL Text Box—Like the IP Text Box, this is a hidden field that picks up where the visitor came to the form from and sends it to reporting.

Hope these little titbits helped you see the capabilities of Web Forms for your own website! Until next time...

Sitecore OMS Launch Event

On Thursday, 1^st October, I attended the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS) launch in Central London. The event promised to outline the highlights of OMS, which comes standard with Sitecore 6.1 and the upcoming 6.2, as well as champagne--perfect.

Now, I should probably give you a little information about myself. I work for ClearPeople on the marketing team, although many of my wonderful colleagues are developers, I am pretty clueless to how they exactly do what they do. As far as I am concerned, when it's broken, they fix it. There, my knowledge ends. Sitecore has a nice name for people like me, ‘non-technology user’ , meaning, the person that thinks her computer is broken when she accidently forgets to turn the screen on. I don’t have a background in development or technology, but do enjoy reaping the benefits of anything that makes my life a little easier. It also helps that when I see my Sitecore changes go live on the ClearPeople website, I do get an ever-so-slight smile and feeling of success.

With OMS, Sitecore has strategically placed the next stone in the path of web content management. We all understand that gone are the days of static web content, users are looking for tailored web experiences and seek value from the sites they visit. This idea of value is what really jumped out and resonated with me at this launch, as I believe it as the heart of a successful online marketing strategy. Value can be anything that the consumer or site visitor seeks and finds easily; information, assistance, a place to vent, a product to buy...anything really. Once the site is able to deliver to a visitors specific need, a relationship begins to blossom. Each time your website delivers something of value, the consumer becomes more trusting, more willing to give in return; personal contact information, engage in discussions, make a purchase or donation. What your exact ‘conversions’ or the actions a visitor takes, are determined by the nature of your business. Sitecore has thus produced a brilliant marketing tool, and basic good web manners.

By assigning each page of web content a value, you are able to measure a visitor’s journey through your site, and begin to assign them a profile. The example at the launch was a photography site, if a person’s path indicates they are an amateur user, content relevant to this would unassumingly be displayed in pre-determined flex spaces. Sitecore OMS allows you to deliver elements of value to your visitor. As they continue to navigate through your site, and are presented with more elements of value, so grows the relationship.

But the effects of this value, and in many cases the effects of marketing as a whole can be ambiguous and hard to measure. In these recessionary times, the return on investment must be tangible and thus, the increasing importance of online marketing strategies. Sitecore OMS may have been in development before the plunge of the economy, but for them, it was a fortuitous turn of events. Sitecore offers a way to not only provide real time ‘value’ and the beginnings of a relationship, which are flecks of gold dust in and of themselves as far as I am concerned, but to measure them as well.

Instead of coming up with my own words for this bit of analytic magic, I will just let Sitecore do the talking,

“What are the first time visitors doing? Which pathways are they using to get to the most popular content? How did your different audience segments behave? You'll know the sources they came from, what they searched for on and off site, the goals they reached and content they consumed – all critical in understanding conversions and building online success. “

The crux of Sitecore is easy web content management, and in the launch event, Simon Bartolo, Managing Director of Sitecore UK made effort to say, ‘we aren’t a web analytics company’. But, it was nice to see, in the preview of 6.2 they are continuing to make content management easier as well, through some very cool ‘drop and drag’ tools, but that’s for another blog and perhaps another champagne event?