As a marketing team, you spend tons of time and resources building marketing campaigns that drive people to your website. Your website is the perfect place for prospects to learn about what you do and, most importantly, let you know who they are. As one of your most valuable assets, capitalizing on website visitors is just as important as getting them there. 

That’s where conversational marketing platforms, like Qualified, come into play. 

Conversational marketing is becoming a common tool in many marketers’ belts because, well, it works a lot better than standard marketing forms at increasing website conversions and capturing leads from target accounts. (See more in our blog post: When ABM Meets Conversational Marketing).  

As Qualified has said in their recent financing announcement, “Every year, B2B marketers spend more than $6 billion driving buyers to their website, but sales teams have no way of knowing when a qualified buyer has arrived, and no way of speaking with that buyer in that pivotal moment.” 

When you’re spending that much money to get people to your website, two things come to mind: 

1. You need to have a top notch strategy to convert them and alert the right people on your team when a target account is on your site
2. You need to be able to report on how your conversion tools are providing a return on investment

This post is focused on #2. Once you’re bringing in Leads and qualified accounts through a Conversational Marketing tool, how do you make sure you’re getting credit for those conversions and tying the work you did back to revenue? 

If you really want to make your execs and sales leaders heart-eyed, connect the dots between what’s happening on the marketing side of the house and what’s influencing and closing deals. Here’s how. 

Step 1: Campaign Attribution 

To understand who’s engaging with your Conversational Marketing platform, you need to be able to attribute engagement to marketing campaigns. With Qualified, you build your Conversational Marketing reports in Salesforce where your entire team can access and understand them. 

The first step is to set up experiences in Qualified so that, when someone engages with your Conversational Marketing tool, they are attributed to the right Salsforce campaign with a designated member status. 

Campaign Attribution shows how multiple Campaigns can have influence over a particular Lead/Contact. If you’re already tracking marketing activities like Email, Webinars, and Events, you can add Conversational Marketing as a Campaign “type” to track alongside your other Campaign Dashboards to measure Conversational Marketing impact. 

Step 2: Configure Campaign Influence 

If the Contacts you’re attributing to Campaigns in Step 1 are also tied to Opportunities through Contact Roles, then we’re in business. You can start reporting on how Conversational Marketing experiences are driving ROI for your business by enabling Campaign Influence in Salesforce. 

Side note: If you’re missing Contact Roles on Opportunities, check our our app to help you automate who is linked to Opportunities upon their creation: Automated Opportunity Contact Roles 

With Campaign Influence, the Contact links the Campaign to the Opportunity, allowing you to see which Campaigns are influencing Opportunities. Then based on the Opportunity value, you can see how much money marketing campaigns are contributing to your pipeline. 

Now that your Leads and Contacts who have engaged with Qualified are being tied to the right Salesforce Campaign through Campaign Attribution, you can start reporting on that engagement in really cool ways. The next step is to understand how your Conversation Marketing tool is helping seal deals and bring in valuable Contacts that you didn’t have insight into before. 

Example Reports

Here are some of the reports you can build once you have Campaign Influence ready to go to show how Conversational Marketing Campaigns are influencing the bottom line. Just set up your Campaign Influence dashboard with a filter for Campaign Type. If you’re capturing Leads through your Conversational Marketing tool and attributing them to the right Campaigns in step 1, then, when those Leads convert to Contacts and are tied to Opportunities, they will pull into these reports as Campaign Influence records. 

Report Type: Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities

Filter: Campaign Type = Conversational Marketing  

• Total Influence Opportunities – Shows how many Opportunities have been influenced by Conversational Marketing 
• Total Influenced Pipeline  (First Touch, Last Touch, and Even Distribution Models) – Shows how much money in the pipeline has been influenced by Conversational Marketing. The different distribution models allow you to see whether Conversational Marketing was the campaign that brought them in (first touch), the campaign that sealed the deal (last touch), or influenced the Contact anywhere along their journey (even touch). 
• Total Influenced Pipeline, filtered for Target Accounts – Shows how much money in the pipeline Conversational Marketing has influenced for Target Accounts only (this could be eye opening when you compare with other Campaign Types because tools like Qualified are especially adept at personalizing experiences for target accounts and getting them to convert when they’re hot.)
• Won Influence Revenue YTD – Shows how much revenue in the bank Conversational Marketing has contributed to 
• Won Influenced Revenue, filtered for Target Accounts – Shows how much revenue in the bank Conversational Marketing has contributed to from Target Accounts only 

Here’s an example of what your Campaign Influence Dashboard could look like for all Campaign Types. You could then set up a filter for Campaign Type = Conversational Marketing  to see a honed-in view of how your Conversational Marketing campaigns are bringing in the dough. 

Take the Next Step with Conversational Marketing 

Conversational Marketing is a great way to make your website work for you and to keep the sales team busy with high-intent visitors. Once you have a consistent Conversational strategy in place, getting credit for your efforts is the next step, and Campaign Influence is the most direct way to show results around Opportunities and revenue. 

Want to see how you can grow your sales pipeline and drive with Qualified? Need help getting started with Campaign Influence? We’d love to learn more. Get in touch! 

The post Prove the Impact of Your Conversational Marketing Strategy with Campaign Influence appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

BY WHITNEY ROSA

Splash – a super-powerful event marketing platform – helps organizations make in-person and virtual marketing efficient and successful. Splash lets you create branded registration forms, custom event promotions like emails, social share cards, and more while tracking registrations and analytics seamlessly on the dashboard. Think, Eventbrite on steroids. 

The Splash integrations enable you to close the loop on your events and see the impact on your bottom line. Specifically, with the Splash and Pardot integrations you’re able to consolidate your data into one tool and bring event marketing into the fold within Pardot. 

First things first: Access Needed to Enable the Integrations

There are multiple tiers to Splash: Free, Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. To be able to integrate into Pardot, you need to have access to their integrations and API. This begins at the Basic level and is included on each level above that. Have a Basic or higher Splash account? Let’s move on.

Integrating Splash and Pardot

Splash integrates with Pardot in three ways: form handlers, prospects, and campaigns. With these integrations, you can bring event marketing into Pardot to sync your data. 

Having Splash data in Pardot also means you can continue to market and nurture your leads and prospects even after your event through engagement studio programs, automation rules, and more. Another added benefit is that you could create all of your pre-event and post-event email marketing in Pardot to ensure leads are getting the right messages and streamline your reporting. 

Use case 1: Maintain compliance with form handlers and completion actions 

You can integrate Splash and Pardot using form handlers. This integration is available on an event or theme level as well as an organizational level. As a best practice we’d suggest using this integration on the event level. A great use case for the form handler  integration is managing unsubscribes. If someone unsubscribes through a Splash email, you can use a form handler to pass that data to Pardot. From there, it’ll update the record and with completion actions on the form handler, you can unsubscribe the prospect from all emails in Pardot. Hello compliance! 

To start this integration you’ll need to first create your form handlers based on statuses. For example, an ‘RSVP yes’ or a ‘Checked-in’ status. You’ll create a new form handler integration and follow the steps.

Step 1. In Pardot create form handler. 

Once you’ve created the form handler within Pardot, navigate back to Splash and create a new event.

Step 2. Create an Event page and publish in Splash.

Next you’ll go to Integration on your event and select New Integration.

Step 3. Create the Splash Integration.

Step 4. Be sure your event integration is turned on and give it a test!

Also keep in mind that you can access an activity log on the integrations within Splash to look for recent activity, troubleshoot, and ensure it’s working properly.  

Use Case 2: Create and Update Prospects

With this integration, you can create net new prospects in Pardot and update existing prospects. Any field you have on your Splash registration page can be pushed to Pardot via field mapping. This feature can be configured on an organizational level AND an event level making it really customizable. 

On a basic level, you’ll choose your trigger and then your action in Splash. For example, the trigger could be ‘Attendee’ and the action could be ‘RSVP yes’. So every time an attendee RSVPs as attending the integration will run. You can then choose to update an existing prospect or create a new one. 

Watch for a gotcha here! You could end up with duplicate prospects if you create a new prospect each time. Check your use case and choose carefully whether you want the integration to update an existing prospect or create a new one. And remember that, in Pardot, email is the unique identifier. 

The next step in this integration is to associate these prospects with a campaign. Your campaign list will automatically import from Pardot so you can choose the right campaign from the dropdown. From here you need to map your Splash fields to your Pardot fields so the data can sync. Lastly, you test! 

Use Case 3: Integrate Pardot Campaigns with Splash 

If you haven’t upgraded to connected campaigns within Pardot, you can integrate your Pardot campaigns with Splash. In this integration, campaigns are used to represent events in Pardot. You can configure the integration to automatically create new campaigns in Pardot as events are created in Splash, and then have the campaign update so that as changes happen, the fields in Pardot will be tracked. Think location or date fields being tracked and updated in Pardot. 

This integration is done directly on the integration page of your Splash account and then verified within Pardot and is done on the organizational level within Pardot.

Close the Loop on Your Marketing Events

Completion actions, engagement studio programs, and more are what make these integrations so powerful. You can continue to nurture and market your prospects even after an event, making events an integral part of your funnel. What do you think? Are you ready to close the loop on your event marketing? 

Get in touch to learn more. 

The post Close the Loop on Events: Splash and Pardot Integration appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

BY ERIN DUNCAN

Before we dig into the meat of this post and some cool ways you can personalize your marketing efforts, let’s take a step back and start with…

“What is Advanced Dynamic Content?”

Advanced Dynamic Content displays custom HTML based on the Prospect’s criteria and allows you to customize messaging to the prospect. 

For example, if am trying to sell Pardot to a Sales executive, I might use the subject line, “Increase your close rate with Marketing Automation”, but if I am trying to sell Pardot to a Marketing Automation Manager, I might use, “Automate and personalize your Prospect journey with Pardot”. 

Advanced Dynamic Content can be used on Pardot Forms, Landing Pages, and emails and is available for Plus and Advanced editions. 

But wait, why should I worry about personalization in the first place?

Prospects are increasingly expecting a personalized experience and personalization has consistently been shown to increase sales and engagement. Personalization can increase sales by 19%, email opens by 29%, and email clicks by a whopping 41%! (Source: https://www.pardot.com/blog/5-incredible-examples-personalized-marketing/)

Customers are also more likely to switch brands if their experience is not customized. (Source: Salesforce State of Marketing Report: https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/assets/pdf/datasheets/salesforce-research-fourth-annual-state-of-marketing.pdf)

Isn’t Handlebars Merge Language replacing Advanced Dynamic Content?

Nope! HML adds a new tool to your arsenal for delivering tailored content to your prospects, but there are use cases for both Dynamic Content and HML. With HML you can write if statements right in your emails, while Advanced Dynamic Content provides you more of a library of prewritten content to use based on the Prospect’s data. Learn more about HML in our blog here. And if you really want to get tricky, learn how you can use HML and scoring categories to fuel dynamic content in our blog post here. 

Ok, back to the topic at hand.  What are some fancy ways you can use Advanced Dynamic Content?

Use Dynamic Content on Standard Areas of your Email Templates

If you have standard language on every single one of your email templates (such as Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policies, legal mumbo-jumbo, etc.) and this language ever changes, you will have to edit every single one of your email templates. To avoid this pain, make this standard language dynamic content. That way, if it ever changes, you only have to update it in one place!

For example, if your standard footer language looks something like this: 

Set up your Dynamic Content with a variation that will match all prospects and enter your standard footer content into each variation.

Finally, replace your standard footer content with your Dynamic Content tag.

(You’ll need to leave the unsubscribe or email preference center link outside of the dynamic content because Pardot needs to see that one of these links is on your email drafts.)

Use Dynamic Content to Manage Translations

If you have an international client base, consider adding Dynamic Content to your forms and landing pages. This example does rely on you capturing the language the prospect speaks somewhere on the prospect’s profile. 

Create Content for Each Stage of the Prospect Lifecycle

Pardot has 5 Lifecycle Stages for prospects:

1. Visitor: an anonymous individual who has visited your website or Pardot-tracked assets
2. Prospect: a Visitor who has converted and is associated with an email address.
3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): a prospect that has been assigned to a user
4. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): a prospect who has been assigned to a user and associated with an opportunity in Salesforce
5. Won Deals: the opportunity the prospect is associated with is changed to “Closed Won”.

The stage a prospect is in is not recorded on each prospect’s profile, but you can easily make that happen with a few automation rules and these instructions.

Once you identify which Lifecycle stage the prospect is currently in, you can use your Dynamic Content to personalize messaging based on the stage. 

For example, if you’re connecting with a prospect who is still in the MQL stage, you may highlight the features of your products or offerings. However, if you are connecting with a prospect who is in the “Won Deals” stage, they’re likely more familiar with the features of your products and offerings already, so they may want to hear about recent case studies or new features you’ve added. 

Customize a “Next Step” CTA for the Prospect

When a prospect fills out a form, the subsequent thank you or success page should not be a dead-end. With dynamic content, you can use these pages to show prospects a “Next Step” CTA that is personalized to them. 

For example, if this is a brand new prospect, you may ask them to subscribe to your emails or link to an overview of your products so they can learn more. If the prospect is a current customer and subscriber, serving up the same content as you would for the brand new prospect is not going to be relevant, so show current customer white papers, case studies, or use the CTA for a cross-sell opportunity.

Ongoing Personalization through Padot 

As you can see, personalizing your marketing is something customers have come to expect and, fortunately, it’s totally doable in Pardot! All you need is a use case and a little creativity. 

What are some interesting ways you’ve used advanced dynamic content? We’d love to hear in the comments!

The post Creative Ways to Personalize Your Marketing with Pardot Advanced Dynamic Content appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

BY: MARCOS DURAN

Building landing pages in Pardot can be an interesting challenge because, depending on your needs and the skillset of your team, there are multiple ways to go about it. 

On one hand, you have the Pardot landing page content builder that leverages Stock Templates. By using this editor, you are allowed to drag and drop sections into a blank canvas. This is where you build out the content and apply a form for each specific landing page.

The landing page builder is a good way to create landing pages fast with zero coding experience. One detail to point out here is that Stock Templates aren’t as adaptive on tablets and mobile devices, so be sure to test them out prior to making them public.

Your other option is to create custom layout templates which give you a lot more flexibility when it comes to how your product will look, but requires coding knowledge (think HTML, CSS, Javascript) to get the look you want. 

To get you started, Pardot gives you access to five out-of-the-box layout templates. However, they’re pretty neutral, so if you want landing pages customized to your branding and design standards, you’ll need to invest some resources and build new ones.

You may have a front-end developer on your team to create the perfect layout templates for all of your landing page needs. If so, that’s great! This post is probably not for you. Go ahead and leverage them. 

If you’re here because your team is nibble and mighty but wears many hats, this post is meant for you!

Landing Page Design Challenges Pardot Admins Face

As a team that’s trying to do a lot with limited resources, here are some challenges you may be facing:

• Creating thank you pages
• Maintaining consistent branding
• Personalizing landing pages for each event/webinar
• Adapting and checking for mobile responsiveness
• Testing your content

These challenges can definitely seem overwhelming for ANY Pardot admin who may not have prior experience creating landing pages. Luckily, this guide can help you make your own landing page (or website) edits with a few simple clicks to Pardot layout templates.

NOTICE: Some of these resources do require that you have basic HTML/CSS understanding to be able to use them properly and some of the options have paid versions for more access (you don’t need them to get started), but trust me, I’m here to bring you these blessings for free!

15 Resources to Bring Your Pardot Landing Pages to Life 

Basics

1. Favicons 

Add branding to your browser tabs by using this tool to generate favicons. Once you generate your favicon code, it can be added to your landing page and form layout templates to keep consistent branding across your website. Follow the instructions on the Pardot Knowledge Base to self implement.

2. Google Fonts

This resource outlines web-safe and free fonts you can use on your landing pages. The most popular fonts include: Fire Sans, Montserrat, Lato, Open Sans, Oswald, Raleway, and Roboto. To use these custom fonts you can find a guide on how to implement this on the Pardot Knowledge Base. Note: Custom fonts on landing pages act differently than emails (including how you set them up). 

3. Meta Tags

Generate code to create social media meta tags for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google.  Just plug in your site’s information to get started. Note: This method would likely require a new layout template per landing page in order to update it. 

4. Pardot-Content Regions – Landing Pages 

Pardot Content Regions give you flexibility to lock down content controls to users creating landing pages. Need content restricted? There’s a tag for that. Need content to be flexible with the full WYSIWYG editor? There’s a tag for that as well!

5. Responsive CSS Grid Fundamentals
This resource outlines the usage of the grid capability to make rows responsive. This is a fairly advanced topic (probably the most from this guide), but with a little bit of testing and “googling” you will become a master in no time!

Personalize 

6. Pexels

Spice up your landing pages with compelling images. This resource provides you with free commercial and personal use images. Simply search terms for your specific landing pages needs and select the best image.

7. Font Awesome

Search and find over 1000 custom icons with Font Awesome. These icons can be used to add context to your landing page offering. To use these, just grab the stylesheet provided and add it to your landing page layout template. Then you can reference the icons following the guide included on the Font Awesome website.

8. Color Schemes

Looking to add a little more color to your landing pages? Color Schemes is a great tool to create dynamic color palettes. To use this tool simply add your HEX or RGB codes from your branding guide and out goes the color series. Don’t know the color codes? Try their image to color generator.

Delight

9. Countdown Timers

Add a little flair and excitement to your emails, landing pages, and website with Countdown Timers. To use this tool, simply create a free account, add your timing, and then add the code to your landing page. Note: this can also be used in emails but be careful as there are limitations across email clients. 

10. Eventable (Calendar Invite Sharing)

Building landing pages for events or webinars held on specific dates? Use this tool to create Add-To calendar buttons, which can be added to your thank you pages, form thank you content or emails.

11. Social Cards 

This resource helps you generate code for a social card, no code involved. When you get to their website, there’s a short tutorial on how to set everything up. Basically, all you have to do is run through their generator and login to the right social media account to post. Currently, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are available. Note: the description does not show up on LinkedIn.

Testing

12. HotJar

Gain insight into how traffic on your site moves around and where they click. With this information from HotJar, you’ll be able to test different layouts/content positioning to see which aspects of the page resonate with viewers. This is a great addition to Google Analytics (separate platforms / different metrics). Note: To use this tool you do need to set up an account, but you can use it for free while you test it.

13. JSFiddle Editor 

Use this resource to try out code, edit, and preview in real time. This is an opensource tool that can save you from a tight bind if you don’t have access to a classic editor like Adobe Dreamweaver. A desktop alternative is Atom (which plug can plug into GitHub if you need it).

14. Multivariate Testing Landing Pages

Multivariate testing is a  Pardot feature for landing pages that lets you test two versions of a landing page and choose a winner. This FAQs blog from Pardot  breaks down the difference between A/B testing and multivariate testing, what to test, and what reporting looks like. Use this documentation to set up multivariate testing in Pardot.

15. Responsive Design Checker

Test your landing pages’ responsiveness with this Responsive Design Checker, which allows you to review any online asset (landing page, forms, and websites) by screen size and different devices. To use this tool simply add a HTTPS link to the search bar and use the left panel to get real time previews. Note: It’s about 95% accurate, does not play well with websites heavily based on Javascript, nor will it work for your Pardot emails.

Spice Up Your Landing Pages

In the end, we all wish we could code beautiful landing pages from scratch. As marketers, we wear many hats and sometimes being able to make some quick changes here and there can enable you to support your team on the fly. If you don’t have the luxury of an in-house designer, these resources should help get you where you need to be.

What are your favorite go-to landing page resources?

Do you need support building your own customized landing page templates? Our development team is ready to invigorate your landing page designs and add the functionality you need. Reach out to us here to get started.

The post 15 Resources To Make The Most Of Your Landing Pages: The Ultimate List for Pardot Admins appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

BY NATASHA WETTEN

If you’re a Pardot Admin, you might’ve received an email recently that either made total sense or perhaps went quickly into the “deal with it later” email pile. It’s about — jargon alert — “SameSite cookie attributes,” and we’ll tell you exactly what you need to do.

In February 2020, Google is releasing Chrome 80, which will impact the behavior of third-party cookies. Basically, Chrome is going to require that third-party cookies, like those used by Pardot and many other web technologies, need to be served over secure connections. There’s a Chromium blog post here with an overview, and a REALLY TECHNICAL document here.

To avoid issues tracking prospects on your Pardot tracker domain, you’ll need to enable HTTPS and SSL, but in the right way! There are some “gotchas” here, so let’s dive in.

First, check on your tracker domains.

• In Pardot open your “Domain Management” page
  • In Classic this is under Admin >> Domain Management
  • In Lightning this is under Pardot Settings >> Domain Management
• Under “Tracker Domains” check the “SSL Status” and “HTTPS Status” columns for each of your domains. 
  • If you see a lot of green, you are all set!

• If you see a grey “HTTP” Status or your “SSL Status” says “Disabled”, you need to take action.

Here’s where the gotcha comes in. Before you update, check your landing page template for mixed content. 

If you enable HTTPS for your primary tracker domain, but you have active landing pages that include HTTP Pardot-hosted assets (think: images, .css files), then your landing pages will not look as intended. It’s because of mixed content.

Next, check your templates.

If you’re about to or have recently enabled HTTPS, audit your existing landing page templates in Pardot and update any hosted assets within those landing page templates that are currently “http” to “https” within the code.

Pro tip: use the search bar to help, enter “http:” to find each one you need to update.

Like this:

Once you have done that for all of your active landing page templates, you can now turn on HTTPS inside of Domain Management.

Another pro tip! After you switch to HTTPS, spot check some of your landing pages to make sure nothing looks off. If it does, go to the landing page template that is powering that landing page and comb through to make sure all instances of HTTP are updated to HTTPS.

Next: Check your iFrames and any Pardot-hosted content.

If you are using Pardot forms on your website through embedded iFrames, check the code. If you see “<iframe src=”http://…“ then switch out the http for an https, like below:

That goes for any content hosted in Pardot as well. For example: You have a direct link to a PDF on a thank you page that’s on your website, and it’s using your tracker domain because you want to track clicks – “http://go.yoursite.com/awesome-pdf-everyone-wants-to-get” – yep, this needs to change to https as well.

A final note: make sure you’re using SSL for your website domain

If you’re not currently using SSL for your domain, you will need to. Without it, the Pardot cookie will not get served to your website visitors after the update and effectively get eaten by SameSite! Also, this is best practice: Google is flagging sites that don’t use SSL, and is ranking secured sites higher in results.

Secondly: once you chance to SSL, you still might have absolute links on your site that are using http. You can use a site like https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/ to find any SSL errors.

That’s a lot – and as you can see, the issue can extend beyond Pardot. If you need assistance or have any questions, let us know in the comments.