Using Forms

Forms provide a way for you to capture information about your audience. They consist of the form HTML and instructions on what should happen after a visitor submits the form. For example, you can specify that after the form is submitted, a follow-up email is sent to the visitor, the submitted form data is saved to various data sources in your account and the visitor is directed to a custom thank-you page. You can create forms in Oracle Responsys using the Forms wizard accessed from the Forms menu.

After you have created a form, there are three ways to use it in your marketing efforts:

  • Generate a URL to use with a non-personalized, blank version of your form
  • Generate links to personalized versions of the form for use in your email campaigns
  • Host the form content externally and submit the responses to the Oracle Responsys form handler for processing

Using a Blank Version of a Form

When your aim is to collect basic subscription information, such as signing up for a newsletter, you may request nothing more than an email address and a name. A blank, non-personalized form works fine in this case.

There are two ways to use a blank version of a form:

  • Copy and paste the URL for a blank form anywhere on the Web, such as your website or email campaigns.
  • Use the ($formlink(name)$ built-in function in your email creative to generate a link to a blank form. This works only within a Oracle Responsys campaign, not on an external Web page.
    Example: $formlink(FormExample)$

After an email recipient or website visitor fills out the form and submits it, the preset form rules process the submitted data.

Using a Personalized Form

Personalized forms are ideal for preference center pages because you can prefill the form fields with information that is known about the individual, thereby saving them time when completing the form. There are two ways to use a personalized form: the prefilledform and formlink built-in functions. Both ways have advantages.

Prefilledform Built-in Function

Prefilled forms are especially useful for requesting updates in profile information. Oracle Responsys looks up the recipient's current profile in the database at the time the email is rendered. So, while this process may take longer than the $formlink()$ method below, it ensures that the profile data is the most up-to-date. And when working with profile information, it's useful to already have it at hand.

Example: $prefilledform(targetCampaignName)$

Formlink Built-in Function

You can generate links to personalized versions of a form by including the $formlink$ built-in function in your campaign message document. Because the URL contains all the data in the form at launch, it does not need to access the database as it does for a prefilled form.

There are three ways to use the $formlink()$ built-in function:

  • Pass data from your campaign by specifying a field name in your form from a distribution list or supplemental data source. Example: $formlink(yourformname, first_name)$. In this case, when the campaign runs, Oracle Responsys replaces the first_name field in the form with the value in that field for each recipient.
  • Pass data from the campaign data lists by mapping a field name to a variable used in the form document. This works similarly to the first way, but the field name is mapped to the name of a variable used in the document. Example: $formlink(yourformname, first=first_name)$. When the campaign message is sent, any reference to the variable $first$ replaces the variable with the recipient's first_name value.
  • Personalize the form using a literal value for the variable name. Example: $formlink(yourformname, offerid=123)$. In this case, a value of 123 is inserted whenever a reference is found to $offerid$ in the form document, and all recipients receive the same value in their email.

Using an Externally Hosted Form

You may wish to host your form content on your company's website. In this case, you can post to the Oracle Responsys form handler to process form responses. When you use an externally hosted form, you must submit the form data using either a form submit or an HTML tag.

Use the information on the Form Usage page to submit form responses to Oracle Responsys for processing. Remember you still need to add the name-value pairs at the end of the link in order to pass the variable data back to Responsys.

Example of a form action URL:

<form method="post" action="https://yourcompanydomain/pub/rf">
<input type="hidden" name="_ri_" value="<encoded data>">

Example of a link:

<a href="https://<yourcompanydomain>/pub/rf?_ri_=<encoded data>">

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