Lead generation in marketing cloud

Question

We are migrating from Pardot to Marketing cloud, and i'm trying to figure out the process of lead generation in Marketing Cloud.

Today, forms on our landing pages post data to form handlers in Pardot, eventually creating leads in Sales Cloud (The lead is created as Prospect in Pardot and then sent to SF).

Now with Marketing cloud, from trailheads it says that we need to create cloud pages of all the forms that we have in our website in marketing cloud in web studio and inside those landing pages we create smart capture forms. is it done this way?

Can't we just keep the forms where they are today, and build a solution which will receive the form post in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and eventually create the lead in Sales Cloud - similar to the behaviour of Pardot form handlers?

Answer 1

You can build a custom "form handler" using code resources in Cloud Pages. You will need a combination of:

RequestParameter

RetrieveSalesforceObjects

CreateSalesforceObject

In the page where you want to collect your leads, you must place a form with action URL pointing to code resource:

<form action="https://subdomain.example.com/yourcoderesource" method="post">
  First name: <input type="text" name="fname"><br>
  Last name: <input type="text" name="lname"><br>
  Email: <input type="text" name="email"><br>
  Company name: <input type="text" name="cname"><br>
  <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form> 

In the code resource, all the parameters posted can be retrieved using RequestParameter AmpScript function:

%%[
SET @fname = RequestParameter("fname")
SET @lname = RequestParameter("lname")
SET @email = RequestParameter("email")
SET @cname = RequestParameter("cname")
]%%

You should check, whether a lead already exists with this email address, and update if exists or create if email address is not known:

%%[
IF NOT EMPTY(@email) THEN
SET @lead = RetrieveSalesforceObjects('Lead', 'Id', 'Email', '=', @email)
IF RowCount(@lead) > 0 THEN
SET @result = UpdateSingleSalesforceObject('Lead',Field(Row(@lead, 1),Id),Firstname,@fname,Lastname',@lname)
OUTPUT(CONCAT("Existing lead was updated: ",@result))
ELSE
SET @result = CreateSalesforceObject('Lead', 3, 'FirstName', @fname, 'LastName', @lname, 'Email', @email, 'Company', @cname)
OUTPUT(CONCAT("New lead was created: ",@result))
ENDIF
ELSE
OUTPUT("Email must be provided in form")
ENDIF
]%%