Benefits of using Pardot Forms over Pardot Form Handlers

This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.

A question I’m often asked is What’s the benefit of moving over to Pardot forms instead of just using a Pardot form handler and keeping the same process?’

Pardot form handlers have 3 primary purposes:

1. They act as a solution for businesses who want to keep the same process before they've implemented Pardot and they can keep the same style forms with minimal effort.
2. Forms with sensitive information like passwords, financial details etc. shouldn’t be fed directly into Pardot as it’s unnecessary. So forms that ask for this would use a form handler.
3. To be added to forms that post to multiple databases

There are some powerful features being missed if form handlers are being used as a long term approach.

All of the below benefits are exclusive to Pardot forms:

• Progressive Profiling
  • A key part of any marketing strategy. Pardot forms can dynamically change and hide questions based on what you already know about the prospects. This keeps forms short, prospects engaged which means your conversion rates can stay healthy.

• Built-in protection against bots
  • All Pardot forms have a honeypot and conditional CAPTCHA built-in. The best part? You and your prospects won’t even know it’s there. This naturally prevents spam submissions but if you want an extra layer of security then you can also add reCAPTCHA on there too with a tick of a checkbox.

• Form views and error data
  • Using a Pardot form gives you more insight into how the form is performing. If 1000 people view your form and you have 1 submission, you can play around with different CTA’s and less form fields to increase the conversion rate. If there’s an unusually high error rate, then it tells us we may need a looser criteria or should use a dropdown field for example. It’s all about conversion.

• Use Pardot forms on Pardot landing pages
  • Once you’ve built a Pardot form, you’ll be able to add it to any of your Pardot landing pages pretty easily. Remember, if a prospect completes a form on a Pardot landing page, the submission will show on the landing page report instead of the form.

• Automate based on form views
  • As we have the form view data, it means we can create automation logic around it. If the contact form was viewed for example, do we want to notify someone? Or incrementally increase a field by +1 so we know how many times they’ve viewed it? Or maybe we just tag them for reference. Opportunities are endless.

• Display Pardot Thank You content after form submission
  • If you want full control over the thank you message then you’re going to want to host the forms in Pardot. Things are constantly changing for marketers so being able to control what shows in the thank you message is important. You can quickly update it with promotions, invites to upcoming webinars and maybe even stick some dynamic content in there too to make it extra clever.

Learn More About Our Pardot Form Template Development Service

For a full breakdown of Pardot forms vs. Pardot form handlers, see the table below:

Feature	Pardot Form	Pardot Form Handler
Prevents data duplication in Pardot	✓	✓
Validates email addresses	✓	✓
Provides progressive profiling	✓
Protects against bots	✓
Integrates with third-party forms		✓
Maintains current lead flow		✓
Integrates with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms	✓	✓
Supports custom front-end editing		✓
Provides form views and error data	✓
Provides field-level change audits for prospects	✓	✓
Integrate with Pardot landing pages	✓
Base automation rules on form views	✓
Base automation rules on form completions	✓	✓
Sends Pardot autoresponder emails	✓	✓
Redirects to a success page	✓	✓
Displays Pardot Thank You content after form submission	✓

Source: Salesforce