*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***

For your Realtime Marketing Forms, there are two options out of the box for determining what happens when someone fills out the form. You can either have a new record created every single time, or you can try and find a matching existing record via the email address field to update it if one exists (otherwise, create a new record). Did you know you can add other options, and set a different matching strategy for each form? In this post we will look at adding a new matching strategy and then how to use it on a form.

First, go to the Settings area, then the Customer engagement section. Click on form matching strategy from the menu.

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For this new strategy, I’m going to add a new one to find and match Contacts as the target entity. I’ve seen First Name and Last Name used a lot, but this isn’t always a good idea. Jim Smith could add his name that way on a form, but then next week use Jimmy, or even James. If your matching strategy is using Email, First Name and Last Name to make the match, the system would actually consider those being three different Contact records. Many B2C organisations marketing to people that could be parents of students, or donators to a charity often find people sharing an email address (yes, it happens more often than you would think). In this instance, we want to make sure someone submitting a form isn’t updating details on another record using the same email. For my example, I am using a custom field called Title that is being made required on a form, and must match along with email address.

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After creating the new matching strategy record, add in the specific fields that should be used as part of the match.

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Now make sure those same fields at least are included on the Realtime Marketing form and make them required.

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We can see here my Title field is a Choice so there is no way someone can just type any old thing in as a value. In theory, this field shouldn’t change for someone (at least not often enough to cause many issues).

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Now in the form settings area, you should see the new form matching strategy you’ve added. Select it from the list, then save and make the form live. Now when someone fills out the form, rather than solely looking at the email address, the title field value must also match to determine if it’s updating an existing record, or if a new one must be created.

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