Marketers of today operate in the era of big data, which, while making them privy to immense possibilities, also makes their jobs that much more difficult compared to their predecessors. You see, there are multiple considerations when big data is involved- locating the data you need becomes a challenge, you run the risk of having data stored in silos, ensuring data security becomes an uphill task, and the like. In a time and day when delivering hyper-personalized experiences has become the norm, you can ill-afford to be bogged down by these challenges. So now, how do you effectively circumvent them? Why, by embracing marketing automation, of course!
Facilitating efficiency, dialing up conversions, taking care of repetitive and manual tasks, nurturing leads- the merits of marketing automation are many, which is why it has come to find a place in virtually every business’ toolkit today, irrespective of their size and scale. Now, while there are quite a few marketing automation platforms for you to choose from, few are as powerful and feature-rich as Pardot by Salesforce. Goes without saying, thus, that in order to make the most of it, one must strive to be fluent with its myriad capabilities; that’s precisely what we aim to help you out with today. In this blog, we take a detailed look at a number of sophisticated Pardot features that you can leverage to give a leg up to your marketing endeavors. Curious to find out what they are? Well, dive right in!
Engagement Studio
In order to deliver a sublime user experience to your customers, you must engage them effectively at every stage of the customer journey. Pardot’s Engagement Studio helps you do just that. Easily among Pardot’s most sophisticated features, Engagement Studio gives you a clear picture of your email drip campaigns. Once you have launched your drip campaign, you can monitor and track it with ease thanks to the wide range of tools that Engagement Studio has to offer. Additionally, you can execute an array of other actions, too, such as adding/removing tags, notifying users, changing fields, adding/removing lists, assigning groups to users, and sending automated emails. What’s more, by integrating Engagement Studio with a Salesforce Connector, you can realize extremely efficient and hassle-free email marketing automation.
You can configure whether Pardot initiates the appropriate actions immediately or upon your lead reaching a particular stage (and satisfying a specific condition- what marketers refer to as triggers). Engagement Studio lets you define a number of triggers such as email open, content view, file download, email link open, click on content, and the like. By utilizing prospect attributes like lead grade, status, score, campaign, tag, etc., you can specify rules that will subsequently govern the steps recipients will take in your drip campaign.
B2B Marketing Analytics
When your customers and prospects interact with your digital marketing assets, they produce B2B marketing data. What Pardot’s B2B Marketing Analytics does is provide you with data visualizations, allowing you to glean critical and actionable insights. An Einstein Analytics app, B2B Marketing Analytics brings your marketing and sales data to one place; this enables either department to complement the functioning of the other, ultimately resulting in revenue maximization. By helping you gain a clear and accurate idea of your campaign’s ROI, B2B Marketing Analytics helps you go about performance optimization in an extremely informed manner. Besides, they also offer a comparative analysis of the performance of all your various campaigns; this proves to be extremely handy when it comes to budget allocation.
Pardot’s B2B Marketing Analytics comprises three important components. They are:
- Datasets: This is source data that has been formatted and dispatched to Analytics Studio. In B2B Marketing Analytics, you can create a dataset from Salesforce data, a CSV file, or simply connect to data in data warehouses, supported applications, and database services.
- Lenses: Lenses in B2B Marketing Analytics refer to a specific view of a dataset. They are used for visualization and exploratory data analysis. The four standard lenses in B2B Marketing Analytics are Pipeline Deals, Lead Sources, Campaigns, and Lifecycle Snapshot.
- Dashboards: They refer to a group of charts, tables, and metrics; they are based on data contained in one or more lenses. The different types of dashboards present in B2B Marketing Analytics are pipeline dashboard, engagement dashboard, marketing manager (a combination of pipeline and engagement, account-based marketing, and multi-touch attribution dashboard.
Dynamic Content
Hands down among Pardot’s most powerful features, Dynamic Content lets you deliver personalized content to every segment of your audience. In the process, it empowers you to skyrocket your engagement and conversions. Based on a particular user’s engagement, you can create custom emails, forms, websites, landing pages, and other assets with the help of Dynamic Content. With this Pardot feature, you can make sure to leave a deeply positive impact on your customers’ minds and have them looking forward to your communications.
As powerful as Dynamic Content is, there are certain limitations associated with it in Pardot. Let’s take a look at them.
- One can only use one prospect field at a time while creating dynamic content.
- You aren’t allowed to utilize custom object data directly from object.
- It is mandatory to declare actual field values while defining a dynamic content variation; one can’t set it to “is blank” or “is empty”.
- You can only create a maximum number of 25 variations.
Connected Campaign
Released in 2018, Connected Campaign is a comparatively new Pardot feature which enables users to combine their Salesforce and Pardot campaigns. In doing so, it paves the way for streamlining campaign management and makes campaign reporting extremely unfussy. Moreover, Connected Campaign lets you access Pardot Einstein Campaign Insights and Engagement History without leaving Salesforce. The improved connectivity fostered by this feature makes managing workflows highly convenient for marketers.
There are certain considerations one has to contend with while using Connect Campaigns. Let’s find out what they are.
- Upon enabling Connected Campaigns, marketing asset sync takes place, counting towards storage limits.
- When Salesforce and Pardot campaigns are connected, the former becomes the master campaign, and thus field values belonging to it are considered to be true. As a result, if there happens to be any difference between the field values of both, Pardot field values get overwritten by Salesforce field values (And this can’t be reversed, in case you were wondering). Some fields which particularly happen to be at risk in the event of value discrepancies are Campaign Name, Cost, Updated By, Archive Date, Created By, and Updated At. Hence, one is always advised to export Pardot campaign data into a CSV file to be on the safe side.
- Once Pardot campaigns get connected, you can no longer effect edits for they become read-only. All subsequent edits to campaign records can only be made in Salesforce. You won’t be able to create new Pardot campaigns, either; if you wish to, you would have to create them in Salesforce and await their syncing to Pardot.
Salesforce User Sync
This is an administration feature that allows users to manage their Salesforce and Pardot accounts simultaneously. Salesforce User Sync is an opt-in feature and can only be enabled when the user has a Salesforce and Pardot connector. This feature fosters enhanced user experience and improved user management, along with boosting security. Keep in mind that once Salesforce User Sync is enabled, Pardot becomes a Salesforce platform-powered native lighting application; this results in a substantial change in how you use Pardot. If you happen to be a new Pardot user, your user profile will be matched to the respective Salesforce profile once you opt for User Sync. Once this feature is enabled, it can’t be disabled.
Wrapping It Up
Although getting marketing automation can be pretty complex, with Pardot in your toolkit the endeavor stands to become a lot simpler for you. We hope you are able to tactfully leverage the Pardot features discussed above and take your marketing campaigns head and shoulders above your competitors.