Forms and Landing Pages: Capturing Leads Directly in Your Platform
5 min read
Your marketing automation platform can host forms and landing pages natively, eliminating the need for separate tools and ensuring every submission flows directly into your contact database and triggers the right automations. Setting this up correctly from the start saves a significant amount of integration work later.
Forms: Types and Use Cases
- Embedded forms: placed on your website pages, blend with your design
- Popup forms: triggered by scroll depth, time on page, or exit intent
- Standalone forms: hosted on a platform URL, used when you do not have a website page
- Progressive forms: show only unfilled fields to contacts who submitted before
Landing Pages
Platform-hosted landing pages combine a form with a complete web page, hosted and tracked by the platform. They are faster to deploy than website pages and automatically connect to your automation flows. Use them for campaign-specific offers, lead magnets, event registrations, and anything you want to track separately from your main website.
What Happens After Submission
Every form submission should trigger: a contact creation or update in the database, a tag or field update marking the source, and the start of a relevant automation - at minimum a confirmation email, and ideally a full welcome or nurture sequence. Configure all three in your form settings before the form goes live.
Tracking Form Performance
Each form has a conversion rate: visitors who saw the form versus those who submitted it. Track this in your platform's reporting. A form with a 2% conversion rate has room to improve - test shorter field counts, clearer value propositions, and different form placements. A form with a 40% conversion rate is working well; focus improvement elsewhere.
Connecting to External Tools
If you need form data to flow into a CRM, a spreadsheet, or another system, use the platform's native integration or a webhook. Most platforms support bi-directional CRM sync so that a form submission in the automation platform creates or updates a record in the CRM automatically. Test the integration with a real submission before going live.