Multi-step form / wizard; Contacts API or Forms API?
We have a custom multi-step form for the sign-up process on our website.
The first page is the sign-up page (requires name, email and phone) which leads to multiple steps where more data are captured at each step.
Should I be creating multiple HubSpot forms one for each step? Or is Contacts API more sensible?
In the Contacts documentation, it says “If your contacts come through online forms, use the Form Submission endpoint.” However, in Forms documentation, it says do not use it for “updating contact properties.”
What is the recommended approach for our scenario?
I would recommend building the multi-step form outside of HubSpot then once they have completed the full form send everything over to HubSpot via the Forms API. This allows you to capture the cookie of the visitor and attach it to the contact record which will allow for better segmentation and analytics.
The note on the Forms API documentations is made to dissuade people from using that endpoint when integrating with a CRM which would flood a portal with Form Submissions that don’t reflect the reality of the situation. If someone fills out a form more than once, it is perfectly acceptable to use the Form Submission API to updated that contact record.
Multi-step form / wizard; Contacts API or Forms API?
Hi Zack,
Thanks for the response. Given that users may drop off during the multi-step process, or logs out and come back to proceed with the process, I don’t feel this is the most ideal solution for us; we’d like HubSpot to have the latest data available at any point.
If we do call Forms API multiple times, once for each step, it sounds like this would potentially work?
On one of the steps, we ask the user to confirm the email address they filled in earlier in the step. However, it does not seem like Forms API allows you to update email address of an existing contact?
While you could do that, you could end up with a lot of form submissions in your portal that really represent one form submission. A way around that is store the information on your end then when there is an abandonment event (like there hasn’t been any new activity for 30 minutes, you send everything you have to HubSpot. I understand that’s more complicated but would better represent how many form submissions are actually taking place IMHO. As long as you are OK with the number of submissions coming in, feel free to a call for each step.
If you send HubSpot a new API call with the same cookie (the hutk as part of the hs_context field in the Forms API) HubSpot will deduplicate that and update the email address so you actually can update email address as long as it’s the same browser from before and they haven’t cleared their cookies in between.
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