Do you need to collect information from your website for sales or marketing purposes? What about service or other custom requirements to ease the data entry process on your end? Here are a few recommended options to consider when it comes to a web form with Salesforce:
- Web-to-Lead – ‘ol faithful, it’s been around since the dawn of Salesforce. It allows you to create html code via a few clicks and inject that into your website. It’s great for the bare bones basics and gets the job done. It also works nicely with any lead auto-response rules or lead assignment rules you may have setup in Salesforce. There are a few drawbacks however. If you want some validation rules (to ensure you get appropriate data) or a create a Captcha (to minimize spam), you’ll need to get a web developer involved. As the name suggests, it can only create lead records in Salesforce and it’s not smart enough to prevent duplicates. Works with Group Edition and above. Price: Free
- Web-to-Case – same idea as web to lead but it creates cases. It also works nicely with case assignment rules and case auto-response rules. It however has similar limitations (no validations or Captcha for example) to web to lead and has no ability to automatically relate itself to an account or contact. It populates web only fields instead (web name, web company etc). Cases then need to be manually linked to accounts and contacts within Salesforce. Available for Professional Edition and above. Price: Free
- WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce – If your website is built on the wordpress platform, you’ll likely want to try this plugin. It’s similar to web-to-lead but a quick add-in for WordPress users.
- Formassembly – The best of the 3rd party apps that allows you to create very powerful forms and integrate them with Salesforce. Create validation rules, conditional rules, custom layouts, contextual help and Captchas all without the need to write code! If you need to do push data to any object in Salesforce, no problem. In fact, you can load related child records. You can even update existing records in Salesforce! File attachments are also possible with most objects. Formassembly uses the API of course so you’ll want to make sure you don’t require more API calls than you have available to you. Works with all editions of Salesforce.
Here is an overview video of formassembly
Here are a few other options if the above don’t work for you.
- Force.com Sites – Part of the force.com platform, sites allow to build public web apps that are natively integrated with your instance of Salesforce. Just make sure that you run Enterprise Edition and you have a good developer available.
- Other 3rd party online form apps – FormSite, Formstack, Wufoo and Gravity Forms are but a few. They all have some form of Salesforce integration but are not as robust as Formassembly in my humble opinion. They may offer a better fit for your company however so do your comparisons.
- Survey Apps – Perhaps what you’re looking is a survey app? Formassembly also does surveys but Clicktools, Timba & Survey Force may be worth looking at also depending on your requirements.
Need help with a form for your website to get it integrated with Salesforce. We are Salesforce experts and Formassembly partners so we can help you with your integration requirements. For more information contact Perpetual West at 1 (877) 388-6400.