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How Our Website Integrates With Salesforce

Since I started at Newfangled four months ago, part of my job has been getting our Salesforce database into shape so that it is a useful tool for our business. One of the main goals of our Salesforce implementation is to provide an accurate picture of each person who has interacted with us in some way. This is achieved in part through our database of leads, which is integrated with our website. Each time someone responds to a call to action on our site—registers for a webinar, signs up for our newsletter—a new lead is pulled into Salesforce.

Because of this, our database of leads is very large, and it used to be pretty messy. By tweaking our web-to-lead integration and implementing some excellent deduplication add-ons, we’re much closer to that goal than we used to be.

This post will provide some detail about how our web forms integrate with Salesforce and why this integration is important to our business.

All Our Calls to Action Integrate with Salesforce

Every individual page of the Newfangled website features at least one call to action. On this page alone you can sign up to receive our newsletter or blog digest, or register for an upcoming webinar. All of these calls to action integrate with our Salesforce database.

This means that if you come to our website and sign up for our newsletter, as soon as you click “submit,” you are entered as a lead in Salesforce.

As you can see in the image above, one of the fields populated in Salesforce is the checkbox called “Newsletter Subscriber.” Before this checkbox was checked each time someone subscribed to our newsletter, the only field in Salesforce that proved that someone had signed up for the newsletter was “Lead Source.” (As you can see above, it says “Web – Newsletter Signup.”) I knew this would be a problem when I starting deduplicating the database and merging leads, because a lead can only have one lead source. There needed to be another way to show that someone was a newsletter subscriber.

Changing Mapping Conditions for Web-to-Lead Forms

When I wanted to tweak how our web forms mapped to Salesforce, I worked with Dave, one of our developers. I knew what I wanted to happen: “Whenever someone signs up for the newsletter, I want the ‘Newsletter Subscriber’ box to be checked.” But what does that really mean?

Here’s the mapping definition for the newsletter sign-up form:


The highlighted portions are the names of the lead fields we are mapping to in Salesforce. You can see that the field on our form called “Name” is mapped onto a field that is identified by a long string of letters and numbers. This is because “Name” maps to a custom field called “Full Name,” and custom fields are identified by a 15-digit code. 

Salesforce has two separate fields for names—”First Name” and “Last Name.” Rather than require two separate fields, we created one custom field to make our newsletter call to action easier to say yes to.

The “Newsletter Subscriber” checkbox is also a custom field. When I wanted to make sure that it would be checked whenever a newsletter sign-up form was submitted, I had to find the custom field ID for that checkbox.

Here’s how to find a custom field ID in Salesforce:

  1. Click the user name that appears in the top right corner of your Salesforce window (to the left of “Help & Training”), and select “Setup” from the dropdown menu that appears. Once the Setup landing page has loaded, follow this path: App Setup → Customize → Leads → Fields. 
  2. Locate the custom field you’re interested in, and click on its field label. The custom field ID is located in the address bar.


Why Integrate With Salesforce?

As I said earlier, one of the main goals of our Salesforce implementation is to provide us with an accurate picture of each person who interacts with us in some way. By tweaking our web-to-lead integration only slightly, we are now better prepared to reach that goal. And a viable and accurate database of leads makes for a better sales and marketing process, both for us and our potential clients.

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