One of the really handy features that Eloqua has is the form submit action that can be used on either Eloqua’s campaign canvas or program canvas.  Essentially it allows you to package up information on a contact and submit is using an Eloqua form.

Why would you want to do this?  My main reason is to create a custom object on the fly, but essentially it gives you the power of Eloqua form processing which includes:

• Notifications
• Update contacts with custom data
• Reposts
• Activity writing
• Trigger update rules
• Create/update Custom Objects

It gives you some really cool functionality that you don’t get on either Eloqua campaign or program canvas.

Tip from the top – In the old days everyone used to use this heavily.  DO NOT DO IT!  I was guilty of it – everyone is guilty of it (I hope).  Every time a contact goes through the form submit app it stamps that they have submitted a form.  This will play merry hell on your contacts in Prospect Profiler meaning that Sales will look at the 360’ view of the contact and think WTF because they will see multiple form submissions.  The other reason is that if you are using form submission in lead scoring you will alter the score unless you do something clever with your filter.

Installing the Form Submit Action App on Eloqua

If you haven’t already, this is a musty have app.  To install it do the following:

1. Go to https://cloud.oracle.com/marketplace/app/AppFormSubmitAction
2. Click Get App
3. Log in with your Eloqua credentials if you are asked to
4. Click on Accept and Install
5. Click Save
6. Click Sign In and give permission for the App to communicate with Eloqua
7. Click Accept

The app will now be installed.

Using the App in Eloqua

The same rules apply for both campaign canvas and program canvas.

First you need to create your form as usual in Eloqua.  Set the fields and the form actions you want to take place.  Save the form off and switch to back to your canvas.  For the purposes of this demonstration I will be using program canvas.

Tip from the top – If you are only submitting Email Address always create a blank field.  I call it spare.  This is because I found that sometimes the form submit app breaks or misbehaves when you only have email address.  When you set up the form, the field will do nothing but don’t worry about it.

Open an existing Eloqua campaign or program canvas, create your program and art the point you want the form submit app to be entered click into your program steps and find the form submit option and drag it on to the canvas.

Next double click into it to set the form

Click on the pencil to set up the form

Select the form that you wish to set using the drop down

The form fields will now load, at this point you need to select the corresponding contact fields you wish to submit this to

There are two other options available to you here.  You can either set none which will send nothing through or static and then type in a custom value.  These options are at the top of the dropdown.

Finally click Save

And that’s it! 

Or so you thought…….

Sadly this connector has a habit of breaking whenever you need it most.  I don’t know why it does it – but it does.  On a previous implementation we didn’t have an SFDC integration which caused problems because at certain stages they wanted an alert in the form of a form notification getting sent to the assigned salesperson so I used the Eloqua form submit app.  A few weeks into the campaign and all of the form submit apps broke and the contacts were stopped there.

To stop this happening you just need to add one very simple step, a wait step.

Pull a wait step over and set it near the form submit app

Double click into the wait step

Give the step a name and then set the time from for Eloqua to wait to 0.01 hours

Now set the bottom part which makes Eloqua send contacts to a new step back to the top of the form submit connector

Double click into your wait step

Click on routing

Click on Automatically route contacts with errors from the cloud app

This step will push contacts to another step of the Eloqua form submit app stops working.

Then click Choose

You will see a new Eloqua window pop up, click on the wait step that you previously set and then click Choose

So there you have it.  Now you know how what the form submit app is for, how to install it, set it up and most importantly how to stop this from breaking.