smart capture vs web collect

Question

We would like to have a web form on our website and let ppl subscribe for our blog. We would like to send a thank you email later on and track those who signed up for the newsletter for a future reference (email and date). We have both, SFMC and SFDC.

What would you recommend?

Smart capture would let me send a thank you email, but can I I-frame it on our website?

Web Collect - can I send there an email using DE, not lists (since they will be gone anyway soon)?

Whats better?

Thank you so much in advance.

Answer 1

I would build a custom solution, creating your new leads/contacts in SFDC. This way, you avoid having having duplicates, if your sales creates same person in SFDC, while your form only creates same one in SFMC.

You would create a Cloud Page with a form, where all the needed fields are present. This form should then post to itself, where AmpScript is taking care of the communication with SFDC. Once the form is being submitted, you should do following:

1. Decide on deduplication rules, in order to check if existing lead/contact exists for the same person. A good way of doing it is by RetrieveSalesforceObjects using email address as query parameter.
2. If your RetrieveSalesforceObjects call returns 0 rows, proceed to creating the record in SFDC, using CreateSalesforceObject.
3. If your RetrieveSalesforceObjects returns a record, you can use UpdateSingleSalesforceObject to append/update it's data.

You will then have created your new subscriber in SFDC, and this person will soon get synchronised to SFMC Synchronised Data Extensions. If you want to send an email immediately upon the creation, you can use the Triggered Send configuration in SFDC as described here. This will trigger the email to this record, even before it is synchronised to SFMC. You can also use Salesforce Data Entry Event to inject this person int your Journey Builder.

Answer 2

I am personally not a big fan of iframes so I recommend two approaches:

1. Use DEManager to inject in a Data Extension (not a list) + SOAP API to trigger an email
2. Have your form post in a Cloudpages landing page which will take care of adding to a DE and triggering the email (and eventually redirect you to your website)

One solution makes you stay on your website using API, the other makes you go to a landing page hosted in SFMC. But if SFDC is your DB of record you probably want to use the SFID as subscriberKey to avoid duplicates. That means you need to either retrieve the SFID before triggering the send or go via SFDC.