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About Celine Newsome

CRM & Marketing Automation Strategist. Celine is a 2x Salesforce certified consultant who also spent nearly 4 years working with Eloqua. She has 6+ years experience working with marketing automation in a variety of industries such as finance, software, homebuilding, and e-commerce. Her free time is usually spent playing tennis.

Email Campaign Efficiency: Tips for Saving Time and Boosting Results

It’s time to launch another email campaign and the anxiety sets in. You have a variety of people on different teams who want their eyes (and opinions) on your emails before you can launch them. This back and forth can be overwhelming and gets buried in 50+ long email threads

Stop the madness! Let’s talk about how to organize the chaos — making your life easier when it’s time to launch an email campaign. Here are a few email campaign tips.

Use an Email Brief

It’s a blank sheet of paper for most clients and they get overwhelmed with where and how to start. Sometimes you need to partner with someone who has a plan you can easily take, customize it to your needs, and boom! You have a starting place now. 

Let’s talk about what exactly you should include in an email brief.

What to include in the email brief

Campaign Overview and Objective 

  • Start with a brief description of the campaign’s purpose and main objective
  • Use it as an opportunity to define its purpose with absolute clarity and give helpful background to your team who will be viewing the brief
  • Clearly state what you want to achieve, such as increasing sales, promoting a new product, driving traffic to a website, or building brand awareness

Metrics and Reporting

  • Clearly define the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure the success of the campaign
  • Stick to goals that translate into clear, measurable objectives
  • Link to the report you plan to use once the campaign is launched

Email Content and Format Crafted for the Target Audience

  • Specify the type of content you want to include in the email, such as text, images, videos, or interactive elements
  • Indicate any personalization elements or segmentation strategies you want to implement to make the email more relevant and engaging to the recipients

Email Schedule

  • Provide the proposed sending date and time for the email

Call-to-Action (CTA)

Internal Timeline 

  • A clear timeline can let team members get involved and stay moving quickly. 
  • Include internal deadlines for teams to owe you items or are giving you approval

Identify and Fix Recurring Pain Points

Continuous edits to email HTML and copy is a common pain point among clients. There are tools like Stensul that can make your life easier because it keeps all the edits out of email threads. 

It is essential to have integrations and features like these to have the capacity to scale operations and to accommodate increases in volume while meeting requester’s timing requirements, all without the need to hire additional staff or compromise on quality. 

Check out this webinar with Sercante & Stensul together where they share tips for integrating an email creation platform into your strategy to ease common pain points.

Create a plan, look for ways to add efficiency, and repeat

Ok so let’s recap!

The first thing you’re going to do is draft and use a brief. If you’re stuck, start with the email brief items listed in this post.

Then you’re going to document your process and iterate on it! 

The goal is to make your campaign launch life easier each time. When you identify a pain point, test out a solution for it and see if the process gets even better.

Original article: Email Campaign Efficiency: Tips for Saving Time and Boosting Results

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Email Campaign Efficiency: Tips for Saving Time and Boosting Results appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-08-23T19:06:40+00:00August 23rd, 2023|Categories: Emails & Forms, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Why Should Marketing Admins Have Salesforce Access?

Getting marketing team access to your Salesforce org breaks down company siloes and can lead to enriched data you can use for things like Einstein campaign reporting.

So, you want to make the case for getting your marketing team’s hands into your company or organization’s Salesforce org. But, you’re having trouble making the case to the team that manages it.

The team may come back to you with things like,

Why do you need to get into our Salesforce org?

and

Don’t you have your own marketing automation program and mailing lists?

Well, this post is going to help you make the case for getting marketing admin access to your Salesforce org.

Salesforce needs interconnectivity to fulfill its data hub destiny

Think of Salesforce (a.k.a. Sales Cloud/Service Cloud) as your one stop shop for all your data. 

When you’re working for a company with multiple departments, or at an enterprise-level company with many locations and lines of business, you have multiple technology tools that connect to Salesforce and enrich that data. For example, your marketing team uses automation programs for email marketing and your 

And the reality is, you are one person. So, you can’t possibly know all the ins and outs of each tech tool that’s connected to your Salesforce org. 

All the Salesforce admins can live in harmony with shared access

The good news is that other tools probably have their own admins and experts who are part of your company or organization. 

These technology specialists can be your best friend when it comes to troubleshooting something between that tool and Salesforce. But, they can only be an effective best friend if they have the right level of access in Salesforce. 

Otherwise, you’re going to be an annoying best friend who asks them to look at a bunch of things you could easily look at yourself to solve the issue. 

What I’m trying to say is they become a bottleneck — unintentionally or intentionally. 

Build a process to prevent issues from Salesforce user access

They are probably thinking, 

but I don’t want anybody to mess up the Salesforce system I’ve worked so hard to build.

And it’s understandable.

I’m here to tell you that admins can give you access and ask you not to change something in the system without going through the proper process. 

Yes, that means they have to instill trust in you. That’s what makes a good team! 

Understand the Salesforce user roles

The Salesforce Marketing User in Sales/Service Cloud can create, read, edit, and delete records they can access, and they can import leads.

If you’re granted access to Sales Cloud through an Admin role, or something custom, be sure the person communicates the specifics of your user role to you. You should fully understand what you’re capable of before diving in. And the person granting access to you has a responsibility to assign a user role to you that provides an appropriate level of access.

Document a process for marketing users

Work with your Salesforce admin to establish everything marketing users need to know about their level of Salesforce access. Put it all in a document, and remember to include the process for requesting changes beyond the marketing user access level.

Make your case and get the user access you need

In case your Salesforce admin still isn’t sold on the idea of giving you admin access, here are three reasons why they should. Use these to help them understand why it’s so important for the marketing team to have access

Giving marketing users access to Sales Cloud:

  1. Allows troubleshooting to happen quickly. The marketing user doesn’t have to ping the Salesforce admin every time they need help with simple tasks for things like reporting or connected campaigns.
  2. Makes other software admins learn how Salesforce works. There’s less back-and-forth communication in the long run! 
  3. Creates shared ownership among the tools. This means less finger pointing and more collaborative ownership to build and troubleshoot.

So, if your Salesforce admin was on the fence about giving you access to Salesforce, I hope this helps you get them to rethink and ultimately grant access. I am confident in saying it’s best for the long run.

Use the comments section to tell us how it goes! Or share your Salesforce admin access stories if you dare.

Original article: Why Should Marketing Admins Have Salesforce Access?

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Why Should Marketing Admins Have Salesforce Access? appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-05-28T12:06:38+00:00May 28th, 2022|Categories: Analytics & Reporting, Data Management, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Common Pardot Salesforce Connector Errors & How to Fix Them

It’s a sad fact in life that sometimes you can do everything right and still encounter issues. This is also true for the Pardot/Salesforce connector.

The three most common Pardot Salesforce Connector errors we see marketing automation admins continuously face are:

  1. “Your Salesforce Connector User does not have all of the permissions Pardot expects”
  2. “Prospect and custom object sync has been paused since [a certain date/time]. If sync is paused for more than 30 days, you’ll need to do a full sync to get all updates.”
  3. The connector is stuck on “Verification in Progress

Here is how to solve these common Pardot Salesforce Connector Errors.

  1. Your Salesforce Connector User does not have all of the permissions Pardot expects

You ran a successful email campaign last week and are eagerly waiting to hear from the sales team on last week’s MQL report. When you get the report you realize a large majority of your marketing leads are missing. You navigate to the Sync Errors report and notice this message “Your Salesforce Connector User does not have all of the permissions Pardot expects” next to the prospects from your campaign.

No fear, this error sounds more scary than it is.

Pardot is simply letting you know that it is expecting to have access to read and write certain fields, but the profile settings of the connector user currently prohibit that for some number of fields (those listed in the error).

This tends to happen more often in established Pardot orgs if profiles or field-level permissions change in Salesforce, but we’ve seen it come up in newly implemented Pardot orgs also. 

In the newly implemented org case, what typically happens is that you follow steps to set up the V2 connector with a Pardot Connector User and then go to the Connectors tab in Pardot, where you see this warning message:

Your first thought is: “What the heck! I followed every step in the implementation guide.”

The first step of setting up the Pardot Connector User (on either the V1 or V2 connector) is to assign the Pardot Connector User Permission Set but that doesn’t actually give Pardot access to everything it needs. Certain objects aren’t covered by that permission set because of Salesforce security restrictions. After you assign the permission set, you must manually configure your connector user’s permissions for Salesforce standard objects. Here’s a handy guide on how to Assign Object Permissions to the Connector User.

What you need to do:

Manually set field-level permissions to the Pardot Integration Profile.  Go into those fields, edit the field-level permissions and add to the connector profile and things should work well going forward.

Here are steps to edit the field-level permissions:

That’s it! It’s not a hard fix but it sure is confusing when you know you set up everything correctly following the Pardot implementation guide. I’m here to at least reassure you that it’s not you, it’s the implementation guide. 

PS: Setting up V2 with an integration user won’t trigger this error because the integration user authenticates directly to Salesforce so we don’t need to assign a permission set or object permissions.

  1. Prospect and custom object sync has been paused since [a certain date/time]. If sync is paused for more than 30 days, you’ll need to do a full sync to get all updates

This is another scary-sounding warning message that isn’t hard to deal with. This is Pardot warning you that since the Pardot/Salesforce sync has been down for so long, it’s not going to catch up on data changes older than 30 days.

To fix it, when you’re ready, unpause the sync and click the “sync metadata” button 

  1. The connector is stuck on “Verification in Progress”

This problem seemed to happen more often in previous versions of the Pardot package and may be a non-issue moving forward. If, however, during implementation you connect and enable your v2 connector in Pardot Lightning and it stays on “Verification in Progress” for more than a couple of hours (Pardot support will probably suggest you wait for 24 hours, but typically if it doesn’t happen somewhat quickly, it’s not going to verify), check out this known issue along with the fix

What else threw you off during your Pardot implementation? Share in the comments.

The post Common Pardot Salesforce Connector Errors & How to Fix Them appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-01-11T22:24:00+00:00November 2nd, 2020|Categories: Uncategorized|

How to Get Sales to Actually Use Salesforce Engage

BY: CELINE NEWSOME

You presented, you lobbied, you conquered and now you have the fancy new tool – Salesforce Engage. GREAT!  

A few months later, your excitement has dwindled as you find Engage isn’t being used like you had hoped…or, worse yet, it isn’t being used at all.

So, the looming question, how do you get sales to actually use Engage the way you intended? Here are 4 tips: 

1. Become the subject matter expert

First, you have to know how to use the tool inside and out. When you are learning it, train yourself on exact scenarios your sales team would encounter. As you go through scenarios, take screenshots and recordings to help the team easily learn exactly how they should use it. Now, when sales has questions, they’ll have a subject matter expert nearby. Oh, you don’t want to be the only go-to person? Read my next tip!

2. Launch to a small group of power users first

Before launching Engage to the entire team, pick a handful of team members to use the tool for a month of two. This will help you prepare for frequently asked questions, adjust business processes that could be a conflict, and perfect your training documents. You will also create additional experts who can help answer team questions after launch.

3. Demonstrate the value (no really, actually demonstrate it!)

 When you are presenting the tool for the first time, start by showing sales the desired end result and how it will help them. It’s like a first impression! Getting buy-in from the beginning is a huge help with increasing adoption and excitement. Use success stories from your small group launch to show real scenarios the rest of the team can relate to. 

4. Track your teams’ usage

Salesforce Engage gives admins user reporting so you can see who is using the tool. You can compare stats for individual sales reps, and identify the top-performing templates by email opens and clicks. Use these reports to regularly train and update the team, which also keeps the tool top of mind. Leverage your power users – the ones who adopted the tool quickly and use it regularly – and ask them to lead a session on how they’ve found success. Oftentimes, sales teams need to hear from ‘one of their own’ in order to buy-in completely. 


Launching a new sales tool is never an easy task. Have you found success and care to share? Let me know what tips you would add! 

The post How to Get Sales to Actually Use Salesforce Engage appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2020-06-30T19:50:22+00:00June 30th, 2020|Categories: Uncategorized|

The 10 Best Pardot Ideas On the IdeaExchange

…in my humble opinion 

Have you visited the IdeaExchange before? In a nutshell, it’s a place where you can submit product enhancement ideas and vote on existing ideas with simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Kinda like Tinder for Pardot. The Pardot development team then picks the top ideas and builds them into their product roadmap. It’s an awesome way for users to have a say in the future of the platform.

And, right now, there are so many great ideas! Here are my 10 favorites for Pardot.

If any of these get you excited, click on the link to the IdeaExchange and give them a thumbs up! 

1. Email Templates With Completion Actions

Right now, you can add Completion Actions to List Emails when someone opens, clicks, or unsubscribes, but when it comes to Email Templates, you have to do it elsewhere in Pardot, adding another step to your setup.  This feature would mean you could simply set up those Completion Actions right from the Email Template without adding so many action steps in your Engagement Studio or building yet another Automation Rule. I’m a fan of less is more when building out processes in Pardot, so this gets a thumbs up from me.

2. Display Unique Engagement Metrics on the Email Template Report

Right now, the only way to get detailed engagement data for an Email Template is by clicking into each individual template in Pardot. It would be great to be able to get data like unique HTML Opens and % opened for sent emails in overview reports that are able to be exported. List emails currently have this data aggregated in a pretty report, but we need it for Email Templates too! If your head is nodding – give this one a vote. 

3. Add 1 Hour Increments to Engagement Studio Wait Times

Currently, the shortest wait time you can set between steps in Engagement Studio is 1 day. I would LOVE the ability to be more granular and adjust wait steps by hours. Sometimes you gotta move fast and 1 day is too slow.

4. Syncing Tags to Salesforce

Imagine launching a mass free trial during COVID. You know the quality of folks signing up is not ideal and you want to track them separately. So you tag them in Pardot – great! But when you go to view that Account in Salesforce, there’s no tag to be found. Sure you could create another custom field, but come onnnnn, don’t we have enough fields already?! Wouldn’t it be awesome if those Pardot tags could carry over into Salesforce?

5. WYSIWYG Editor for Landing Pages:

For your typical Pardot admin, the fewer  HTML edits required, the better. I’m great with a WYSIWYG editor, which is standard for Pardot emails, but when it comes to HTML design edits, not so much. So getting a simple WYSIWYG editor for Landing Pages is at the top of my enhancement list!

6. Export PDF of Emails Created

I don’t know about you but I am tired of shrinking my browser size trying to get an accurate screenshot of what my emails look like in Pardot. When internal stakeholders want to see emails without sending a test to everyone, it would be AMAZING if we could quickly and easily export a PDF of the creative.

7. Zoom Webinar Connector

Everyone and their mom (and even their grandma) is using Zoom these days. With so many events and marketing efforts shifting to virtual, it would be fantastic to integrate Zoom with Pardot so we can create sign-up forms and completion actions for our campaigns.

8. Report on Hard Bounces with Reason Codes

Data on hard bounce reasons exists in Pardot but you have to pull it by going into each individual email. If you’re like me and would love the ability to run a mass report on all emails and easily export hard bounce data, give this one an upvote. 

9. Record Direct Replies from a Pardot Email

You spend hours putting together a great campaign. You send an email with a clear CTA but the prospect hits reply instead of clicking the button. Technically, your campaign should get credit for that interaction!  But you have no way to track this scenario. I’m willing to bet that every marketing team wants this data. If you agree, give this idea a thumbs up. 

10. Ability to Change Date Format

A lot of global companies want to be able to update how dates appear because their prospects are used to seeing dates in a different format than the default in Pardot (YYYY/MM/DD). Another reason you may want this enhancement is to be able to send date data to another platform. If the other system has a different date format (DD/MM/YYYY), that makes syncing the data messy and complicated. 

Weigh In on Your Favorite Ideas

So do you agree, wouldn’t these be awesome enhancements to Pardot? Which ones are you going to vote for? Or did you find inspiration for a new idea? Let us know and we’ll give it an upvote!

By |2020-05-07T07:42:00+00:00May 7th, 2020|Categories: Uncategorized|