Since September 2023 Outbound Marketing is now in a sunset state and will not receive any new features or updates. Now it's time to think about a transfer of your Marketing assets to the new Real-time area and boost your Marketing speed and performance.
This series will show you some tips and guides how to perform this in a time saving and efficient way. For more in infos about Real-time forms in general visit my article 3 ways to boost your Real-time Marketing forms.
Transfer options
Unfortunately, there is no easy way of importing or transferring your Outbound Marketing forms to Real-time. You need to rebuild them from scratch.
Another restriction is the missing option of creating new Marketing form templates, which makes difficult to define a creation process for new Marketing forms.
Split your Marketing forms into Contact & Lead based ones
Create a list of your Outbound Marketing forms and split them into Contact based (create or update Contacts) and Lead based (create or update Leads).
Then remove all forms from your list which need one of the following features. They are not available in Real-time at the moment:
Create/update Contacts AND Leads at the same time
Forms with a type of Subscription Center or Forward to a friend
The No update option (submission data will be stored but no table is updated)
The Form level double opt-in
The Captcha element or Reset button
Please note: Capture Forms can now be transferred (can be enabled in Feature Switches), but it is much more complicated then in Outbound and I have not tested it yet.
The text under the Lead selector isn't true - you can update Leads via a matching strategy and are not forced to create always new Leads with each submission.
Rebuild your forms
The Real-time form editor is similar to the one used for emails, so you should be able to work with it very fast. Use sections and elements to define the rough layout and add then the neccessary fields via drag and drop from the Fields tab. Keep in mind, that only existing Contact or Lead fields can be selected. The specific Form fields you have used in Outbound before don't exist anymore in Real-time.
You can also modifiy the general theme and styles and the specific input elements. It is much more user friendly compared to the Outbound editor and offers a variety of options to choose from.
On the Form settings tab, you are able to select the Duplicate records strategy. To add more options to this Drop Down, you can create new matching strategies in the main Marketing Settings area --> Form matching strategy.
After publishing the Marketing form, you get a fresh Javascript code to replace the old Outbound one on your website. Or you can host the form on an automatic generated standalone page.
