Resource

🌐 The Ultimate Guide to Forms & Landing Pages That Perform

9/9/2025

by Sara McNamara

🫟 Introduction 🗯️ Why Forms & Landing Pages Matter Common Pitfalls 📝 Form Strategy Guiding Principles Standard Field Framework Guardrails 🕵️ Hidden Fields & Form-Level Settings Why You Should Care About Hidden Fields Important Form-Level Field Settings Hidden Fields Decision Matrix 🌍 Character Encoding & Data Integrity Why You Should Care About UTF-8 Encoding Best Practices 🗂️ Field Menu Governance Why You Should Care About a Field Menu The Solution: A Field Menu 👨‍🍳Example Field Menu Categories 🖼️ Landing Page Strategy Conversion Design Framework Governance & Standards 📊 Attribution & Routing Tracking Standards (Simple) Example Routing Logic ⚖️ Compliance 🎨 Branding & Compliance Consistency Why You Should Care About Branding & Compliance Branding Consistency Compliance Consistency 🛠️ Tools & Tech Stack 🧰 Tools for Scale & Governance ✅ Pre-Launch Checklists Form Checklist Landing Page Checklist 💡 Pro Tips Cheat Sheet 📊 Visual Frameworks Form Field Decision Matrix Landing Page Wireframe Matrix 🔄 Progressive Forms & AI-Enriched Profiling 📅 Alternatives & Complements to Forms 🎯 Landing Page Personalization 👀 What Now?

🫟 Introduction

Forms and landing pages are the front door of your funnel and are too often forgotten. You can either lose prospects with a clunky user experience or capture a clean, enriched contact record that’s ready for routing.

This guide will help you build conversion-optimized, compliant, pleasant, and scalable programs.

🗯️ Why Forms & Landing Pages Matter

Forms capture leads, enrich profiles, and enable routing. Landing pages create distraction-free conversion environments for offers such as demo requests or gated content. If you screw these up, you are hurting your pipeline right at the beginning of the customer journey.

Common Pitfalls

Some companies ask for too much too soon, which kills conversion rates. Others skip field validation, leading to dirty CRM data. Poor accessibility or mobile experiences frustrate users and reduce submissions. And without consistent naming and tracking, attribution becomes unreliable.

📝 Form Strategy

Guiding Principles

Keep required fields to a minimum — shorter forms convert better. Use progressive profiling across multiple touches so you can gather more data over time. And bake data hygiene into the form itself to prevent dirty records from ever reaching your systems.

💡

Focus on shorter forms, collecting the data that is hard to get reliably with enrichment — like job title, email address, company (especially in this chaotic economy, with many layoffs and job changes)

Standard Field Framework

Field	Required	Notes
First Name	✅	Capitalize properly for personalization
Last Name	✅	Normalize casing for clean CRM records
Business Email	✅	Block Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail; enrichment works better with business emails
Company	✅	Anchor enrichment and routing to company field
Country	✅	Enables territory routing and compliance
Job Title	✅	Collect directly; enrichment is unreliable
Industry	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Capture progressively or enrich later
Company Size	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Capture progressively or enrich later
# of ads running	💰 Enrich	This is an example of a field that I can pay pennies on the dollar to enrich, rather than asking folks to enter it in themselves — and it’s more reliable from ad libraries than user memory. Think about fields like this, when it comes to what’s worth enriching on the back-end.

Guardrails

Use regex (or email validation APIs, like Neverbounce) for email validation to ensure formatting and block junk data. Suppress spam and student domains to reduce CRM noise. And map fields consistently across CRM and MAP to avoid duplicates and broken workflows. More on data cleanliness here!

🕵️ Hidden Fields & Form-Level Settings

Why You Should Care About Hidden Fields

Hidden fields are the backbone of attribution and automation. Your prospects never see them, but they quietly pass key metadata into your MAP and CRM. Campaign tracking and lead routing are a pain without them.

Examples of Hidden Fields

UTM parameters can be captured directly from the URL and stored on the lead record, so you know which channel or campaign drove the form fill.

Campaign IDs help connect submissions to the right campaign object in your CRM.

Lead source and source detail show whether the lead came from paid, organic, referral, or partner.

Offer type or content type tags the asset (whitepaper, webinar, demo request) for reporting.

Lifecycle stage triggers can automatically update a lead’s funnel stage when a specific form is completed (example: if your org considers a demo request to be a MQL, you could set MQL lifecycle stage here).

Important Form-Level Field Settings

Most MAPs let you configure how fields behave at the global level and within each form. Getting these settings right is what keeps your database clean and your automations running smoothly. And helps you keep your sanity, lol. Otherwise, you’ll be combating data and reporting leaks all over the place.

Best Practices

Standardize picklists across your MAP so you don’t end up with messy free-text entries like “IT,” “I.T.,” and “Information Technology” all meaning the same thing.

Keep operational fields hidden. For example, don’t expose lifecycle stage or lead status to users — handle those values in the background.

💡

If you must pass a sensitive (or self-conscious) field via UTM or URL, use anonymized values instead of the internal value — for example, instead of passing the campaign name “2025Q4-LinkedIn-Competitive-ABM-Ads” you could pass a value like campaign=2352352 and map that internally. This feels less creepy for the user.

Use progressive profiling at the form level so returning visitors see new fields over time instead of the same ones again. If you try to capture all of your fields at once, it could overwhelm the user and they could abandon your form. This is especially key for demo request forms and free sign-up forms (for PLG).

Always test hidden fields by submitting sample forms in a test campaign. Check that the values actually make it through to your MAP and CRM. ← do NOT set and forget without testing! You’ll end up with a backlog of screwed up records that will build over time 🫠

Hidden Fields Decision Matrix

Hidden Field	Include?	Why It Matters
UTM Source	✅ Always	Ties form fills back to the marketing channel (paid, organic, social).
UTM Medium	✅ Always	Distinguishes between ad formats or placements (email, CPC, referral).
UTM Campaign	✅ Always	Connects submissions to specific campaigns for reporting.
UTM Content	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Useful for A/B test tracking but not always necessary.
Campaign ID	✅ Always	Ensures leads sync into the right campaign object in CRM.
Lead Source	✅ Always	Provides a high-level categorization of where the lead originated.
Source Detail	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Adds granularity, such as “Paid Social – LinkedIn.”
Offer Type / Asset	✅ Always	Tracks what was consumed (webinar, whitepaper, demo request).
Lifecycle Stage	Conditional	Set on demo or contact-us forms to mark MQL automatically.
Event ID / Webinar ID	Conditional	Important when syncing registrations to event tools or webinars.
Language / Region	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Helps localize follow-up but not required for every campaign.
Cookie ID / Session ID	❌ Avoid	Better handled by analytics tools; duplicating creates messy records.

🌍 Character Encoding & Data Integrity

Why You Should Care About UTF-8 Encoding

Forms and landing pages often capture names, emails, and company data that include special characters — accents, umlauts, hyphens, or even non-Latin alphabets. If your systems aren’t consistently enforcing UTF-8 at EVERY data pass/transformation step, those characters can break or get stripped as the data moves through APIs, MAPs, CRMs, and enrichment tools.

When encoding isn’t handled correctly, you end up with broken records like “José” turning into “Jos?”, “München” becoming “M?nchen,” or “Zoë” showing up as “Zo�.”

Raise your hand if you’ve walked into a new MAP or CRM and seen a bunch of ��s. ✋

This isn’t just cosmetic either. It hurts personalization, can cause deliverability issues if emails bounce due to malformed characters, and it’s a poor experience for prospects when their names are mangled when exposed back to them.

Best Practices

Standardize on UTF-8 everywhere, from form submission through APIs to CRM storage. Work closely with your web developers — I’ve had really experienced developers forget to explicitly enforce UTF-8 encoding on one little javascript snippet, and that’s enough to cause malformation.

Test forms with edge cases like accented letters, emojis, and non-Latin scripts to confirm data integrity. Too many teams only test for english, which is a mistake.

Watch for legacy systems or connectors that downgrade encoding to ASCII or ISO standards.

Store both the raw UTF-8 version and a normalized version if you need to simplify reporting.

Confirm with IT and vendors that MAPs, CRMs, and enrichment partners all fully support UTF-8.

🗂️ Field Menu Governance

Why You Should Care About a Field Menu

Field sprawl is one of the most common issues in Marketing Ops. Different teams ask for slightly different fields — “Job Function,” “Role,” “Title” — and before you know it, reporting is a mess and enrichment is unreliable. New fields can also create compliance risk if they haven’t been vetted by InfoSec, Privacy, and Legal.

The Solution: A Field Menu 👨‍🍳

A Field Menu is a pre-approved library of fields that stakeholders can pick from when they request a new form. Every field has already been checked for compliance, mapped correctly to CRM/MAP, and aligned with reporting needs. This is an example of proactive stakeholder management — by offering this menu, you can deter the behavior you DON’T want to see from stakeholders…asking for duplicative fields or being messy with data. Instead of saying “no” and being seen as a “wall of no”, you can reframe yourself as a wall of yes — yes, choose these fields and let’s get going with the campaign. 🙂

This way, marketers don’t create duplicates, ops doesn’t have to clean up sprawl later, and Legal is comfortable that no risky data is being collected. And they still have the option of asking for a new field…they’ll just have to submit a request with Legal, and that is out of MOPs hands and could take weeks. 😉

Example Field Menu Categories

Identity fields: First Name, Last Name, Business Email

Company fields: Company Name, Industry, Company Size, HQ Location

Role fields: Job Title (required), Department (optional)

Event fields: T-shirt size, Dietary restrictions, Gift choice

Routing fields: Country, State/Province, Region

Compliance fields: GDPR Opt-in, CCPA Consent

Campaign fields: UTM parameters, Offer type

🖼️ Landing Page Strategy

Conversion Design Framework

A strong landing page wireframe starts with a headline and subheadline that state the value proposition clearly. Keep your hero CTA above the fold so it’s visible without any (or much) scrolling — including on mobile screens. Place the form in a prominent position, typically on the right or center. Add logos or testimonials for social proof, and use supporting copy or FAQs to address objections before submission. Yes, creativity is great — but not if your prospects can’t find the form or leave the page because of a lack of clear value prop.

Governance & Standards

Adopt a naming convention such as 2025-Q3-US-Webinar-ProductDemo-LP to keep assets organized and reporting clean. Use an approval flow that runs from Marketing to Ops to Legal so compliance is never an afterthought. And test for accessibility under WCAG 2.1 (or similar accessibility) standards, making sure pages are screen-reader friendly, have proper color contrast, and include alt text for images.

📊 Attribution & Routing

Tracking Standards

Always include UTMs. utm_source identifies the channel, utm_medium specifies the campaign medium, utm_campaign ties the activity back to a campaign object, and utm_content helps distinguish variations.

(Simple) Example Routing Logic

Lead Type	Routing Path	Why
ICP-fit	SDR or AE queue	These leads match your Ideal Customer Profile. Speed-to-lead matters, and routing them directly prevents competitors from engaging first.
Non-ICP	Nurture programs	Keeps sales focused on high-value accounts while marketing builds awareness and engagement.
Spam/Fake	Suppressed or recycled	Prevents CRM clutter, saves SDR time, and ensures reporting isn’t skewed by junk.

⚖️ Compliance

Include GDPR/CCPA consent checkboxes where required (ask your legal team or refer to applicable privacy laws for your business). Always link to your privacy policy to increase trust and stay compliant.

🎨 Branding & Compliance Consistency

Why You Should Care About Branding & Compliance

Forms and landing pages are often the first branded experience a prospect has after clicking an ad or email. If they don’t look and feel like your core site, or if they collect data in non-compliant ways, you risk losing trust and creating legal exposure.

Branding Consistency

Design should align with your brand’s colors, typography, and imagery. Copy should carry the same tone of voice as your ads, website, and sales messaging. Branded elements should render properly on mobile, and trust signals like logos, SSL badges, or certifications should be visible.

💡

This isn’t just a cosmetic thing, by the way — in the age of phishing and internet scams, consistent branding is key to help consumers avoid falling for traps. If they know your emails always come from @saramcnamara.com and have the same logo, they’re more likely to spot when someone is trying to spoof you with @yahoo.com and a different logo.

Compliance Consistency

Collect only the fields approved by Legal, Privacy, and InfoSec. Make privacy policies easily accessible. Build audit trails so consent, field choices, and versioning can be reviewed later. Basically…don’t make your policies a mystery that every individual has to ask for.

For ops teams, this protects brand equity, prevents compliance debt, and reduces rework when new campaigns launch.

🛠️ Tools & Tech Stack

Category	Example Tools	Notes
Form Builders	HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Knak, Typeform, Default, Zapier	Use native when possible for better sync
Landing Pages	HubSpot CMS, Webflow, Knak, Unbounce, Instapage	Choose based on IT alignment and scale
Enrichment	Clay, Clearbit, ZoomInfo	Reduce form length by enriching backend
Optimization	Optimizely, Hotjar	Test UX and gather behavioral insights

🧰 Tools for Scale & Governance

As your organization grows, managing forms and landing pages manually becomes unsustainable. The right tools ensure speed, consistency, compliance, and governance.

Knak provides drag-and-drop builders for emails, landing pages, and forms. It lets non-technical marketers build brand-compliant assets quickly, reducing reliance on developers. The great part about the centralized tool is that it means just 1 place to create, edit, and approve assets, and you can enforce consistent branding.

Sonar/Arovy provide visibility into MAP/CRM configurations. They show where fields and workflows are used so you don’t break dependencies when making changes. They also surface duplicates and redundancies, improving governance. The great thing is, you can share the interface across teams so everyone can see a live, updated schema for your data. If you can’t afford a tool, just spin up a Google Sheet and make at least 1 person per team responsible for updating it with each change.

Other useful categories include experimentation tools for A/B testing, enrichment vendors to reduce form fields, and consent management platforms to enforce compliance.

✅ Pre-Launch Checklists

Form Checklist

Required fields tested. Make sure mandatory fields don’t block valid submissions.

Free domains blocked. This prevents personal emails that weaken enrichment.

Progressive profiling enabled. Collect new information over time without overwhelming users.

Sync to CRM campaigns. Confirm submissions flow into the correct campaign for attribution.

Landing Page Checklist

Single CTA. Keeps the page focused and reduces abandonment.

Social proof included. Testimonials or logos boost trust.

UTMs tested. Attribution depends on this.

Mobile responsive. A significant share (estimated to be ~65%) of traffic comes from mobile.

Load speed under two seconds. Faster pages convert better and reduce bounce.

💡 Pro Tips Cheat Sheet

Short forms almost always convert better, so use enrichment strategically.

Test CTA copy — action-oriented CTAs like “Get My Demo” outperform generic ones like “Submit”.

Remove navigation on gated pages so prospects stay focused on converting.

Prefill known fields to make submission faster and more trustworthy.

📊 Visual Frameworks

Form Field Decision Matrix

Field	Include?	Why
First Name	✅ Always	Needed for personalization in emails and sales follow-up.
Last Name	✅ Always	Provides full identity for record matching and SDR outreach.
Business Email	✅ Always	Ensures enrichment and routing accuracy; personal emails lack value.
Company	✅ Always	Necessary for firmographic data and account-based routing.
Country	✅ Always	Enables territory routing and compliance with local regulations.
Job Title	✅ Always	Critical for segmentation and scoring; enrichment is unreliable.
Company Size	🤷‍♀️ Progressive/Enrich	Important for ICP fit, but better captured later or through enrichment.
Industry	🤷‍♀️ Progressive/Enrich	Useful for segmentation, but enrichment is often cleaner.
Phone Number	❌ Avoid	Lowers conversion rates; only collect if absolutely necessary.
Personal Email	❌ Avoid	Low-quality data that doesn’t enrich well in B2B.

Landing Page Wireframe Matrix

Element	Include?	Why
Headline	✅ Always	Clearly communicates the value proposition.
Sub-headline	✅ Always	Supports the headline with additional clarity.
Hero CTA (above fold)	✅ Always	Keeps the primary action visible immediately.
Form	✅ Always	Essential to capture conversions.
Social Proof	✅ Always	Increases trust and reduces hesitation.
Trust Indicators	✅ Always	Reassures visitors with certifications or policies.
Secondary CTAs	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Can capture hesitant users but may distract.
Images or Video	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Adds engagement but must not hurt page speed.
FAQs / Additional Info	🤷‍♀️ Optional	Removes friction by answering objections.
Navigation Menu	❌ Avoid	Creates exit points that reduce conversions.
Footer Exit Links	❌ Avoid	Distracts users away from form completion.
Pop-ups / Auto-play	❌ Avoid	Interruptive and lowers trust.

🔄 Progressive Forms & AI-Enriched Profiling

Progressive forms reveal new fields over time so you don’t overwhelm prospects at first touch. Pair them with enrichment to pre-fill company size, industry, and revenue, while reserving forms for data enrichment can’t handle reliably, like job title.

AI makes progressive profiling adaptive. It can decide which fields to show based on user behavior, hide attributes already enriched, predict when prospects will abandon forms, and route leads in real time.

Example flow:

A visitor downloads a whitepaper and provides only name and email.

Enrichment fills company, industry, and size.

When they return for a webinar, the form asks for job title and country.

AI recognizes that industry is already enriched, so it asks for department instead.

On a demo request, AI scores the lead as ICP-fit and routes it instantly to SDRs.

💡

You don’t need AI to show fields progressively, but it can help do so more intelligently. Same with scoring.

📅 Alternatives & Complements to Forms

Sometimes the best conversion isn’t a form, it’s letting someone book directly or interact conversationally via chat. Meet the consumer where they are, don’t force them into an experience they hate. You have options:

Scheduling Tools

Calendly is simple and widely used, easy to embed on landing pages.

Default is built for B2B and adds qualification before showing availability.

Chili Piper is common in enterprise SaaS, routing meetings to the right rep instantly.

LeanData combines routing with scheduling so the right team always gets the lead.

Chatbots

Modern bots now act like conversational forms. They qualify leads dynamically, route high-intent visitors to SDRs or schedulers, personalize flows based on data, and work 24/7.

Best Practices

Use schedulers on high-intent pages like demo requests and pricing. Use chatbots in places where conversation adds value, such as product tours or content hubs. Always sync both back to CRM and keep them on-brand. Always have back-up plans, like a follow-up email offering a recorded demo if someone fails to book a live meeting.

Schedulers and chatbots don’t replace forms and landing pages, but they complement them. By offering multiple paths to conversion, you meet buyers where they are and reduce drop-off.

🎯 Landing Page Personalization

Personalization can dramatically improve conversion rates. Industry-specific messaging, role-based copy, or ABM landing pages resonate better than generic content.

Forms can also be personalized by showing or hiding fields based on CRM data, pre-filling known values, or tailoring questions by persona. Landing pages can dynamically swap headlines, value props, and CTAs

👀 What Now?

My biggest next-step advice to you is to:

Audit your forms and landing pages, if you haven’t in the last 6 months. Export them from your MAP and import them into a Google Sheet. Then:

Retire any old forms/LPs that are no longer relevant (especially old in-person events)
Assign an owner for each evergreen asset (to ensure it stays updated and used)
Make sure old pages are updated to be compliant and to provide complete data profiles for your leads

If you don’t already have the standards listed in the guide above, work towards creating them. Create an established process to request, build, edit, and deploy forms and LPs. Create your own internal guide on which fields are required on which forms.

If you’re drowning in campaign creation, especially in an enterprise org, consider a tool like Knak, Sonar, etc. There are tools out there that can help take all of this documentation and management weight off of your shoulders…and it tends to be easier to justify a licensing fee instead of headcount these days.

If no one has tested your forms or landing pages in a while, try to partner with marketing or sales to do so. Run some A/B tests, see if your assumptions about form length and landing page look/feel are still correct. Too many orgs set and forget this, and are leaving leads and money on the table!

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