Dear Joe - We currently user PowerWebForm on our website and are looking to create an RSVP form for our annual gala. Even though we use PowerWebForm to dedupe submissions, sometimes our clients will use personal information, such as email or cell phone number, causing a duplicate. We think that if we can send a link to the web form that is already filled with their information, we'll be able to minimize the chance of a duplicate. Is it possible to send a link to a web form with pre-populated information?

Sincerely,

Duplicate Detective

Dear Duplicate Detective - Prepopulating the web form with data from your CRM is a great way to minimize duplicate data in the CRM. You can encode the PowerWebForm URL to specify a desired value per field. This is accomplished by adding the Form Field ID with value to the end of your web form URL (ex. &{form field ID}={value} ) we'll walk you through the process below for workflows and when using PowerMailChimp.

After creating the web form, you'll need the web form URL and to find the Form Field IDs in the source code for each field you want to pre-populate.

If using a workflow to send the web form line, you will create a hyperlink of the web form URL. Then you can add the & symbol with the Form Field ID, follow with an = sign and the dynamic value that correlates to the field. In the sample workflow email below, the web for URL has been added with the form field information for First Name, Last Name and Company Name.

When the workflow is ran for a Contact record, the dynamic values will be seen when the web form link is clicked.

Using a similar process, users can send the URL through PowerMailChimp using merge tags to add dynamic values to the URL. In MailChimp, you will need to add the link to your template – in our example below, we're adding the link to an RSVP button.

Before adding the URL, we've created a Merge Tag for the Company Name in CRM. This will allow us to pass the Company Name value from CRM to MailChimp when the Marketing List is next synced. Next, we'll locate the merge tags for the MailChimp list we have synced our Company Name field to. We can then start building our URL by adding the & symbol, the Form Field ID, followed by an = symbol and the desired merge tag.

Now when the PowerMailChimp blast is sent, the URL will be encoded with the merge tag values, when the RSVP button is selected the pre-populated web form will be rendered.

Interested in trying this out for yourself? Download PowerWebForm today and begin your FREE 30 day trial! Be sure to check out our full line of PowerPack CRM Add-Ons to extend your CRM functionality even more.

Happy CRM'ing!