Managing Marketing Forms, Pages, and Websites

We’ve gone through the fundamental aspects of Dynamics 365 Marketing, such as basic configuration in Chapter 1, The Basic Configuration of Dynamics 365 Marketing, and core tables in Chapter 2, Managing Leads, Accounts, and Contacts. In the next chapters, we’re going to dig deeper into the core marketing functionalities.

In this chapter, we’re going to start by going through and learning what marketing forms, marketing pages, and marketing websites are and why it’s so important to go through analytics and constantly improve your forms and pages. We’re also going to look at the different types of forms and pages you can create, and some use cases for each of them.

We’ll cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Understanding and managing marketing forms
• Understanding and managing marketing pages
• Understanding and managing marketing websites
• Analytics

Understanding and managing marketing forms

Most companies that work with customers want, at some point, to gather information from their customers. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, the easiest way of gathering information from your customers or potential customers is to create a marketing form. Let’s go through the different types of marketing forms you can create, see how you can create and edit them, examine the different relevant settings, and discover how you can incorporate your customizations into marketing forms.

Types of marketing forms

When we start creating a marketing form, the first thing we need to know is what type of form we need to create. There are four different types of marketing forms that you can create, as seen in the following list:

• The landing page form
• The subscription form
• The forward-to-a-friend form
• The event registration form

The event registration form is not one of the standard ones but has to be activated in the settings...

Understanding and managing marketing pages

We’ve now gone through our marketing forms and seen how they are created. Now, let’s embed them in marketing pages. To use marketing pages built in the marketing page designer in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you need Power Pages. You can create pages on your own CMS and track the information in Dynamics 365 Marketing. The subscription center is the only type of marketing page that is always available even if you do not connect your system to Power Pages. Be aware that using Power Pages will also trigger Power Pages licensing. We’ll go through Power Pages and how you use it in Chapter 10, Power Platform.

There are a lot of similarities between marketing pages and marketing forms when it comes to creation. Because there are so many similarities, we are only going to go through the differences between the two and not dig deep into the parts that are common to both.

Types of marketing pages

As you have seen in marketing...

Understanding and managing marketing websites

Your marketing website is used to connect your own CMS to Dynamics 365 Marketing. In order to capture information from your website, you need to create a new marketing website. As you can see in Figure 4.29, you need to register the URL of your website, give it a name, and save the record. Once you have saved the record, you will get some lines of JavaScript code and some lines of form capture code. This code has to be embedded in your CMS.

Figure 4.29 – Marketing website record

When your tracking script is embedded into your CMS, you will start getting insights and analytics from your website. Let’s go through how analytics works for marketing forms, pages, and websites.

Analytics for marketing forms, pages, and websites

There’s always room for improvement. This also applies to your marketing forms, pages, and websites. So, how do we improve? By going through our analytics and insights, and seeing how people are using our forms, pages, and websites.

Marketing forms

The different types of marketing forms will give you different kinds of data and insights. In Figure 4.30, you can see that this form has had 496 submissions and 353 unique submissions between 01/01/2022 and 08/08/2022. Be aware that you can change the date to see the data on each of your forms.

Figure 4.30 – An overview of the Insights section for a marketing form

You can also see all the visits to a form in the Visits area of Insights, as you can see in Figure 4.31:

Figure 4.31 – Visits to a marketing form

This marketing form is used on a default marketing page; let’s see what insights look like on a marketing...

Summary

In this chapter, we have gone through how we understand and manage marketing forms, marketing pages, and marketing websites.

We’ve looked at the different types of marketing forms and pages and when to use which. We now know that we can use landing pages to get contact information into our system and that subscription centers can be managed through subscription center forms and subscription center pages. We have also learned the benefits of using forward to a friend.

We’ve gone through how to design and style your own forms and pages and looked at the analytics of forms and pages and how you can better understand your customers use of your forms and pages by using analytics.

We’ve also seen how to connect your existing websites to Dynamics 365 Marketing to get analytics and improve your websites.

In the next chapter, we are going to see how to create and use marketing emails.

Questions

The following are some questions that will help you gauge your understanding of the topics discussed in this chapter. The answers are available in the Assessments section at the end of the book.

1. What are the three standard marketing forms?

A. A landing page form

B. A subscription form

C. A contact information form

D. An event registration form

E. A forward-to-a-friend form

2. Why are marketing form fields important?

A. You need them to create your fields in a marketing form

B. You need them to connect the fields in a form to your data in Dataverse

C. They are the fields shown on your marketing form

3. Where do videos in a marketing page need to come from?

A. A real-time marketing asset library

B. An outbound marketing library

4. What are marketing websites used for?

A. Creating new websites

B. Connecting Power Pages to Dynamics 365 Marketing

C. Connecting websites to Dynamics 365 Marketing

D...