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The form pre-fill functionality has been around for years, but for Outbound marketing. It was added to Realtime in the September 2024 update in preview. The really exciting thing about how the pre-fill works in Realtime that differs with Outbound, is that cookies are not relied on for it to work. Awesome! This means we can send out an email to a Lead or Contact with a link to a page that contains a form, and the values we want to include as pre-filled are populated based on context passed through in the URL. Let’s jump in!
First things first, because it’s preview, there is a feature switch for it (at the time of this post being written). Make sure to turn it on then save before trying to use.
Next, go to the domain(s) where you embed your forms. You will see a new switch to allow Form prefill for your Realtime marketing forms. Make sure to turn this on.
It’s also worth reviewing your Compliance Profile. The prefill requires the customer to consent with the Tracking purpose. So if you have your Tracking purpose set up as Restrictive, and don’t ever give customers a way to Opt In, the Prefill will never work for anyone.
Now we can create a form (edit an existing one if you wish by following the same steps after creation).
The settings tab will now include a Prefill fields toggle. This is off by default but you can turn it on for forms you wish to use the feature on.
Once you have turned it on on the form level, all of the fields will have a little icon next to them indicating Prefill is turned on. If you want to turn it off for a specific field, simply select the field then toggle the Prefill switch to off. Hopefully this will be resolved soon, but one thing to note is that once you turn prefill on, it’s difficult (although not impossible) to change the label. So sort out the field labels first and THEN turn on Prefill.
You can also have prefill turned on for your consent related fields (Purpose and Topics). This should not be attempted to use as a replacement to Preference Centres, you will still need to include a link to the Preference Centre on the bottom of your Commercial emails, but it does mean you could make sure if someone navigates to your initial opt in page (subscribe to our newsletter) for example, prefilling means it would already show they are opted in to specific things making it a cleaner user experience.
After publishing and adding the form to your web page, you then just need to send out an email with a hyperlink or button linking to that page. The URL then has specific prefill context passed through in the URL which allows the values to be populated. Keep in mind, if the Contact or Lead forwards their email on to someone, the context is still there in the email… so would populate for the person they forwarded it on to. Also note, the links with the prefill context are valid for 30 days. So if the person clicks on a link from an older email, the values would not be populated on the forms.
One thing to note that I saw in my own environment, if you have added custom fields or changed the layout of the form, you might see some strange things with the prefill toggle in the settings area. It was turning back off for me after I published the marketing form which was in turn making ALL fields set for prefill. So if that happens, have your system administrator or customiser check the table and see if there is anything unmanaged lurking around before reporting to Microsoft.
Here we can see the form populated after an email was sent to Jim with a link to the page that contains the form. You can find more information here on how the consent model will determine how the purpose and topic tick boxes are handled and populated.
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A weekly issue covering features, functionality and news on the topic of Marketing, specifically covering Dynamics 365 Marketing and other interesting tools and tips for anyone interested in the subject.
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Hey Megan, when we tested this prefill we noticed that the form submission isn’t always linked to the same contact with the same guid, rather the same email address. This is an issue to keep in mind for an environment with lots of duplicates, or where email isn’t considered the unique identifier.
Have you found the same issue?
Hi Lauren, hmmm that wouldn’t be good! I don’t have that much data in my system so a bit harder to check. Will see if I can find out any more about that possible scenario.
Hi Lauren, some more feedback on this one. So the form matching logic will always kick in when someone submits a form. If you have duplicates, and if your form matching strategy is based on email address only (as an example), the match will be linked to the record with the most recent Modified Date. Currently there is no way to use the tracking context to override that.