Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers

As a marketing administrator within Salesforce, it is essential to understand your audiences and create a winning audience segmentation strategy. Without segmenting your audience, you will target the same group of people each time. That can lead to increasing opt-outs, spam, and a direct impact on your sending reputation. 

The goal of sending mass emails is to target the right audience so you provide value to the people who are likely to interact with your brand. And that’s exactly what audience segmentation accomplishes. 

Use these strategies to segment your audience so you can deliver the right marketing messages to the right groups of people every time — no matter if you’re a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement user.

Audience Segmentation Strategies for Marketers Who Use Salesforce

Whether you are a Marketing Cloud Engagement (A.K.A. SFMC) Administrator or an Account Engagement (Pardot) Administrator, fundamental principles apply across the board when it comes to audience segmentation. 

Below are tactics you can use within Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement. 

Who is actively engaging with your brand?

Use web tracking, social, and ads to learn how visitors interact with your brand. You can compile a group of individuals to target based on clicks, form completions, and pages visited. 

For example, if you have a visitor who clicks an ad on social media and is taken to your website, where they download the content that you promised them with your ad, you can make the assumption that the visitor is interested in that product.

What preferences do your customers share?

Let’s say you are sending an invitation for an upcoming webinar. Segment your target audience based on previous ad clicks, webinar attendees, or downloaded resources. By building an audience list based on shared preferences, you will see an increase in webinar registrations and attendance.  

For example, look at the specific campaigns you’ve launched in the past. Think about how you can categorize the products or services that were the main focus. Maybe you had a marketing campaign to drive awareness about a product that would result in a one-time and low-cost purchase. And you had another campaign advertising a product that requires a high-cost ongoing purchase. The people who engaged with the high-cost product but didn’t necessarily purchase the item may be good candidates for a segmentation list that includes people with bigger budgets to potentially spend.

Who are you actively targeting to attain as a new customer?

If you could create a map of ideal customers, what attributes would they share? Is it a specific set of companies? Perhaps, it’s a specific product or service you can provide them? 

Decide on those attributes and build your segmentation strategy and buyer personas. Target this audience and help sales close the deals on your ideal customer.

Which individuals have expressly subscribed to what topics?

Take advantage of your Email Preference Center. You can create targeted campaigns that run on an ongoing basis and continue to nurture your target audience based on their expressed interests. 

Ensure that your Email Preference Center offers a variety of targets, including product interests and types of communication. For example, the Sercante Email Preference Center allows email subscribers to sign up for only emails related to the services that interest them, like Salesforce consulting, integrations, or training.

Suppress individuals based on a subset of criteria

Counterintuitive to who you want to target with your email marketing, who do you want to ignore? Considering who you don’t want to receive a message from is as important as who should receive it. There will likely be a default suppression list, including competitors, employees, spam, etc., but you may also want to create specific one-off suppression lists too, such as email frequency or inactive customers.

Account Engagement (Pardot) Audience Segmentation Best Practices

Now that you have a few ideas on strategy, let’s talk about building segmentation within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) . Let’s review the list creation options and the different ways to add Prospects. Keep in mind, there may be times when you use multiple list types for a single send.

Static Prospect Lists

Static lists are controlled by you, the administrator. You set the rules and criteria for who joins and comes off the list. There are several ways to add to a static list, both manual and automated. 

Imports

The most common way for building a static list is via prospect imports. When importing, you have the option to import via CRM ID or Email. If the list has existing prospects, you want to import via CRM ID. If they are brand new prospects, use the import via email option. 

Within the import wizard, you will be given the option to add to a list via an existing list or by creating a new list. Once complete, review the import report for the total number of prospects created or updated.

Table Actions

Adding a subset of prospects that already exist within Pardot can be done via Table Actions

To add a subset using Table Actions, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to your prospect table.
  2. Set your filters, such as view and creation time frame.
  3. Check the boxes of those you want to add to the static list
  4. Use the table action at the bottom of the table and “Add to List.”

Public Lists

Public Lists can be created as dynamic or static, but most default to static and are controlled by the Email Preference Center. These lists are subscribed to directly by the Prospect. Individual Prospects are able to subscribe and unsubscribe as they see fit based on their preferences.

Completion Actions

The “Add to List” completion action exists on most Pardot assets, including forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails, and page actions. Completion Actions include both standard and conditional and allow you to set specific parameters when adding to a list. 

Automation Rules

An automation rule is criteria-based. You can set multiple criteria pertaining to a Prospect by using “Match All” and/or “Match Any” statements. Based on this criteria, you then set an action, such as “Add to list,” which will populate a static list. 

The good thing about using an automation rule to populate your static lists is that they are retroactive, so they will collect past and present matches and take action on them.

Dynamic Prospect Lists

Similar to automation rules, dynamic lists are criteria-based. Unlike static lists, these are outside of your control. 

Once you set the criteria, the list will automatically add or remove prospects based on that criteria. These lists cannot be manually manipulated.

Campaign Membership

While there are several settings and criteria you can use to create dynamic lists, one of the most popular strategies is to build lists based upon campaign membership. This is especially beneficial when collaborating with sales teams. 

If your sales team is adding Leads and Contacts to Salesforce Campaigns, perhaps based on a recent trade show, you can build a dynamic list in Pardot based on that campaign membership.

Marketing Cloud Engagement Segmentation Best Practices

Lastly, let’s look at how to best create segments in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Subscriber data can come from many different sources into Marketing Cloud and can be stored in two ways: 

  1. Lists
  2. Data Extensions

Lists

A List is a collection of your subscribers. Lists are best used when you have a small dataset (500,000 or fewer subscribers) that you need to manage quickly and efficiently. 

Lists share a format with your All Subscribers table and typically include Email Address, Subscriber Key, Status and any profile attributes you have created in your account. 

Creating a List

To create a List:

  1. Navigate to the Subscribers tab within Email Studio.
  2. Within the My Lists folder structure, you can click ‘Create’ at the top right of the page to create a new List, assigning a name, external key, description, and placing the list in any folder you have created. 

Once the list is created, it can be populated by manual or automated import.

Groups

A Group is a filtered list. Creating a Group allows you to build a subset of subscribers from a list based on rules or by splitting list subscribers by count or percentage of the total list being filtered.  

The rules used to build a Group can be saved as a Data Filter, which can be used to automate the process to refresh membership in your group.

Creating a Group

To create a Group:

  1. Navigate to the Subscribers tab within Email Studio
  2. Within the My Groups folder structure, you can click ‘Create’ at the top right of the page to create a new group. 
  3. Select whether the group you are creating is a Filtered Group or Random Group, then select the source List. 
  • When creating a Filtered Group, drag any attributes or measures from the left side panel to the canvas and define the filter criteria. 
  • To create a Random Group, after selecting Random Group and your source list, click ‘Add Group’ to add as many random splits as needed to get the desired number of random segments.
  1. Once your filters or splits have been properly configured, click ‘Save & Build’ to create and populate your groups. 

Once created, unless automated using a data filter, Groups need to be refreshed manually to be up-to-date.

Data Extensions

Data Extensions are more complex than lists and offer greater flexibility in managing contact data. While lists can only contain Subscriber information, Data Extensions are more flexible and can contain relational data. 

Data Extensions data can be filtered in a similar fashion to Groups, and can also be combined with or filtered by data in other Data Extensions using SQL activities in Automation Studio.

Creating a Data Extension

Follow these steps to create a data extension:

  1. On the Subscribers tab in Email Studio, select a folder within the Data Extensions folder and then click ‘Create’ at the top right. 
  2. Here, you select which type of Data Extension you want to create. Standard Data Extensions require you to define the fields of your Data Extension. 
  3. After defining the name and data retention policy for your data extension, you must define the fields in the table, choosing from several data types, including Text, Date, Number, and Boolean. You can also set the length and default value for each field. 
  4. Once you have defined all fields needed in your Data Extension, click ‘Create’ to finalize your Data Extension. 

This Data Extension can now be populated by manual or automated file imports, API calls, SQL Query activities, or AMPScript.

Filtered and Random data extensions function in much the same way as Groups. Filtered Data Extensions require selection of a source Data Extension, then definition of any filter criteria. Random Data Extensions will produce a number of data extensions of randomly split rows based on the number of splits defined in the setup.

Go forth and segment your audience like a Salesforce marketing pro

Marketing Cloud offers multiple routes to implementing segmentation and audience targeting, regardless of platform. By taking into consideration your audience personas, incorporating key email marketing segmentation strategies, and applying the correct segmentation tools, you will be able to spread brand awareness swiftly.
Have any cool stories of marketing segmentation success? Tell us in the comments. Or reach out to the team at Sercante to get help with your audience segmentation strategy.

Thank you to Zachary Norman for contributing to this post!

Original article: Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-06-06T15:33:16+00:00June 6th, 2023|Categories: Data Management, Emails & Forms, Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Displaying Account Fields on a Salesforce Opportunity Record Page

Salesforce opportunity record pages are great for displaying all of the key information about a particular record. But, what if you need to be working with and updating multiple related records at the same time, without flipping back and forth?

That’s where this hack for displaying account fields on Salesforce opportunity record pages comes into play. 

Salesforce Opportunity Record Page Example

Let’s say a sales rep is working on an opportunity, but some of the fields they need to see and update are on the account. 

If they only needed to view the information, using custom formula fields on the Opportunity referencing Account fields would have been sufficient. Because they also wanted to update this information while they were on the Opportunity record, an alternative option may be using an Object Specific Action with the Lightning Record Page.

How to Create an Object Specific Action

  1. From Setup, go to Object Manager > Account > Buttons, Links, and Actions
  2. Click New Action
  3. For Action Type select Update a Record
  4. For Label, enter a label that is appropriate for this purpose. For example ‘Update Account Details’
  5. Enter a Description outlining the purpose of this action. For example ‘Displays Account details to users from Opportunity record page’
  6. Click Save.

Edit the Action Layout

This is the key! This is where we decide what fields to display, and how they will be arranged.

  1. Once you have saved, you will be looking at the Action layout.
    • Note: you can also access this later from the Action page by clicking on the Edit Layout button.
  2. Just like a page layout, drag and drop the fields that you want to be visible.
  1. Click Save.

Add the Account Action Layout to the Opportunity record page

Now that we have the Action Layout we want, here’s where we connect it to the Opportunity. 

  1. From Setup, go to Object Manager > Opportunity > Lightning Record Pages.
  2. Select the Lightning Record Page you want to update.
  3. Drag the ‘Related Record’ component where you want it on the page.
  4. In the Related Record settings panel on the right, update the following:
    1. Header Label = the heading that will appear at the top of that layout on the page
    2. Lookup Field = Account
    3. Update Action = the name of the action you created above
  5. Click Save.

Now when looking at an opportunity, the related Account fields will appear on the Opportunity record page!

Editing Account Fields on the Opportunity Page

Unlike formula fields, these fields can be edited directly from the Opportunity. 

To edit the Account fields, click the pencil icon next to the Account field you want to edit. All of the fields in that section will become editable, and notice that the Opportunity fields are not. When done, click the Save button to save the fields in that section. These fields are edited separately from the Opportunity fields. 

Find Key Account Details on the Salesforce Opportunity Record Page

That’s it! Now the sales team can manage the key details on their Account and Opportunity in one place. All with a handy object-specific action layout and the flexibility of a Lightning record page.
Want to know how you can use this tip in your overall technology strategy? Reach out to the team at Sercante to start a conversation.

You can also check out these resources for more ways to make work flow between your sales and marketing teams:

Original article: Displaying Account Fields on a Salesforce Opportunity Record Page

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Displaying Account Fields on a Salesforce Opportunity Record Page appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-05-31T19:10:52+00:00May 31st, 2023|Categories: Data Management, Pro Tips|

A Guide to Multi-Select Picklists in Account Engagement (Pardot)

The surest way to get a reaction from any Salesforce Admin is to mention multi-select picklists. They are notoriously hard to report on and can be challenging at times. However, there are times when more than one value is needed. 

Multi-select picklists can also cause quite a few issues for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Admins. In this guide, we’ll discuss the proper way to create, sync, and update multi-select picklists in Account Engagement.

Field Types and Compatibility

Field types between Salesforce and Account Engagement don’t always behave the same way. Before we address how to work with multi-select picklists, we first need to understand field types and compatibility.

Account Engagement

  • Checkbox – Allows a prospect to select multiple options from a list of values.
  • Dropdown – Prospects can select a single value from a picklist.
  • Multi-Select – Prospects can select multiple values from a picklist.
  • Radio Button – Allows a prospect to select a single option from a list of values.

For more information, see the complete list of Account Engagement Prospect Field Types.

Salesforce

  • Checkbox – A single select field that is used to indicate true or false.
  • Picklist – Allows users to select a single value from a defined list.
  • Picklist (Multi-select) – Allows users to select multiple values from a defined list.

For more information, see the complete list of Salesforce Custom Field Types.

The first thing to note is that checkboxes are multi-select in Account Engagement, but not Salesforce. This can lead to issues when syncing to a checkbox field in Salesforce. To avoid issues, set your field type to radio button in Account Engagement when syncing to a Salesforce checkbox (for more information see – Mapping Pardot checkbox fields to Salesforce checkbox fields).

The next thing that you’ll notice is that Account Engagement has two fields that allow users to select multiple values – checkbox and multi-select. So what’s the difference and how should each be used? I’m glad you asked.

  • Checkbox – Select this option if you are creating a form in Account Engagement and you would like all values to be shown as individual boxes where prospects can check one or many.
  • Multi-Select – Select this option if you are creating a form in Account Engagement and would like the values displayed in a picklist where the user can select one or many options. 

Salesforce and Account Engagement Field Compatibility 

Salesforce Field Type Account Engagement Field Type Compatible
Checkbox Checkbox ❌
Checkbox Dropdown ❌
Checkbox Multi-Select ❌
Checkbox Radio Button ✔
Picklist Checkbox ❌
Picklist Dropdown ✔
Picklist Multi-Select ❌
Picklist Radio Button ✔
Picklist (Multi-Select) Checkbox ✔
Picklist (Multi-Select) Dropdown ❌
Picklist (Multi-Select) Multi-Select ✔
Picklist (Multi-Select) Radio Button ❌

Account Engagement Custom Fields

Now that we are all on the same page related to fields and compatibility, it’s now time to create our custom fields in Account Engagement to hold the data. You have options when creating custom fields, so it’s important to consider the data in Salesforce and how you would like the information displayed on your Account Engagement forms before creating your field.

Option #1 – Checkbox

If the multi-select picklist in Salesforce has a small number of values (less than 5) and you would like all options visible to prospects when they view your form, checkbox is the field type for you.

Example Form with Checkbox Field Type 

Example Form with Checkbox Field Type

Option #2 – Multi-Select

If the multi-select picklist in Salesforce has a large number of values and displaying all on a form would not be practical, multi-select is the way to go.

Example Form with Multi-Select Field Type

Example Form with Multi-Select Field Type

Additional Field Options & Considerations

Regardless of the field type selected, there are a few options that I would highly encourage you to consider.

Options that Should Always be Selected 

  • Keep this field’s type and possible values (for dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes) in sync with the CRM.
  • Use pre-defined values (for checkboxes, radio buttons, drop downs, and multi-selects).

Record and Display Multiple Responses 

The “Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues)” box is not as clear cut as the other options mentioned above. Its use is really tied to how you are using the field and what data should be retained. 

  • Selected
    • Initial selections will be recorded in Account Engagement upon initial form completion and synced to Salesforce.
    • If form is completed again and new values are selected, they will be added to the prospect record in Account Engagement (and will sync to Salesforce). 
    • Values that were deselected during the second submission will still be included in the prospect record in Account Engagement and would also be visible in Salesforce. Essentially, the original selections from the initial form submission will be retained – even if they are not selected during the second form submission.
  • Not Selected
    • Initial selections will be recorded in Pardot.
    • If form is completed again and new values are selected, they will be added to the prospect record in Account Engagement (and will sync to Salesforce). 
    • Values that were deselected during the second submission will be REMOVED from the prospect record in Account Engagement and would NOT be visible in Salesforce after the records sync. 

Account Engagement Forms

We’re getting there! Now that we have decided how we want the multi-select picklist options to display on our form and we’ve created the custom field in Account Engagement, it’s time to build our form.  For this exercise, I’m going to assume that you are familiar with creating a form. If you need a quick refresher, check out the Create a Form article from Salesforce.

Forms with Checkboxes

The process of adding a checkbox field to a form is pretty straightforward. Simply click the +Add New Field button once you reach the “Fields” tab and configure the field. Be sure to set the type to Checkbox and make sure to click the Load Default Data button.

Check the “required” box if you would like the field to be required. You can also select the “Always display even if previously completed” option on the “Advanced” tab, if you would like the field to always display.

multi-select picklist info

After configuring, your form preview will look like the example below. Finish the form wizard for completing the additional tabs (Look and Feel, Completion Actions, Confirm & Save) and your form will be ready for use.

form fields preview multi-select picklist

Form with Multi-Select Picklists

The process for creating a form using a multi-select field is very similar to the process for creating one for a checkbox. The only real difference is the “Type” of field that you’ll select.

Very quickly, you’ll notice that there is not a multi-select option in the “Type” list. This can be confusing, but is not an issue. When configuring the form, set the checkbox type.

The magic will happen when you click the Load Default Data button. This will pull in the data from the multi-select field that you previously created and update the type selection to Multi-Select.

Form with Multi-Select Picklists
Form with Multi-Select Picklists

After configuring, your form preview will look like the example below. Finish the form wizard for completing the additional tabs (Look and Feel, Completion Actions, Confirm & Save) and your multi-select form will be ready for use.

Form fields preview

Importing Multi-Select Picklist Values 

When importing data into a multi-select field in Account Engagement, you must first decide on the desired action. Do you want to overwrite the current selections or do you want to add new selections to the existing data? This is a big one as it will determine if you should select the Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues) option when creating your field. 

Import – Record and Display Multiple Responses NOT Selected

In this scenario, the Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues) is not selected for either of my custom fields in Account Engagement.

After completing both forms, my initial selections were recorded in Account Engagement and synced to Salesforce.

The data below was then imported into Pardot. The “overwrite existing data” option was selected for the MAP field, but not not the Mascot field upon import.

The result is that the MAP field was updated to Marketing Cloud Engagement, but no changes were made to the Mascot field. This makes sense as we opted to overwrite the data in the MAP field when we imported. Since we did not overwrite the Mascot data, the initial values were retained.

Import – Record and Display Multiple Responses Selected

In this scenario, the Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues) IS selected for both of my custom fields in Account Engagement.

After completing both forms, my initial selections were recorded in Account Engagement and synced to Salesforce.

The data below was then imported into Pardot. The “overwrite existing data” option was selected for the MAP field, but not not the Mascot field upon import.

The result is that the MAP field was updated to Marketing Cloud Engagement and that the additional values of Flo and Brandy were added into the Mascot field. This is exactly what we would expect. We told Account Engagement to overwrite the data in the MAP field so it did. Since we did not select “overwrite” for the Mascot field and the field was configured to record and display multiple responses, the new values were appended to the existing.

salesforce mascots - multi-select picklist values

Updating Multi-Select Picklist Values 

When using automation rules to change data in multi-select picklist fields, you must first decide on the desired action – just like you did for list imports. Checking (or not checking) the Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues) option when creating the field will impact the results in Account Engagement and Salesforce.

Automation Rule – Record and Display Multiple Responses NOT Selected

In this scenario, the Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues) is not selected for either of my custom fields in Account Engagement. The values have also been reset to the values below as the starting point. We will now create automation rules to update the values. 

Salesforce mascots multi-select picklist

For this exercise, I’m going to assume that you are familiar with creating automation rules. If you need a quick refresher, check out the Create an Automation Rule article from Salesforce. The automation rule below contains actions to update the MAP field to “Marketing Cloud Engagement” and the Mascot field to “Astro” and “Flo”. Let’s run and record our results.

Multi-Select Picklists

The result is that both fields were updated based on the actions included in the automation rule. This is the expected behavior based on the field configuration. The automation rule told Account Engagement to change the field values and that’s exactly what it did. 

Form with Multi-Select Picklists 3

Automation Rule – Record and Display Multiple Responses Selected

In this scenario, the Record and display multiple responses (useful for fields that are set to always be displayed like reporting issues) IS selected for both of my custom fields in Account Engagement.

The values have also been reset to the default values below.

Form with Multi-Select Picklists 2

We’re now going to recreate the exact same automation rule as we did earlier. As a reminder, the rule contains actions to update the MAP field to “Marketing Cloud Engagement” and the Mascot field to “Astro” and “Flo”. What do you think will happen this time?

Form with Multi-Select Picklists

If you said that both MAP fields would be selected and that the Mascot field would contain all four of our fiends (Astro, Codey, Flo, and Max), you would be correct. Since our fields are now configured to record multiple responses, the new values were added and the original values were retained.   

Parting Words 

In this guide, we tested a lot of situations that can result when working with multi-select picklists in Account Engagement to help add clarity to how these fields work. The decisions that you make related to how data should display on forms and the data that you would like to retain are two critical questions that must be addressed at the beginning of your project. These decisions will determine how your fields are created in Account Engagement and the data that will ultimately end up in Salesforce. 

Further Reading

Questions?

Contact the Sercante team for help.

Original article: A Guide to Multi-Select Picklists in Account Engagement (Pardot)

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post A Guide to Multi-Select Picklists in Account Engagement (Pardot) appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-03-28T19:58:12+00:00March 28th, 2023|Categories: Data Management, Emails & Forms, Pardot, Pro Tips, revive|

7 Questions to Guide Your Pardot Account Audit

Pardot account audits: You know you need to do one, but somehow this daunting task keeps getting relegated to the bottom of your to-do list. With the new year on the horizon, do future-you a favor and carve out time soon to conduct an audit of your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) instance. You’ll feel better kicking off 2023 knowing your account is in order!

So where do you start? Audits can certainly be overwhelming, with long checklists of components and settings to review. But, a bit of reflection up front can help you identify and prioritize the areas to audit with the highest need or greatest potential to benefit your business.

Key questions to consider before a Pardot account audit

Make the most of your time by asking yourself these seven questions before diving into your Pardot account audit:

1. Are the essential building blocks in place to ensure Pardot is working properly? 

This is square one — you’ll need to confirm the foundation of your account is set before moving forward. Yup, this means going through the Pardot Settings tab and checking that there are no surprises. Must-dos include your account limits, Salesforce connector, user set-up, and tracker domains.

This is also a good time to step back and think about the big picture: How is data moving in and out of Pardot and where are the weak spots? Besides checking your Salesforce sync settings, review your lead forms, import processes, opt-out processes and integrations to make sure the data is flowing as you intend and that there aren’t any issues causing downstream impacts.

2. What haven’t we checked in a while?

As much as we want to “set it and forget it,” even the best marketing automations need check-ups. Take a minute and list out the areas in Pardot you haven’t paid as much attention to recently. Common culprits could be:

  • Sync errors
  • Repeating automation rules
  • Custom fields syncing with Salesforce
  • Email footer content
  • Scoring and grading rules
  • Sales handoffs and assignment rules
  • Auto-responder email settings and content
  • Automations based on email opens
  • The black hole that is the Uncategorized folder

During your audit, run through this list to ensure everything is running as you expect, and clean up whatever you can. 

3. Where could a little work go a long way to fix something or improve efficiency? 

We’ve all been there: You build a work-around or take on a manual process in order to get something done, then poof — it’s months later and you’re still doing it! 

Now’s the time to figure out if there’s a better way that frees up your time and energy. This might mean addressing bigger issues that require multi-step solutions, but the upfront work now will pay off in the long run. 

For your audit, prioritize figuring out ways that you can leverage automations to carry some of the load. Besides Pardot’s Automation Rules, explore these other key tools:

For help with any of these automations, feel free to reach out! 

4. Does our marketing work align with best practices and industry standards? 

When it comes to marketing practices, it can be helpful to compare yourself to others (within reason of course!). For example: Comparing your email engagement metrics and deliverability practices to industry standards can highlight areas that need improvement, like your template design, segmentation practices to engaged prospects, or personalization strategies. 

Identifying the big-picture improvements needed to align with best practices will help you drill down on the specifics of what it will take to execute — and, as a result, which components in Pardot should be audited and updated to make it happen.

5. Can we showcase the ROI of our marketing efforts? 

Connecting the dots between your marketing work and sales is truly the holy grail for marketing teams, but it can be tricky to get up and running.

With Pardot and Salesforce, you can unlock the marketing attribution magic through a combination of consistent processes and technical tools. Consider these questions and add related items to your audit checklist accordingly.

  • Are you using campaigns consistently to record and organize marketing initiatives?
  • Are Connected Campaigns enabled and configured correctly in your account?
  • Is data being captured at the right times in your prospect journey to connect their engagements to sales?
  • Are your marketing reports set up in Pardot and Salesforce?
  • If you’re using Campaign Influence reporting in Salesforce, does the attribution model fit your needs?
  • If you have more robust reporting and dashboard needs, could you benefit from using additional data integrations and/or B2B Marketing Analytics

Getting a handle on where you are in the process of ROI reporting can crystalize your next steps. Making a commitment to shore up your marketing attribution once and for all in 2023 could pay dividends for you in the long run!

6. What’s coming up that will impact our Pardot system or usage?

Looking ahead, think about how new initiatives, goals or changes at your company will have trickle-down impacts on your Pardot account. What parts of your audit need to adapt accordingly?

Maybe your customer base is expanding and you’d benefit from setting up multiple Pardot Business Units. Or you’ll be creating lots of new automation programs and want to install a Pardot sandbox environment for testing. Maybe Einstein features in Pardot would alleviate some of your workload? 

Conversely, try to identify some aspects of a typical account review to deprioritize or cross off your audit checklist entirely because of upcoming changes.

You’ll also want to keep an eye on upcoming feature releases and new system updates, like the opt-out field sync behavior changes

7. What can we clean up or organize better to make things easier?

Lastly, a bit of housekeeping. Use part of your audit to tidy up your account for some quick wins: 

  • Do your folders, tags or images need organizing? 
  • Are there unused automation, lists, files, or email or form templates that you can clean up, consolidate or archive?
  • Where could you establish naming conventions to better organize assets going forward?
  • Are you identifying junk prospects and recycling them regularly?

Addressing built-up clutter in your account will help you reset and clear the way for more strategic work!

Account audits can feel intimidating, but they’re worth it 

With these considerations in mind, you’re ready to tackle an audit of your Pardot account that focuses on what matters most to your business. 

If it still feels overwhelming or you want some support, please reach out for help — the Sercante team routinely conducts account audits, looking for ways clients can better leverage both the strategic and technical aspects of marketing with Pardot. Plus, you’ll get the advantage of an impartial expert reviewing your account with fresh eyes. Contact us about audit services or fill out this form to get started!

Original article: 7 Questions to Guide Your Pardot Account Audit

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post 7 Questions to Guide Your Pardot Account Audit appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-12-13T14:58:10+00:00December 13th, 2022|Categories: Data Management, Pro Tips, revive, Setup & Admin|

Pardot Marketing Data Sharing Rules: Prevent Duplicates in Salesforce

You’re a responsible marketer and adhere to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Permission-Based Marketing Policy. You’ve enabled Marketing Data Sharing (MDS) rules to ensure that prospects who have not opted-in are not syncing to Pardot. Now you get a call from your Salesforce Admin about Pardot creating duplicates in Salesforce.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can remain compliant AND prevent unintentional dupes in Salesforce.

Let’s start at the beginning

Most sales organizations use tools like Clearbit, Lusha, or ZoomInfo to research companies, find new contacts, review intent data, or enhance data.

These are perfectly valid use cases and can be very beneficial to organizations. However, the problems start when marketing begins emailing these records through Pardot.

What’s the problem? The email addresses are valid.

Salesforce has a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Permission-Based Marketing Policy that strictly prohibits the sending of emails to customers or prospects who have not expressly opted-in to receive them.

Our customers certify that they will not use rented, traded, or purchased lists, email append lists, or any list that contains email addresses captured in any method other than express, customer-specific opt-in when using our system to send emails.

Sending emails to acquired records is a clear violation of the permission-based marketing policy and can result in the suspension or termination of your account. I’d hate to be the person responsible for that!

What’s a marketer to do?

Verify your connector preferences

The first thing is to understand your connector settings in Pardot. Most accounts will be configured to automatically create prospects in Pardot if they are created as a Lead or Contact in Salesforce. This means that ANY lead or contact created in Salesforce from ANY source is going to end up in Pardot and could unknowingly be emailed by your marketing team.

Limit record entry with Marketing Data Sharing Rules

MDS is the safest way to make sure that data does not enter Pardot (Here’s a great post on MDS if you have questions – Pardot Marketing Data Sharing: Tips, Gotchas, and Setup). You can restrict which leads, contacts, opportunities, or custom objects sync to Pardot. The intent of MDS is to control the data that can be seen by the Pardot connector. The issue is that MDS does this job a little too well and this can result in duplicate leads being created in Salesforce.

MDS and duplicate records records

Hold up a minute! Are you telling me that by doing the right thing, I could actually create duplicates in my Salesforce org? Yep.

Here’s the rub. Before creating a lead or contact in Salesforce, Pardot undergoes a series of checks to see if the prospect is in Salesforce already. The intent is to identify matching records and not create duplicates. Since MDS limits the visibility of the connector, Pardot is not able to find prospects who might be in SFDC from a source deemed “not marketable” if they visit your site and complete a Pardot form (for example).

For reference here are the checks performed by Pardot before creating a lead or contact in Salesforce.

  • Is there a lead or contact with a matching CRM ID?
  • Is there a contact with the same email address?
  • Is there a lead with the same email address?
  • Is the prospect assigned to a user in Pardot?

Here’s how we addressed this issue for one of my clients

Don’t activate MDS

It’s important that MDS is not activated in this solution. We want the prospects to sync from Salesforce to Pardot. We’re going to use custom fields and automation rules to make sure that we remain compliant and don’t create duplicates in Salesforce.

Create custom fields

The first step involves creating several custom fields in Salesforce and Pardot. We created first touch and last touch fields to capture the needed information on leads and contacts. In this case, we used Lead Source Detail and Lead Source Detail Most Recent.

  • Lead Source Detail – This is a FIRST TOUCH field that identifies the specifics of where the lead originated (ex. ZoomInfo).
  • Lead Source Detail Most Recent – This is a LAST TOUCH field that identifies the specifics of the most recent source that drove the prospect to your site (ex. LinkedIn).

Map data to your custom fields

We’re going to stick with the ZoomInfo example here since I see this product used in a lot of organizations. When setting up your CRM Integration in ZoomInfo, you have the ability to map fields to for your Account, Contact, and Lead Objects.

In this case, we mapped Lead Source (standard field) and the two custom fields that we created. We also set fixed values for each.

Based on this configuration, any new records added from ZoomInfo into Salesforce will have the fixed values specified. This is super important.

Automation Rules

Remember the Pardot prospect mailability upgrade that took place with the Winter ‘22 release? We’re going to take advantage of it to make sure that we comply with the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Permission-Based Marketing Policy. Don’t remember the changes? No problem – check out this post “Are You Ready for the Pardot Prospect Mailability Upgrade?” from Erin Duncan.

Automation Rule #1 – Set Do Not Email to TRUE

This automation rule will look for prospects in Pardot where Lead Source Detail and Lead Source Detail Most Recent equal “zoominfo”. This lets us know that the prospect was added into Salesforce from ZoomInfo, synced to Pardot, and that the person did not opt-in. As a result, we’ll mark the record as “Do Not Email.”

Automation Rule #2 – Set Do Not Email to FALSE

This automation rule will look for prospects in Pardot where Lead Source Detail is “zoominfo” and Lead Source Detail Most Recent is NOT “zoominfo.” This will show us that the person interacted with our marketing and is eligible to be emailed. It goes without saying that we only want to “activate” prospects who have given permission for us to email them. The Lead Source Detail Most recent field can be updated using completion actions or UTM parameters from URLs (that’s another post).

The short and sweet summary

This solution allows records added into Salesforce (that have not opted-in) to sync to Pardot. Automation rules in Pardot update the “Do Not Email” field based on Pardot interactions and opt-in status. This ensures that prospects who did not previously opt-in are updated correctly when they do opt-in and that no duplicates are created in Salesforce.

Let’s play by the rules AND not create duplicate records

Based on how your organization uses tools like Clearbit, Lusha, or ZoomInfo and the volume of records added to your Salesforce org, MDS might be the best solution for you. However, if a high volume of records are being added into Salesforce, I would recommend that you give this solution some consideration. The chances of duplicates being created in your system grows exponentially based on the number of records being added from external sources.

If you have any questions about this solution, MDS, or anything related to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement or Marketing Cloud Engagement, contact us with your questions.

Original article: Pardot Marketing Data Sharing Rules: Prevent Duplicates in Salesforce

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Pardot Marketing Data Sharing Rules: Prevent Duplicates in Salesforce appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-11-30T20:39:21+00:00November 30th, 2022|Categories: Data Management, Privacy & Compliance, Pro Tips, revive|

Why Salesforce and Marketing Admins Work Better Together

How often do your Salesforce and marketing platform admins talk to each other? 

  • Very little
  • Not at all
  • Only when things go wrong  

If you selected any of the above, you’re not alone. 

I’m here to tell you, no matter how awkward or challenging starting that conversation may be, it’s one that needs to happen (and continue) sooner rather than later. Having a solid bridge between Salesforce marketing and Sales Cloud admins will (I promise!) make both your lives so much easier. Here’s why…

Benefits of marketing and Salesforce admins working together 

#1 Keep your data clean in both places

Whether you’re using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) or the OG Marketing Cloud, the way data flows between your marketing automation platform and Salesforce was probably one of the reasons you purchased the tool. So, let’s keep it flowing. 

By working together you can avoid the following pitfalls:

  • Duplicate fields
  • Data being overwritten 
  • Sync errors (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)): 
    • Fun fact – most common sync errors can be avoided by knowing the Salesforce set up. 
      • Field values = prevents invalid picklist errors
      • Expected data = Prevents validation  rule errors
      • Field types = Prevents invalid field format errors 

If both admins are communicating, you can ensure any updates that happen are accurately reflected in both systems.

#2 Prevent loss of access for users and systems 

When marketing and Salesforce admins stop working together, systems can stop working together. 

True story, I’ve worked with clients who have seen automations stop working and users unable to access the systems and data because of updates that the other admins were not aware of — permissions, profiles, field accessibility. When these changes are not communicated, frustrations can arise and time can be wasted looking into the cause. 

Additionally, If you’re using a sandbox environment, understanding the refresh schedule can help prevent loss of work when it’s unexpectedly refreshed. 

Include both admins in conversations around any updates in either system. The changes may not affect the opposing team but it’s good to know just in case.

#3 Experience Team and Business Benefits

The above are all technical reasons why marketing and Salesforce admins should be best friends. But, we haven’t even touched on the business and team building benefits, which are huge.

Here are a few reasons why:

  • Improve productivity. Stop looking for the cause of a problem but rather plan for the update as a team.
  • You can help advocate for each other with other decision-makers. We are both on the same team and we should both want the same thing. But when one team of admins is working on something and leaves the other out, they can be left to play catch up and try and figure out what’s going on… increasing the frustration and silo.
  • Ultimately, it comes down to $$$ –  Two sets of admins working independently = Mo $ Mo time
  • Teach each other. The great thing about being an admin is that every day is a school day, we are always learning about the latest tools, security updates and new ways of doing things. Let’s share that knowledge. Get to know what the other team does and find out how you can help each other and make each other’s lives easier.

How to build relationships between Salesforce admins

So what can you do to improve or build a relationship between marketing and Salesforce admins?

  • Documentation, documentation and yes, more documentation. Having a record of changes that have been made and how that change relates to the other system will be a huge help in marketing and Salesforce admins working together. 
Tip: Using Pardot? Create a shared spreadsheet with all the Salesforce fields and note if they are synced with a Pardot field. What’s that field for? What’s the sync behavior? What are the values? Admins can then refer to this document when field changes need to be made and ensure the other admin knows if it’s going to affect them 
  • Schedule a regular sync up and use this time as a feedback loop, planning session. This can be monthly or quarterly, depending on how often changes are made. Here are some questions you can ask during these meetings:
    • What plans do each admin have for the month ahead?
    • How will this impact the other team?
    • Consideration you hadn’t thought about
    • What does each team need to do to prepare? How long will it take to get things in order? 
    • What’s not working at the moment and what can be done? 
  • Create a joint Slack, Teams, Google Hangouts channel. Whatever your choice of instant messaging channel, use it to inform admins on both sides of any upcoming changes. Use it to post reminders, questions, updates. This will become your go to place to find answers and work with your admins. 
  • Consider an overview training session of your respective platform. Does your Salesforce admin understand the impact on Marketing cloud when field visibility is changed in Salesforce? Probably not. Work with them to help them understand the implications of such changes. They simply may not know what affects the connection between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to just give Marketing admins Salesforce admin access? 

Yes and no… If you’ve read our blog on Why Should Marketing Admins Have Salesforce Access?, you would have noticed a lot of very good reasons as to why marketing admins should have salesforce access. This is great if you can hand out this access but what happens when you can’t? Should each admin go their separate ways, never to speak again? Absolutely not! 

Even if you can get Salesforce access you should still be opening up communication between yourself and other Salesforce admins.

Strengthen those relationships between marketing and Salesforce admins

Creating a harmonious relationship between both marketing and Salesforce admins starts with the basics… communication and understanding for each other’s roles. When this is followed the benefits can be huge, both personally and technically. 

What tips do you have for improving the relationship between both admins? Let us know in the comments.

Original article: Why Salesforce and Marketing Admins Work Better Together

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Why Salesforce and Marketing Admins Work Better Together appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-11-19T00:54:00+00:00November 19th, 2022|Categories: Analytics & Reporting, Data Management, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

What To Do in Pardot When Contacts Change Jobs

People change jobs all the time. Maybe they’re part of The Great Resignation. Or navigating a new career path after years of military service. But have you ever thought about what to do in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) when contacts change jobs?

It’s something you should consider for two reasons. 

  1. If the person leaving was the primary contact, then you’ll have to figure out how to address generating new sales opportunities with the company.
  2. The contact who changes jobs may be joining another company that can use your products or services.

You could:

  • Delete the contact record
  • Update the record
  • Tell sales they left
  • Sales can tell you they left

THERE ARE SO MANY OPTIONS!!!

What do you do???

The do nothing easy button when Pardot contacts change jobs…

The simple answer is to do nothing. Delete the prospect record, and move on.

For the majority of records in your database, letting them go peacefully is exactly what we ought to do. A great many records in your database are not going to buy from you anyhow.  If they are really interested in your offerings, then they will come back on their own with their new business email address.

Easy! Next Question!

If only business was so easy…

Is that really the user experience you want people to have with your brand? 

How does Pardot know when CRM contacts leave a company?

The simplest answer is that we see email hard bounces when we send contacts an email through Pardot.

Some email systems won’t hard bounce emails as an anti-spam measure. (This is why we should delete records after a period of time when they show no activity and may be silenced hard bounces.) In those cases, we would depend on other ways of knowing.

Use the CRM to notify Pardot when the contact record changes

Sales tried calling and was told they left. This is usually marked in the CRM in some fashion. We can configure Pardot to recognize this and take action accordingly. The solution likely looks like a dynamic list looking for these former employees and deleting them in Pardot periodically. 

Or, we may have a data augmentation vendor, which is telling us that the contact has left. We would again follow a similar process to the above to get these records out of our Pardot instance.

Use a hand-wavy custom field process to record when contacts change jobs

When there isn’t a formal process or custom fields to use for employment status, people will just figure things out. 

Too often, this involves editing a field, such as the last name, to add “Left the company” or “retired” or “died” —  yes, I have seen all of these. In fact, I have seen physical mailers go out with ‘died’ in the address because we couldn’t filter out records we shouldn’t take action on anymore. Talk about cringeworthy.

(read more on avoiding marketing horror stories in this post)

If we look at the data vendors as likely followers of best practice, we see many of them with two fields:

  • An ‘active/inactive’ field
  • And sometimes a ‘reason’ field

The reason field may be more important to our account-minded sales team. That’s because they have established relationships with these individuals versus the bulk data vendors who don’t have the same visibility as to why people are no longer at a company.

Determine personal versus business interest for the contact

A lot of people want to change an email address to the new company email address in Pardot, and then change a Contact record over to the new Account in the CRM.

This may not be the best idea.

While an individual doesn’t forget everything about you when they change jobs, their new company may be effectively starting from scratch.  Personal interest doesn’t automatically transfer to a person’s new company. That’s because the business interest may not be there… yet.

Using Net Promoter Score (NPS) and brand mavens

If you use Net Promoter Score surveys, people changing jobs may be a great way to action those scores. Your 9s and especially the 10s may very well ‘recommend to a friend or colleague’ at their new position. 

If somebody truly loves your brand, they may be the best sales person you can have. They will find all the hidden buyers at that new organization and close a sale before your sales team is even involved. 

Keep your brand mavens happy even if there isn’t an opportunity now. They will work on the new org at their own pace and the org may be ready in a few years without needing much time spent by sales.

Conversely, a NPS 1-4 moving to a new org with an active project can totally derail the opportunity. Sales may be blindsided as the negative new hire may not come to their attention. A project that was about to close just evaporates in front of their eyes, inexplicably. 

Create a process for your team for contact job changes

Notify the sales team.

If we get an email bounce for somebody who is connected to an open opportunity, we probably ought to notify sales that we’ve lost somebody in our buying center. This usually involves creating a task in Salesforce.  

Sales could use this information to try to find the new person taking over the project. The task shouldn’t demand action. But rather, it informs the team of the situation and suggests a few possible courses of action — as defined by the sales manager.

This could look like an automation rule looking at the high/low NPS scores, Pardot bounces, and the dynamic list of records marked in CRM as left.

Link an old Salesforce record to a new record.

If your business makes sense for doing so, you could link contacts together as a custom field(s) and connect a person from their prior job to the new contact record. This would be a forward looking pointer. We want to be able to follow that brand advocate to where they are now. We are less interested in where somebody was in this context.

If your business truly has a good user community and you want to keep track of people over the course of their career (let’s use the Salesforce MVPs as an example), then we can create a custom object to track brand mavens, VIPs, influencers, or  whatever you want to call it. 

A contact record would link to this custom object. As people move around, we have a consistent way to find the most current contact record for these rock stars. 
To make this actionable in Pardot, we would have a ‘current contact’ ID on this custom object and pull this into Pardot as a custom object.  We can now create dynamic lists, and provide a red carpet treatment in our Engagement Studio Programs (ESPs).

Wait, the contacts aren’t gone, just promoted!

Funny thing, preconceived notions. We just jump to conclusions! 

The title of this article said nothing about leaving the company….

Tracking internal job movement

Internal job movement is going to be harder to suss out and action at scale in Pardot. Is the Prospect in the same department and our products or services even still relevant to them?

Our Grading may change with the new role. We need to make sure that our Grading Rules are written in a way that they can re-evaluate correctly to the new criteria.

Speaking of new roles…. Oftentimes, our Pardot to CRM sync field settings are set that the CRM ‘wins’ if there is a difference. 

People filling out forms in a hurry tend to not always properly capitalize things, or may abbreviate. Conversely, our sales team tends to make sure these details are exactly right before a PO gets sent out. Thus our expensive, staff-curated data tends to have more ‘staying power’ than user-submitted data.
But if the Prospect just filled out a form telling us about their new promotion, and that new job title syncs to the CRM, the CRM refuses the change and we’ve lost the big news!

This is the pain of data management. We can’t have easy, simple processes that always work all the time. 

We may need to change the field sync behavior to last updated, and hope that we don’t get end users damaging our data too often.

How do promotions affect buyer personas?

The other thing to think about is how their information needs may change with the new role. Being promoted to a manager means they no longer use the product every day, so they are less interested in specific features and usability, but now more on team effectiveness and ROI for how they spend that fancy new budget they just got control over.

Our ESPs need to be designed such that we can fall out of the old role-relevant nurtures, and they can start getting the new content.

Like most things in marketing, the answer is “it depends”

There are a lot of options that we could do. Depending on your business and your audience, some things will be more impactful than others to the company’s bottom line.  

However, we don’t need to do all the things right now.  Pick one thing that seems like it will help the most, and try to work on that. 

It may take a couple of iterations before you get it right. It’s OK.

And if you’re still stuck after that, then tell us about it in the chat. Or send us a message.

Original article: What To Do in Pardot When Contacts Change Jobs

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post What To Do in Pardot When Contacts Change Jobs appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-10-21T20:52:26+00:00October 21st, 2022|Categories: Data Management, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Preparing for Pardot Opt Out Field Sync Changes

The Salesforce Winter ’23 release is bringing some changes to the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) “Opted Out” field. After this release, the sync options will change and “Use most recently updated” will no longer be an option for this field. 

Pardot Admins must choose between “Use Salesforce’s Value” or “Use Pardot’s Value” before February 26th, 2023 or this field will stop syncing with Salesforce. All Pardot Orgs created after August 26th, 2022 will default to use Pardot’s Value.

So, how do you keep Pardot and Salesforce Opt Outs in sync between the two systems after this change? Well, it all depends on where your emails are coming from. 

If you are only sending emails from Pardot

If you are only sending emails from Pardot, then Pardot being the system of record should not cause any issues. 

Before you change your Opt Out sync behavior in Pardot, check the permissions of your “Email Opt Out” field on the Lead and Contact Objects. You will want to ensure only the Pardot to Salesforce connector user’s profile can edit this field so Salesforce users don’t incorrectly think they can opt out Leads/Contacts from the Salesforce side. 

  1. In Salesforce navigate to Setup > Object Manager > Lead > Fields & Relationships
  2. Locate and open the Email Opt Out field
  3. Select Set Field-Level Security
  4. Ensure Read-Only is selected for any profiles who have visibility to this field except for the connector user’s profile (this will be the “B2BMA Integration User” profile if you are using the B2BMA integration user as your connector user)
  1. Select Save
  2. Repeat steps 1-5 for the Contact Object

Next, change your Pardot Opted Out field to use Pardot’s Value and voila! You are ready for this update. 

But Salesforce Users want to be able to Opt Out Leads/Contacts

If your Salesforce users need to maintain the ability to opt Leads/Contacts out of Pardot Email from the Salesforce side, they can use the “Do Not Email” field going forward. Make sure you go through the “If you are only sending emails from Pardot”  steps above, as well as:

#1 – Create a “Do Not Email” field for Leads/Contacts

  1. In Salesforce navigate to Setup > Object Manager > Lead > Fields & Relationships
  2. Select New
  3. Select the field type Checkbox, then Next
  4. Name the field “Pardot: Do Not Email”
  5. In the Help Text field, enter “Prevents this Lead/Contact from receive Marketing emails in Pardot”
  1. Select Next
  2. On the Establish field-level security screen, ensure all profiles that will need update this field have visibility to it especially the Connector user’s profile (this will be the “B2BMA Integration User” profile if you are using the B2BMA integration user as your connector user)
  3. Select Next
  4. Select the page layouts you’d like to add this field to, select Save
  5. Repeat steps 1-9 for the Contact Object 

# 2 – Map the “Pardot: Email Opt Out” field upon Conversion

  1. In Salesforce navigate to Setup > Object Manager > Lead > Fields & Relationships
  2. Select Map Lead Fields
  3. Select the Contact tab
  4. Locate the Pardot: Do Not Email field in the Lead Fields column and select the Pardot: Do Not Email  field under the Contact Fields Column
  1. Select Save

# 3 – Map the Pardot “Do Not Email” field to Salesforce

  1. In the Pardot Lightning app, navigate to Pardot Settings > Prospect Fields > Default Fields > Do Not Email
  2. Select Edit default Prospect field
  3. In the salesforce.com Field Name drop down, select Pardot: Do Not Email
  4. In the Sync Behavior field, select Use the most recently updated value
  1. Select Save default field

If you’re sending email out of multiple systems

If you’re sending emails out of Pardot and Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, or various other systems, my recommendation would be to create an Opt Out field for each system then use a Salesforce flow to keep these checkboxes in line. 

For instance, if a Lead/Contact opts out of Pardot emails, you likely want to also opt them out of Salesforce and Marketing Cloud emails coming from the same company or email domain,  otherwise you’re likely to get some SPAM complaints. 

Tell us how Pardot Opt Out Field Sync changes affect you

How are you handling the Pardot Opt Out field sync changes? Do you have any scenarios that are more complex than the examples above? Let us know in the comments!

Original article: Preparing for Pardot Opt Out Field Sync Changes

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Preparing for Pardot Opt Out Field Sync Changes appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-10-05T14:06:00+00:00October 5th, 2022|Categories: Data Management, New Features, Release Notes|

Connected Salesforce + Pardot Campaigns: How They Rock Our World

Salesforce and Pardot connected campaigns bridge two distinct campaign reporting functions into one powerful feature. 

Prior to 2019, Salesforce and Pardot campaigns were independent of each other. But with the introduction of connected campaigns the two entities joined forces. And with that, the humble marketer’s life is made easier. 

The Difference Between Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns

Before we jump in, let’s do a quick 101 refresh on the difference between Salesforce campaigns and Pardot campaigns.

The Skinny on Pardot Campaigns

Pardot campaigns refer to the first touch interaction that could be tracked. It answers the question: “What brought this person to us?”

For example, let’s say someone visits your How to Be Good At Stuff webinar page. They didn’t sign up, came back 30 days later, and converted to a lead by downloading your I’m Awesome at Stuff whitepaper. Their campaign would be set to the How to Be Good At Stuff webinar, since that was the first initiative that brought them to you.

Pardot campaigns are one-to-one. That means each person has ONE source campaign. And every asset created in Pardot has to be tied to one campaign as well.

This gives you useful reporting data on the number of leads sourced by your campaigns and how these convert into closed-won opportunities downstream in the pipeline.

How Salesforce Campaigns are Different

Salesforce campaigns are more… how normal people think about campaigns. Campaigns are marketing initiatives, and each contact or lead can belong to multiple campaigns.

Tracking this in Salesforce is hugely impactful. If you leverage Salesforce campaigns to record who you touch with your marketing efforts, then you’re laying the foundation to be able to show all of the marketing touchpoints that led to a sale on each of your opportunities:

Opportunity Dashboard

And at the campaign level, you can see the total volume of opportunities that were influenced by your marketing activities.

Salesforce Campaign dashboard

Marketers have been talking about revenue attribution for the last decade. But for most organizations, this stops with “talk.” We all like the idea of being able to link marketing campaigns to hard revenue numbers, but our disparate systems and measurements make that incredibly hard to deliver.

Campaign influence reporting finally makes revenue attribution doable for a typical marketing team — all with tools native to the platform. This comes together in first touch, last touch, or any other custom attribution models your team needs to analyze the impact of its marketing spend.

Campaign performance dashboard

How to Set Up Connected Campaigns in your Pardot Org 

The good news is that connected campaigns are automatically activated for Pardot orgs setup after 2019. But, there are a few settings we’ll want to take a look at to make sure everything is functioning.

 The magic is in the Pardot connector!

Connected campaign settings are managed by the connector that bridges Salesforce and Pardot. 

In Pardot Lightning…

  1. Click on Pardot Settings
  2. Connectors (on left menu)
  3. Click the settings cog under Actions on the right for the Salesforce connector
  4. Select Edit Settings

On this screen, you’ll notice the campaign that is being used to connect contacts that come from Salesforce into Pardot. They will be marked with this “first touch” campaign when they sync from Salesforce. If you do NOT have a campaign here, you should create a campaign in Salesforce, something generic like “Salesforce Contacts,” and select it here. 

Question: I created the campaign in Salesforce and it doesn’t appear in this picklist?

This is pretty common. There are three reasons why the campaign would not appear, here are some troubleshooting steps…

  1. When setting up the campaign in Salesforce you must check the box to make the campaign “Active.”
  2. Be patient! It can sometimes take 5-10 minutes for the campaign to appear in Pardot. You may need to refresh the connector settings page to see it appear.
  3. As a last resort, delete the campaign you created in Salesforce and create a new campaign. You might be shocked at how often this solves the problem.
Connector Settings

Let’s Look at Campaign Settings

Once you have the connector settings worked out, click on the Campaigns tab at the top.

Pardot Settings, campaign tab

Let’s take a closer look at the setting options.

  • First, ensure the check box for “Enable Connected Campaigns and Engagement History” is checked. This should already be checked by default, which turns on all the wonderful connected campaign magic. 
  • Enable Campaign Member Sync should also be checked to ensure that when you add people to your campaign in Salesforce or Pardot they stay in sync. Note: If you add people to a campaign in Pardot but they do not exist as Contact or Lead records in Salesforce, you will not see them in Salesforce under that particular campaign. 
  • Use Salesforce to manage all campaigns should be checked allowing you to create and manage campaigns in one place — Salesforce! No more duplicating efforts in Pardot.
  • Limit Campaign Creation by Date – this handy feature gives you the ability to limit what campaigns sync to Pardot. If your Salesforce org has been around for a while, it undoubtedly has campaigns that were created and you may not wish to clutter Pardot with old campaigns. You can select a cut-off date here!
  • Show unconnected campaigns in Pardot Campaigns tab is good to check if you wish to see what campaigns in Pardot are not connected to Salesforce. As the subtext under the box states: Unconnected campaigns are always shown unless Manage Campaigns in Salesforce is enabled.
  • Finally, Campaign record types enabled for connection. This will say “Master Record Type” by default if you only have one Salesforce campaign record type. But some orgs are fancy and have multiple record types for different parts of the business. If this is the case, you can select which record types should sync to Pardot.

Once Connected Campaigns are flowing here’s what you’ll notice

  • All new campaigns will be created in Salesforce — you can not create campaigns in Pardot.
  • Every time you add a new active campaign to Salesforce, it’s automatically available in Pardot.
  • You can add campaign members in Pardot through automation rules or completion actions. As long as they are assigned to a user, they will sync to Salesforce and show up as members of that campaign in Salesforce. 

PRO TIP: If you have a campaign set up for a weekly or monthly newsletter, add a completion action to your signup form. This ensures that when a prospect fills out the form, they are automatically added to that campaign.

These campaign fields will also be updated by Salesforce and pushed to Pardot:

  • Name
  • Cost
  • Created By
  • Updated By
  • Updated At

Now for the Really Exciting Stuff: Show Engagement History on the Campaign in Salesforce & Report On It

To add another layer of awesomeness to this, Connected Campaigns allows you to also enable Engagement History on Salesforce campaigns.

What this means is that on Salesforce campaigns that are connected to Pardot campaigns, you can pass engagement metrics from:

  • List emails
  • Forms
  • Form handlers
  • Links & custom redirects

When you turn on Engagement History, new custom objects called ListEmail, MarketingForm, and MarketingLink are created and populated with data from corresponding Pardot records. These records DO count against your org’s data storage limits. 

Important: these custom objects do need to be added to your Campaign page layout! Here are detailed instructions to do this.

Benefits of Enabling Engagement History

Enabling Engagement History lets you add KPIs for these assets to the Campaign Page Layout:

Engagement History

And even better, it lets you get at this data in Salesforce reports & dashboards:

campaign report

My heart literally flutters with anticipation of the power this is going to bring to marketers on the platform.

 A few general FYIs on what you need to make Engagement History work:

  • Connected campaigns set up (duh)
  • Prospects syncing with a Salesforce lead or contact, and added to the connected campaign
  • The prospect must be assigned to a user, group, or queue in Salesforce (a requirement for it to sync to Salesforce in the first place)
  • To access Engagement History data, users need the Sales User or CRM User standard permission set and field-level security access to the engagement history fields.

Ready to Roll with Salesforce and Pardot Connected Campaigns?

Once you experience connected campaigns, there’s no going back. (Literally and figuratively. Once it’s on, it can’t be turned off.)

To make this magic happen, you will need your Salesforce admin on board, since a lot of the configuration changes take place inside Sales Cloud. 

Do you utilize the power of connected campaigns? What’s your experience been? We’re dying to know — please share with fellow readers in the comments!

Original article: Connected Salesforce + Pardot Campaigns: How They Rock Our World

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Connected Salesforce + Pardot Campaigns: How They Rock Our World appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-09-19T14:37:00+00:00September 19th, 2022|Categories: Analytics & Reporting, Data Management, Pro Tips, revive|

Salesforce Native Reporting: Get More From Your Data

Salesforce has robust native reporting capabilities that come out of the box. But what happens when you need more? What CAN you do? 

This Salesforce native reporting overview will make you a custom operational reporting superstar. That’s because it highlights the ways you can leverage custom objects and use joins in your reporting. 

The good news is, once you know what’s possible, the world of Salesforce reporting is much easier to navigate.

Where to Start: Create a Lookup Relationship on a Custom Object

We’re going to start by going through the process of creating a lookup relationship on a Salesforce custom object.

Why start here? In short, all Salesforce reporting is based on relationships between objects. 

Let’s say you have a custom object where you store all of your team’s required compliance paperwork. You want to report on which opportunities need which paperwork within that custom object. 

While you can create a custom report type for your custom object, there is no link between Opportunities and your custom object. 

The good news is that you can create one! 

Example: Creating a relationship between custom object and Opportunity

Here’s an example that we can use as we move through our reporting exploration. Specifically, these are the steps to create a relationship between a custom object and an Opportunity in Salesforce:

  1. Open the custom object. In this case, I have created a custom object called “Compliance Documents.”
  2. Select Fields & Relationships.
  3. Select “New” to create a new field.
  4. Select “Lookup Relationship.”
  1. Select “Opportunity” as the Related to. This will create the relationship between Opportunity and the custom object, making them “linked” for reporting and other related purposes.
  2. If you want the relationship to be consistent and there should be a value selected, make sure to select “Always require a value in order to save the record.” Also make sure that “Add this field to existing custom report types that contain this entity” is checked.
  3. Click through the next few screens to verify permissions, Related list label and select what layouts to the new field to.

With these steps, you can now add the custom object in a report type AND the related list will appear for the Opportunity. So easy, right?

Exploring Salesforce Custom Report Types

So, now that we have linked our custom object with a lookup relationship, let’s get ready to report!

Use the following example to inspire your use of native Salesforce reporting capabilities.

Use Case Example: Set up a custom report type 

You want to be able to see what type of compliance reports have been completed (and what opportunities do NOT have documents) for your Opportunities. To accomplish this, we will set up a custom report type. 

  1. Go to Setup and select “Report Types.”
  2. Click “New Custom Report Type.”
  3. Select the Primary object (see tip below for more information).
  4. In our case, we will use Opportunities as our base object. We are interested in both Opportunities that have documents AND those that don’t. So, we’re calling it “Opportunities with or without Compliance Documents.”
  1. Now we can select the related objects. In this case, we want to see Compliance Documents. 

Because our custom objects were created to support Activity creation, and Activity creation links to the Assignment object, we can add all these to maximize our report.

NOTE: We are selecting “A” Records may or may not have “B” records so we can see how many of our total Opportunities have records. If we selected Each “A” record must have at least one “B” Record, we would ONLY see these records and not be able to compare (which will be handy in our report).

  1. Save your changes.

Tip: What is the Primary Object?

The primary object is the “base” Object for your report. You can select a custom or standard object. To decide which to select, consider what fields you want and whether they are connected as you select these. 

Remember that all reporting starts with relationships between objects. One tool that can help you “see” the relationships in Salesforce is the Schema Builder in setup, which is where you can select your objects and get a visualization of how they are connected. 

Good news for us, Salesforce report types makes this easy by only allowing you to select objects that are related and have lookup relationships. If you don’t see a child object, it’s because there isn’t a defined relationship. 

Add Lookup Fields in Salesforce Custom Report

So, great news! You have connected your custom object to a standard object and created a new report type. But what other data can we add from here? 

Let’s see what we can add using the “edit layout” section of the Report Type.

  1. Click on “Edit Layout”
  2. On the left, you can dropdown the list under “view” to see the objects in your report type.
  1. Use the “Add fields related via lookup” to see what you can add to your report from other related objects.
  1. You can see all the objects that have a relevant relationship to “opportunity” in this window. Clicking on the object name allows you to select fields to add to your report.

    In the example above, I am adding Account Name and Account Number. You can change the view to show any of the objects in the custom report type to select related fields. You can see which fields were added by lookup easily since they have a magnifying glass next to them in the layout window.

NOTE: Watch out for duplicate fields. For example, if I select the ID for Account using the related lookup, I will end up with two almost identically named fields when creating reports, which could be confusing. Not all lookup fields contain data. If a field is not required in a related object field, you may not get any additional data (just empty fields)

  1. You can add sections, add and remove fields and do many other fun things in this window, but we’ll move on to creating our report with our shiny new report type! (more information on working layouts here.) For our use case, we are ready to move on.

Creating a Report Using Your Custom Report Type

Finally all your work will come together in an amazing report! Let’s jump in!

  1. Go to Reports
  2. Click on “New Report”
  3. Be sure to select “all” to search for our New Custom Report type
  1. On the right, you can quickly see what reports have been created with this report type and what objects are included. Click on “Start Report”. You can add whatever fields you need.

Using Cross Filters to Filter Records Based on Related Objects

Now that I have a report in progress, what else can I do to use other objects with it? One example of this is a cross filter. 

A cross filter allows you to filter your report type based on a related object. For example, If I have a report type based on opportunities, I can use a cross join to limit the results to opportunities that have related campaign influence records (without actually having to include the Campaign Influence object in the custom report type).

  1. Click on “Filters”
  2. Select the drop down next to filters and select New Cross Filter
  3. Select Opportunities as the “show me” and Campaign Influence as the limiter

    NOTE: You can use “With” or Without” as the criteria to return records.

TIP: Check out the Sercante Campaign Influence Starter Pack for more information.

Using Joined Reports in Salesforce to Enrich Your Data

Joined Reports in Salesforce are a little tricky to understand but can be VERY practical. Here’s how the feature works.

Consider the following use case. You want to be able to show Products on Opportunities related to those with compliance documents. Your custom report type does not have Product information. 

No worries at all! If there are related fields between the two report types, you can join them together in blocks.

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Click on “Report” at the top left of your report window.
  2. Click on “Joined Report,” and click apply.
  1. Click on Add Block.
  2. Select the Opportunities with Products block.
  1. Use the lookup window under “Group Across Blocks” to pick the field you want to group on. This will create a connection on a common field. 

In this case OpportunityID is most appropriate since I want to see detail for each opportunity. You can now see the fields I selected from my Custom Report type and fields I selected from the Opportunities with Products report.

NOTE: Once you create a Joined Report, you also need to manage filters for each one separately under the filter area. 

Now you can see how the Joined Report enriches your data! We can see if any Opportunities with or without documents have products linked.

So what happens now?

In our little summary we have reviewed the ways in which you can show data in Salesforce reports through Lookup relationships on objects for the following:

  • Custom reports types
  • Lookups on Custom report Types
  • Joined Report
  • Cross filters

The wonderful world of Salesforce Reporting is constantly changing and improving with every release. Knowing what you can do to bring your data together is the key to creating meaningful, actionable reports. 

I hope this summary helps in your understanding of what’s available and related use cases.

Looking for information about Salesforce native reporting?

Salesforce has a wonderful help section with videos and how tos that can help you on your journey. And remember, you can always reach out to the team at Sercante if you have any questions. 

Tell us what you’re going to build using Salesforce native reporting capabilities in the comments section.

Original article: Salesforce Native Reporting: Get More From Your Data

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Native Reporting: Get More From Your Data appeared first on The Spot.

By |2022-09-16T14:21:00+00:00September 16th, 2022|Categories: Analytics & Reporting, Data Management, Pro Tips, revive|