People do really cool stuff in Pardot, and the ParDreamin’ team is recognizing them for it with the first-ever ParDreamies Pardot Awards. The ParDreamies honor community members for finding creative and thoughtful methods to reach business goals using the power of the Pardot platform. 

Individuals submitted their stories as independent consultants, on behalf of their clients as part of an agency, and as in-house Pardot admins and marketing professionals. Then, we announced the winners of the ParDreamies Awards during the ParDreamin’ VIP After Party on October 28, 2021.

Here are the winners of the 2021 ParDreamies Pardot Awards.

ParDreamies 2021 Best in Show Award

Each ParDreamies submission entered the race to take all the glory by winning the ParDreamies 2021 Best in Show Award. The ParDreamin’ team considered each entry for their respective category, but the most innovative stories rose to the top to battle it out for Best in Show Pardot Award.

With that in mind, we are pleased to announce the overall winner for the ParDreamies 2021 Best in Show Award…

The fun way to profile your prospects

Submitted by Claudia Hoops for Destined

Summary:

Understanding who your prospects are and how they might interact with your brand presents a challenge to even the most seasoned marketers. The team at Destined saw opportunities in that challenge.

The ParDreamies Best in Show award goes to the team at Destined for building a fun icon-driven landing page their prospects use to profile themselves. Prospects use the landing page to provide information about themselves so Destined can send them on a personalized journey through a Pardot Engagement Studio Program.

Quick Facts:

• Automates prospect profiling
• Enables easy prospect segmentation
• Empowers prospects to tell brands what they’re looking for
• Combines Pardot forms, landing pages, scoring and grading, and engagement studio programs

ParDreamies 2021 Personalization Perfection Award

The best marketers know their audience and they know how to use technology to deliver messaging at the perfect time and in the perfect channel. The Personalization Perfection Award celebrates that perfection by recognizing right-time, right-message marketing achieved using the power of the Pardot platform. 

And the Personalization Perfection Award goes to…

Engaging prospects with quiz-style content

Submitted by Brittany Rhyme for Restaurant365

Summary:

Engage your prospect database using quiz-style content via the Outgrow + Pardot integration and creating an interactive experience using custom fields and dynamic content on Pardot Landing Pages.

Quick Facts: 

• Outgrow + Pardot integration
• Dynamic Content 
• Custom Fields
• Pardot Landing Pages 

ParDreamies 2021 Social Impact Award

While the past two years have been challenging for everyone, nonprofit organizations that serve the world’s most vulnerable populations were stretched to the limits while demand for services increased. One team rose to the challenge and found innovative ways to use Pardot to continue providing essential services.

The 2021 ParDreamies Social Impact Award recognizes an organization that creates positive social change through Pardot, and this year it goes to…

COVID-19 Learning & Policy Center

Submitted by Miriam Childs for Lexipol

Summary:

In March 2020, Lexipol utilized Pardot to provide targeted promotion and follow-up of our Coronavirus Learning & Policy Center. The resource is designed to give public safety agencies free access to industry-specific COVID-19 online learning courses, policies and news to assist in their response on the front lines of the pandemic.

Quick Facts: 

• Pardot was critical in promoting and tracking success.
• List emails and social posts informed the market of the site, highlighting critical information via dynamic segmentation.
• Pardot files hosted and tracked policy documents are available on the microsite.
• Scoring and connected campaigns allowed leveraging of interaction data.
• Per Einstein AI campaign influence, these efforts influenced 2,445 opportunities to date.

ParDreamies 2021 Grassroots Innovation Award

Marketers are known for wearing many hats, and that’s especially true for marketers working for small businesses. But small business marketers using Pardot have an advantage because they have the power to automate that which can’t be accomplished manually by a small team.

That scrappy innovation is what led one (tiny) in-house team to implement new Pardot features to reduce workloads and prevent duplication of tasks. The winner of the ParDreamies 2021 Grassroots Innovation Award is… 

In-house Implementation: Business Units, Sandbox and Multiple Product Interests

Submitted by Pooja Goel for BrandEd

Summary:

The BrandEd team implemented Pardot Business Units and built a way to capture, track and manage multiple product interests for the same lead record (i.e. allowing prospects to select more than one program of interest upon form submission), and map them to Salesforce. BrandEd completed the project in approximately 60 days with a team of only two full-time employees who had no prior Pardot knowledge. 

Quick Facts: 

• Complicated requirements – multiple business units, multiple products within each unit, tailored user journeys based on business unit/product choices, and tracking path for each customer-business unit-product combination 
• More than 70% of prospects select more than one program of interest, so communication needs to be coherent and unduplicated, as much as possible.
• Some Pardot features did not meet the team’s requirements so they devised creative solutions.
• Utilized Pardot Sandbox to validate functionality

ParDreamies 2021 Extending Pardot Award

The ways companies and organizations use Pardot to achieve their goals is endless. That’s what makes Pardot integrations essential to teams of all shapes and sizes. Some teams use Pardot native features to collect prospect data, while others have their own industry-specific tools they hope will play nice with the platform.

One company leveraged the Pardot API to bring prospect subscription data into their marketing team’s hands so they can take the next steps. All this Pardot API innovation earned this company the 2021 ParDreamies Extending Pardot Award, which recognizes teams leveraging API-driven solutions. And the winner is…

Project Octopus: Bringing customer subscription status into Pardot

Submitted by Jacob Filipp for LexisNexis Canada

Summary:

The team at LexisNexis Canada was encountering the problem of “I want a list of everyone who cancelled their subscription to Product X, within geography Y.”  So, they developed a solution to put product subscription information into Pardot. This allows the team’s  marketers to pull their own campaign lists, which reduces list turnaround time and miscommunication errors.

Quick Facts: 

• The Pardot v4 Batch Import API 
• Pardot custom fields 
• Developers delivered work in four waves
• Automated QA testing
• Formal refactoring phase
• Navigated Pardot’s switch to OAuth

Pardot Award Honorable Mentions

We had many amazing stories and solution submissions from Pardot professionals in the community. So, of course, choosing the winners was challenging. 

Here are the honorable mentions from the ParDreamies award submissions. These solutions are all helpful in their own right, and they deserve recognition.

Honorable Mention: Hot Job Email Using Dynamic Content 

Submitted by BJ Dodenbier for Flexcare Medical Staffing

A weekly email FlexCare Staffing sent to their prospects wasn’t getting the results they hoped because the relevant information wasn’t immediately obvious to readers. That prompted the team to take action through personalization.

Email personalization, which was achieved using Pardot Dynamic Content, created a better experience for readers by bringing the information they wanted to see to the top of the email.

FlexCare sends two primary emails every week with each email showing  the top-paying assignments of the week for each group.: 

• Hot jobs for traveling nurses
• Hot jobs for traveling allied clinicians

When these emails originated, they included the top 13 jobs for each group regardless of the recipient’s primary specialty. To provide a more personalized experience for the recipients of these emails, Flexcare Staffing redesigned the emails to show only the top-paying jobs for each clinician’s primary specialty. The updates lead to better engagement with prospects by significantly increasing click-through rates for the emails.

Honorable Mention: Pardot Business Card Scanner App from MarCloud Technologies

Submitted by Tom Ryan for MarCloud Technologies

Physical business cards give a personal tangible touch when forming business relationships, but they can be difficult to keep organized when you’re collecting them on a large scale at in-person events and conferences. That’s where the Pardot Business Card Scanner App from MarCloud Technologies becomes a game changer.

Most businesses that use Pardot also use Salesforce as their CRM. However, the data held in these two systems can become inconsistent, particularly when the sales team enters cold prospects straight into Salesforce thus bypassing Pardot altogether. 

The team at MarCloud saw an opportunity to create a business card scanner app that allows professionals to instantly add prospects they meet offline into Pardot. This aligns sales and marketing teams by ensuring the correct treatment of new prospects and saves time.

When MarCloud set out to create the world’s first ‘Pardot Business Card Scanner’ app, they had no idea if it would be possible. Integrating with the Pardot API is difficult, but they were able to deliver an app that:

• Sends prospect data directly into Pardot lists, campaigns, and custom fields
• Works without WiFi
• Recognises multiple languages

Since launching in August 2021, the app has had over 45 iOS downloads and 25 Android downloads with global corporations making direct contact regarding paid plans.

Honorable Mention: Drop email templates like they’re HOT!

Submitted by Tammy Begley for Destined 

While the new drag-and-drop Pardot Email Template Builder does make building emails in Salesforce a lot easier, it still requires a certain amount of time and effort for the marketing team to design, build and tweak them. That’s where the team at Destined decided to make the process easier for busy marketers.

The innovative team at Destined built email template packages that can be installed into a Salesforce org and ready to use in less than 15 minutes. Marketing teams just need to rebrand the templates, and then they are ready to use.

When Pardot announced the extensibility feature for the drag-and-drop email template builder that allows marketers to use pre-built components from the Salesforce AppExchange, Destined jumped at it. The developer team at Destined converted the company’s entire email template gallery into install packages that can go straight into any Salesforce org. Destined is the first Salesforce Partner in the world to have used the Pardot Email Template Builder extensibility feature to create install packages for download and use, and the project was featured at Dreamforce ‘21 in the Marketing Roadmap session.

The new Email Template Builder will be available to be used across all other Salesforce clouds, too. That means a company will have the power to deliver consistent branding and messaging from any Salesforce platform.

Honorable Mention: Pardot Forms: Customized content download on selection criteria

Submitted by Pankaj Verma for Accenture

An Accenture client wanted to provide the best experience for their prospects by delivering relevant content to them with instant gratification built in. That’s where the team at Accenture swooped in with JavaScript magic to save the day.

The client has multiple product and service lines, which means prospects have specific needs when interacting with the company. Prospects visiting the client’s website encounter a form that gauges their interest area to determine those specific needs. So, the team at Accenture suggested the client use dynamic content in an email that’s triggered when prospects complete the form. However, the Accenture client wanted to deliver relevant content to prospects in real time rather than in an email to reduce the number of clicks for prospects.

So, the team at Accenture solved the challenge by introducing JavaScript Thank You Code and custom field values to the form that triggers an automatic content download based on prospect interest area. 

The hurdle was to have JavaScript code working within the Thankyou code of Pardot forms. The code had to pick the value and automatically download the personalized asset on form submission after prospects select their interest area from the radio button and drop-down menu. The team ultimately had to refine their approach of providing multiple selection criteria. 

The result of the project was a more personalized experience for prospects with instant gratification built in. After enabling the solution, conversion rates significantly increased for the form and leads were directed more efficiently based on assets consumed by them.

Honorable Mention: Pardot + Salesforce = Personalization Perfection

Submitted by Cara Woo for Cloudtegic

A Cloudtegic client using multiple Salesforce clouds was dealing with sync issues and lack of personalization options that made account journeys inconsistent for prospects. So, a consultant from Cloudtegic took six journeys out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and duplicated them in Pardot to create a seamless experience that behaves and syncs as expected.

Using a combination of custom objects, formula fields, flows and automation rules, the Cloudtegic consultant was able to create fully personalized and automated account status journeys including:

• Account-activated emails
• Welcome emails
• Account executive introduction emails
• Account cancellation emails

Formula fields are generally not recommended for any use within Pardot because they do not trigger a sync. So, the consultant created a process builder that looked for the criteria of those formula fields to be created and/or edited. Then, she created a secondary field called “Pardot Sync” that uses Boolean to check from true to false and back again whenever changes are made on the account. This forces a sync between Salesforce & Pardot, and it clears the path to use personalization from custom objects in Pardot Dynamic Content.

The biggest hurdle she faced was the timeline. She only had three weeks to take six account journeys out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and duplicate them in Pardot. These three weeks included scoping, building and testing. Due to the client’s flexibility and the consultant’s drive to get it done, they met their deadline with time to spare to deploy the changes in production.

The project touched nearly every feature of Pardot. The ability to sync with custom objects, the seamless sync between Pardot & Salesforce, and the ability to use Pardot Sandboxes and custom objects in automation rules all made this project a success. Additionally, the project likely saved the client budget in the long run while contributing to ROI by creating personalized experiences for prospects.

Honorable Mention: Next-Level Email Marketing Design for Brand Awareness by InterWorks

Submitted by Jenny Parnell for InterWorks

One team was searching for the perfect digital hub to house all of their marketing assets in addition to providing email marketing capabilities and robust reporting metrics. That search led the team to adopt Pardot for the organization. 

Since adopting Pardot as a home base for digital brand awareness and demand generation, the InterWorks Marketing Team has been maximizing their experiments with design. Their monthly blog newsletters, product updates, customer message and webinar communications all received custom designs, curated content and engaging themes. These custom emails hit inboxes and are undeniably stunning while also relaying vital information to their contact base to help grow the business.

The hurdles involved in this initiative included establishing a monthly cadence on multiple levels of their marketing funnel with limited time and resources to customize the content and design. 

In 2021, the team delivered nearly 500,000 messages to their contacts. They currently hold 13,000 active contacts for brand awareness and average 1,200 active prospects monthly. The team’s click-through rate is above industry-average at around 5%. 

Pardot has given InterWorks a digital home base to manage their marketing funnel. From email marketing, to webinar integrations with Zoom, replay integrations with Wistia, and customer insights integrations with Salesforce, they now have a better understanding of their contact base, which is vital to their global marketing strategy. 

The world of marketing and design is subjective. Pardot has enabled the team to become data-driven and confident in their creative approaches to drive interest in their brand.

Honorable Mention: Custom Pardot / Zoom Integration

Submitted by Julia Hoffman for FARO / Sercante Labs

FARO hosts 300+ webinars a year via Zoom. The Zoom-provided integration provides basic list management that can sync to Pardot from a Zoom registration page, but FARO was looking for a way to host webinar registration landing pages on their event website and automate a confirmation email using a Pardot template. Furthermore, there was a desire to send reminder and follow-up emails directly from Pardot in nine different languages.

FARO worked with Sercante to build a custom Pardot and Zoom integration that streamlined FARO’s webinar process. The solution accomplished that by allowing all of the participant management (confirmation emails, reminders, pre- and post-webinar action items) to take place in Pardot rather than Zoom. By using email templates with dynamic content, the team significantly decreased the amount of time required for weekly email design and by making the process more automated, webinar attendees are passed to sales days sooner.

The build included email templates with dynamic content to allow us to reuse assets, as well as an API that syncs data from Zoom to Pardot to automate records being upgraded from Registered to Attended. A Pardot engagement studio program template and process was created for scheduled execution of pre- and post webinar actions, supported in nine different languages.

Since FARO began using the solution from Sercante in April: 76 Webinars have been hosted; 9,215 Records processed via the integration, with approximately 30% of those then being updated from Registered to Attended via the integration; Resulting in 127 Closed Won Opportunities and $1.1M in revenue from those efforts.

Honorable Mention: Driving Business and Investment across the African Continent

By Africa Events Limited

Africa is a fragmented continent split into 54 economies, each of sub-scale size. Global businesses want to operate in Africa, but deciding who to deal with is complex, time consuming and expensive. Africa Events Limited launched a Salesforce-Pardot solution in 2021 to meet these challenges. The solution is set to become one of Africa’s most important business tools. Additionally, the team hosts a physical event, AFSIC – Investing in Africa, which has become one of the African continent’s most important investment events.

African Investments Limited developed a scalable system that will increasingly drive business and investment across the entire African continent by combining matching business requirements in all sectors of Africa’s 54 countries.

The team believes they have produced the first pan-African multi-sector, multi-country Pardot Business Opportunities Dashboard solution allowing companies to promote investment and business opportunities not just within Africa, but also as export opportunities to global companies. This is entirely new ground as they are not aware of a competitor doing anything similar. Business opportunities, and their growing network are shown at www.invest-in-africa.co.

Pardot is the company’s main communication tool. They use it to trigger email templates that are sent to 100,000+ of Africa’s most important business executives and investors. 

Honorable Mention: Leading & Inspiring Career Growth in the Pardot Community

By Ben Lamothe for BDO Digital

People working in the Salesforce ecosystem will typically choose to specialize in a specific platform. The path to becoming a Salesforce developer/architect/admin/analyst is fairly well established and clear to follow. The same can’t be said for someone who wants to work in marketing automation and has a passion for nonprofits or education, for example. Ben Lamothe sought to provide insight for those people and to hear from people working in those jobs today.

Ben’s Salesforce mentees were seeking a path into the ecosystem focused on the core Salesforce platform. It made him realize the path to becoming a Pardot professional is less than clear. That led to the decision to host a four-part Pardot Career Paths panel focused on the different career paths available for a Pardot expert/user/admin in marketing operations and automation at B2B and B2C companies; education organizations and institutions; nonprofits; and as independent consultant or with a Salesforce Partner. More than 20 Pardot professionals participated as panelists. They shared their career paths and answered questions from more than 340 attendees.

You don’t go to school for marketing automation. Instead, Pardot has passionate community users and platform evangelists to provide guidance. The Pardot community helped to achieve the goal of making the four panels happen.

Thanks to everyone who shared their Pardot stories

While the purpose of the first-ever ParDreamies Pardot Award Show was to recognize people for their amazing achievements, we’re presenting these stories with another motive. 

Understanding all of the possibilities within Pardot can be difficult to grasp. We hope that presenting these challenges and the solutions marketing professionals built to solve them helps others to do the same. Reading real-world examples of Pardot solutions is a great way to get the gears moving and ideas flowing.Have you built a really cool Pardot solution that may be helpful to solve challenges marketers face? Tell us about it in the comments below. And remember to sign up for the ParDreamin’ newsletter so you know when we open ParDreamies Pardot Award submissions in 2022.

The post Announcing the 2021 ParDreamies Pardot Award Winners appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.