By Karin Pindle
If you use Eloqua forms, you should be sharing your Eloqua forms across all your campaigns. Why? It’s low maintenance, cleaner, and reporting is easier too. Let me explain why and how to share them.
Picture this (and I know some of you are not just picturing this, you’re living it)…
You have 50 forms in Eloqua that all have the same purpose of Contact Us and you need to update all 50 with a new field that your Sales team is now requiring to route leads, let’s say Industry. Argh! Now you have to go into all 50 forms in Eloqua and add this new field to each. And, you should test all of them too. No thanks!
Instead, a cleaner solution is to have one Contact Us form used/shared across all of your campaigns. In order to share the Contact Us form, you need to have an easy way to know which campaign the person was in when they submitted it (i.e. what drove them to your form).
That’s where the Eloqua Campaign ID aka elqCampaignId comes into play. Your Eloqua Campaign ID is generated automagically by Eloqua for every campaign you save and it’s easy to grab; it is in the URL. Go ahead, take a peak. You’ll see the ID right there in the URL. Neato! Here’s an example from a live Eloqua instance with 9065 being the ID: https://secure.p01.eloqua.com/Main.aspx#campaigns&id=9065
Here are the 4 key steps to sharing one Eloqua form across MANY campaigns:
- Create and save your Eloqua campaign. Note the Eloqua Campaign ID in the URL. Our top Eloqua Campaign ID tip is to store your Eloqua Campaign IDs in a spreadsheet so your team knows which ID aligns to each campaign and also whose campaign it is.
- Add the shared Eloqua form asset to your campaign canvas. You need to make sure that your form has a hidden form field called “elqCampaignId”. You can also add the landing page asset IF the form will be hosted on an Eloqua landing page, this will ensure any visitors to the landing page are also reported as part of the campaign. When creating the link to the form page, ensure each link contains the Eloqua Campaign ID. For example:
https://sojournsolutions.com/contact?elqCampaignId=285 - Here’s the clever bit – add JavaScript code to the page (web page or a landing page) where the Eloqua form lives so that the Eloqua Campaign ID is pulled from the URL and put into the hidden form field “elqCampaignId”. Alternatively, you can hardcode the Eloqua Campaign ID as a hidden field on the page, but this should only be done if no other channel will be linking to the same page)
- Test
Another tip: If you use multiple channels to drive people to the form page (like social, paid ads, email, print), ensure each link also contains another query string parameter so you know which channel drove them there. For example, you can use “src” which is short for source. Or, you could create a separate landing page per channel but then you’ll have LOTS of landing pages to maintain. Up to you 
If you need help implementing this solution, feel free to reach out to us:
https://sojournsolutions.com/contact?elqCampaignId=285
The post 4 Steps to Eloqua forms sharing and modern marketing happiness appeared first on Sojourn Solutions.
