ParDreamies Best In Show Pardot Award Winner: Destined

The first-ever ParDreamies awards, which were presented during the ParDreamin’ 2021 VIP After Party, celebrate solutions marketing and IT professionals built to reach their goals using Pardot. These solutions are especially impressive because they each rose to solve a specific challenge while utilizing technology to automate their way to greatness. Winners of the ParDreamin’ awards get bragging rights for their team and company, a sweet swag pack, and a fancy trophy to remind them how awesome they are every day.

ParDreamies Categories

The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:

  1. Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
  2. Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
  3. Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
  4. Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
  5. Best in Show

Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Best in Show category, which recognizes the overall winner among all ParDreamies award submissions. The ParDreamies Best in Show award went to Destined, which was submitted by Tammy Begley and Claudia Hoops.

Best in Show with Destined

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

About the Award-Winning Solution

Destined is a premier Salesforce consulting partner based in Australia. They do great work in the Pardot space and have several amazing marketing champions. 

With a client from the property industry, the team at Destined workshopped the criteria of an ideal client and put a Pardot grading profile together. As a result, we built an engaging, icons-driven profiling landing page for prospects to self-identify and build their own profiles. Anyone who signs up for the newsletter is added to a welcome journey within Pardot Engagement Studio. The objective of this journey is to build rapport and trust so the prospect profiles can grade them.

They built an easy and engaging way to automate the collection of information rather than for a sales team member to ask these questions over the phone to then find out that the person they are talking to wasn’t ready to buy. 

Challenge the team wanted to solve

Australia’s property industry is very competitive. As a property developer, you want to collect as much information as possible about your potential buyers. It is imperative that sales teams can quickly follow up with clients who are ready to buy, have finance approved, and are high budget investors. 

At the same time, it likely makes sense to send prospects who are still saving and might be looking to buy in 12+ months on an educational nurture campaign. The profiling page automates the gathering of this information in an engaging way.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

There were no major hurdles to overcome other than coming up with the idea in the first place on how to build an engaging landing page that prospects actually want to complete. 

Pardot forms and landing pages helped the team to build an engaging profile page. They used Pardot’s profile feature to build the criteria of the property developer’s ideal client profile. Then, they built automation rules to trigger the grading. And finally, they built a welcome journey as a Pardot Engagement Studio Program with the profile page as a call to action to gather the information from our prospects.

Results after implementing the solution

To date, the team has seen a 34% conversion rate on average. This is for customers who have been put onto the welcome journey and who have profiled themselves and have met the MQL threshold of being the right client.

Learn more and keep it going

The project was a huge success, but it took several people and a great deal of expertise and resources to make it happen. Here are resources you can use to replicate the project in your own Pardot instance or get inspiration to do something similar.

Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way. 

The post ParDreamies Best In Show Pardot Award Winner: Destined appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-11-16T21:43:54+00:00November 16th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Content Marketing, Data Management, Design, Email Marketing, Engagement Studio, Events, Integration|
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ParDreamies Social Impact Pardot Award Winner: Lexipol

The first-ever ParDreamies awards, which were presented during the ParDreamin’ 2021 VIP After Party, celebrate solutions marketing and IT professionals built to reach their goals using Pardot. These solutions are especially impressive because they each rose to solve a specific challenge while utilizing technology to automate their way to greatness. Winners of the ParDreamin’ awards get bragging rights for their team and company, a sweet swag pack, and a fancy trophy to remind them how awesome they are every day.

The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:

  1. Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
  2. Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
  3. Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
  4. Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
  5. Best in Show

Perhaps the greatest side effect of the awards is the opportunity to share the winning solutions so others can replicate them in their own Pardot instances. Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Social Impact category, which recognizes teams that utilize Pardot to affect positive social change. The ParDreamies Social Impact award went to Lexipol, which was submitted by Miriam Childs and Julian Janssen.

Social Impact with Lexipol

Lexipol is a Texas-based company that provides policy manuals, training bulletins, and consulting services to law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and other public safety departments. 

The team at Lexipol sprang into action in March 2020 and utilized Pardot to launch a Coronavirus Learning & Policy Center. This was a resource 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 and to help their communities during a particularly challenging time.

To add an extra hurdle, the company was evolving from a recent merger. This project represented one of the first times they offered these solutions under one brand, which in turn helped demonstrate how the merged entities could add value and deliver on their brand promise.

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 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.

Challenge the team wanted to solve

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lexipol, the leader in policy, training and wellness support for public safety and local government, recognized the urgent need for pandemic-related resources in public safety agencies who were tasked with executing many of the public health responses necessary in the pandemic. The team at Lexipol investigated opportunities to help public servants safely succeed in helping their communities during a particularly challenging time.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

Internally, Lexipol innovated by pooling relevant resources across product lines, consolidating them in a unified place and providing free access to any agency, whether or not they were a current customer. Evolving from a recent merger, this project represented one of the first times they offered these solutions under one brand. In turn, the project demonstrates how Lexipol uniquely provides comprehensive solutions to help agencies serve their communities in times of critical stress.

Results after implementing the solution

Compiling resources across systems and unifying access through a free online environment presented a challenge. However, the product was incredibly successful in helping first responders access critical resources to address the challenges of the pandemic.

List emails and social posts informed first responders of the site, and they highlighted critical information via dynamic segmentation. Additionally, scoring and connected campaigns allowed leveraging of interaction data to help sales and services teams follow up with agencies that benefited from the resource. This process contributed significantly to  converting prospects to customers while helping existing customers adopt additional solutions.

Over the course of the campaign, over 13,000 courses were accessed, 17,000 policies downloaded, and 1,700+ agency leaders requested online learning access be set up for their agency. Per Einstein attribution’s campaign influence model, these efforts influenced 2,445 opportunities to date.

Learn more and keep it going

The project was a huge success, but it took several people and a great deal of expertise and resources to make it happen. Here are resources you can use to replicate the project in your own Pardot instance or get inspiration to do something similar.

Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way. 

The post ParDreamies Social Impact Pardot Award Winner: Lexipol appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-11-16T16:53:35+00:00November 16th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Content Marketing, Data Management, Design, Events|
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How to be Successful with the Pardot Drag-and-Drop Landing Page Builder

In the Salesforce Winter ’22 release, Pardot launched the new drag-and-drop Landing Page builder, which allows users to create nativey responsive landing pages and control when pages are published and/or removed. This builder uses the same integration as the drag-and-drop email content builder, so if you are already using that feature there is nothing new to set up!

This post will cover a few things you can do to ensure your users are successful with this new builder. For a great demo of this new feature, check out the Pardot Release Readiness Winter ’22 Webinar (The landing page builder demo starts around the 14-minute mark).

Requirements and System Usage

Before you get started with the landing page builder, you’ll need to ensure:

You’ll also want to take a look at your landing page usage and limit. Landing pages published with the new drag-and-drop experience plus landing pages published with the classic experience will both count toward your account’s limit. 

To check your usage and limit, navigate to Pardot Settings > Usage and Limits

pardot landing page builder

Ensure consistent use of naming conventions

Good naming conventions are going to be especially helpful when using this new builder. Naming conventions will allow users to quickly and easily locate the correct campaign, images, and form while building a new landing page. 

If you are using multiple Pardot Business Units (PBU) it will be even more important to have good naming conventions. When you create a new landing page, you will need to associate it with a connected campaign. The campaign you select determines which PBU the landing page belongs to as well as which forms can be used on this landing page (the landing page can only use Pardot forms that exist in the same PBU as the page). To make sure your users can determine which PBU a campaign or asset belongs to at a glance, I highly recommend adding your PBU name to the naming convention. 

To ensure naming conventions are used correctly on Salesforce Campaigns, check out our previous blog post on how to automate Salesforce Campaign Naming Conventions.

Vanity URLs

You’ll also want to make sure you have a good policy around using vanity URLs and ensure your users know how to check if a vanity URL is already in use before attempting to publish their new landing page. Vanity URLs are not validated until the landing page is published, meaning a team may center their marketing materials around the URL being www.sercante.com/really-cool-awesome-stuff only to find out upon publishing that this URL is already in use for another marketing initiative. More considerations for vanity URLs can be found here. 

Salesforce Navigation and Page Layout Edits

Make sure your users know where to find this new feature by adding the Landing Page tab to the Pardot Lightning App navigation.

  1. Navigate to Setup >  App Manager
  2. Locate the Pardot app (ensure the App Type says “Lightning”)
lightning experience app manager
  1. Select the dropdown arrow and click Edit
  2. Select Navigation Items
  3. Move Landing Pages over to the Selected Items pane, click Save
navigation items - landing pages

Also edit your Landing Page layouts to include the new Publication Details section:

example landing page

You can edit this page layout by navigating to Setup > Object Manager > Landing Page > Page Layouts

Create New Landing Page List Views

With more granular control over when Pardot Landing Pages are published and unpublished, as well as additional tracking of changes, creating a few list views will help you easily audit your pages. 

You can create new landing page list views by navigating to Landing Pages, clicking the Action wheel, and then New.

all landing pages

Configure a “Published Landing Page” view to keep an eye on metrics

  • This view is filtered to only show “Status equals Published”
published landing pages

Configure a “In Progress Landing Pages” view to monitor which pages are unpublished but in progress:

in progress landing pages
  • The “Content Last Saved” fields are updated anytime the landing page name, campaign, content, search engine indexing, and/or vanity URL are changed. Publishing and unpublishing a landing page does not update these fields.
  • This view is filtered to only show “Status equals Draft”

Finally, configure a list view of landing pages that have a status of “Published (Changes Pending).” Unlike the classic landing page builder, new and updated pages will need to be pushed to “published” when they are complete. Landing pages will not auto-publish upon saving. This new change in functionality may cause some users to leave their page in the “Published (Changes Pending)” state and a list view can help you keep on eye out for these. 

For this list view, clone your “In Progress Landing Pages” view but change the filter to only show “Status equals Published (Changes Pending)”

published pending landing pages

Automate Reminders to Publish

Since users will need to publish landing pages when changes are made, you can set up a flow to remind landing page owners that their pages are not published. I set this up with a flow. My flow looks for landing pages with a status of “Published (Changes Pending)” and a Content Last Saved date of three days ago or less. My Flow will send an email reminder to the user who last updated the landing page for up to three days after their edits were made (unless the page is published). 

automate reminders to publish landing pages

What excites you about the new Pardot Landing Page builder? Tell us in the comments!

The post How to be Successful with the Pardot Drag-and-Drop Landing Page Builder appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-10-22T11:01:21+00:00October 22nd, 2021|Categories: Content Marketing, Design, Release Notes, Salesforce|
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How to Audit Dynamic Content and Variable Tag Usage with the Pardot API

By Erin Duncan & Mike Cruezer

Incorporating dynamic content and variable tags is an excellent way to personalize your emails, forms, and landing pages. But viewing where dynamic content and variable tags are in use is a proverbial black hole. 

Not knowing where these items are used makes updating or deleting dynamic content and fields risky. You don’t want to leave a big blank space in an email template or send a prospect an email that says “We would like to offer you              for a limited time.”

Completing an audit can reveal all the places Pardot Variable Tags and Dynamic Content are in use. So, where do you start?

How we completed the Pardot Dynamic Content and Variable Tag audit

To solve this issue, I teamed up with the Pardot API Wizard Mike Creuzer to see what information we can pull via the API. With the API, Creuzer pulled the asset IDs and the full HTML (and TEXT for email templates) from the assets. We then took the raw data and looked for anything containing “%%” (or “{{“ if you are using HML). The end result being a giant Excel sheet like this:

Pardot Dynamic Content and Variable Tag audit

Using skills from the Excel for Pardot Admins mini-series, we then split this list out into one master list of all Pardot Dynamic Content and Variable Tags present in any assets. This allowed us to not only view which dynamic content assets are more frequently used, but also ensure we would not break any personalization in our assets while altering or deleting fields and content.

Getting Technical with Ad Hoc Reporting in Pardot

To get the data in the format above, we used the typical computer science ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pattern at a smaller scale.

Extract

In this scenario, we had to go beyond what a typical Pardot export would get us, so we turned to the Pardot API. Using the API we pulled the full HTML and TEXT from all unarchived email templates in the Pardot instance. 

If you are new to using the Pardot API, you can shorten your ramp-up time with the Postman Collection for the Pardot API from Sercante Labs.

Transform

We used a regular expression to pull only the HML, PML, and dynamic content merge fields. This allows us to quickly skim the HTML and TEXT of our email templates and identify where dynamic content and/or variable tags are in use. We effectively tossed away all the other ‘stuff’ in the emails to focus on just the needed bits.


Load

“Load” means getting the data to its final destination. In our case, the destination is a shareable and usable spreadsheet. 

We included useful fields within our spreadsheet for people who are doing the dynamic content and variable tag review (i.e. template name, Pardot business unit, etc.). And there are seemingly useless bits like the template ID, which anyone can easily use to create a direct link to the template for editing. 

We also built in additional features, such as flagging when a TEXT version of an email is blank or where an @ symbol was used before %%current_year)yyyy% instead of ©. Finally, we pulled this process together in a programmed script to allow us to easily re-pull the data after dynamic content and fields were deleted, thus ensuring no tags were missed.

Audit your Pardot Dynamic Content and Variable Tags, and tell us how you did

With toolsets like this at your disposal, you can quickly and accurately get more work done. It’s easy to expand this process into other use cases after you’ve completed the process once or twice. For example, you can look for variable tags within dynamic content. 

What Pardot data would you like to audit with a process like this? Tell us in the comments!And remember to reach out to the Sercante team when the challenge calls for Pardot experts.

The post How to Audit Dynamic Content and Variable Tag Usage with the Pardot API appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-08-24T19:39:41+00:00August 24th, 2021|Categories: Content Marketing, Design, Email Marketing, Experiments, Integration|
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Four big Salesforce Winter ‘22 Pardot highlights

It’s time to prepare for the Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release and how it will affect your Pardot instance.

We get three major releases from Salesforce each year — Spring, Summer and Winter. Each Salesforce release includes upgrades and enhancements that affect Salesforce orgs in different ways. 

So, if you’re using and managing Pardot for your company or organization, then you’re in the right place. We’re going to cover everything you need to know about the Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release for Pardot admins and users.

Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release Dates

Here are the Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release dates:

  • August 12, 2021: Pre-release org signup
  • August 16, 2021: Release notes available
  • August 27, 2021: Sandbox preview starts, release site available, and release Trailhead module launches
  • August 30, 2021: Release overview deck and feature matrix available
  • September 10, 2021: Release weekend
  • October 1, 2021: Release weekend
  • October 8, 2021: Release weekend
  • September 10-17, 2021: Release Readiness Live

Salesforce Winter ’22 Release: 4 Highlights for Pardot users and admins

Pardot users and admins are getting lots of attention from the Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release. Some updates are changing the way we work to meet evolving technology demands. Others are saving us time by connecting the dots in a logical way. All we know is, this release includes big updates for people in the sales and marketing world.

Highlight 1: Salesforce My Domain requirement

A Winter ‘22 release update has the potential to create chaos for companies that want to use branded domain names.

The Salesforce Winter ‘22 release will require all orgs to have a My Domain.

That means Pardot orgs that aren’t already configured for My Domain will get a random Salesforce-picked domain name. My Domain names have to be unique, so you’re outta luck if some other Salesforce customer has yours already.

If you don’t have a My Domain yet — then register your brand name now! You don’t have to deploy My Domain right away, but you can claim your preferred domain name now and deploy later (preferably in a Sandbox).

Salesforce My Domain Example

There’s likely to be a gold rush for domains from now until the first few weeks of the Winter ‘22 release, peaking at release, as folks register My Domains before enforcement or pick new ones after being force-registered.

What you should do: Implement a My Domain if you don’t have one

Here are resources to use when implementing a Salesforce My Domain.

(Thanks to Sercante Salesforce Solution Engineer Hayley Tuller for this one!)

Highlight 2: Pardot Classic App Retirement

Pardot Classic isn’t going away completely. But, the Winter ‘22 release includes a step toward moving in that direction. Salesforce has given soft nudges to customers encouraging them to adopt Lightning for quite some time. With that in mind, the Winter ‘22 release brings the news that Salesforce is retiring the Pardot Classic App after October 17, 2021. 

Current Pardot Classic users can refrain from panicking for now. The Pardot Classic App is a Salesforce page with Pardot on top via iFrame. The Pardot Classic App experience is going away, but you can still access Pardot Classic for now. Salesforce will disable the Pardot Classic App for ALL users on October 17, 2022. After that date, Pardot Classic users will only be able to access Pardot using the standalone Pardot app (available at pi.pardot.com).

Say goodbye to the Pardot Lightning app

What you should do: Start planning for the switch to Pardot Lightning

Salesforce Lightning is here to stay, so expect more pushes toward making the switch if you’re using Pardot Classic.

Here are resources to prepare for switching to Pardot Lightning.

Highlight 3: Pardot marketing asset design capability enhancements

Marketers love drag-and-drop tools like fish love water. Salesforce is opening the doors for more drag-and-drop design functionality in Pardot through a few different enhancements.

Enhancement #1: Pardot drag-and-drop landing page editor

Pardot Lightning users now have the ability to build landing pages faster in Pardot with a user-friendly landing page editor. After you enable the feature, the Pardot drag-and-drop landing page editor allows you to create landing pages from templates or scratch. 

Enhancement #2: Custom components for the email content builder

You currently use standard components when you create emails in Pardot. These are the blocks you use to add elements, like graphics or text boxes, to your email drafts. 

Winter ‘22 brings an enhancement that will open the doors to using custom components in your emails to add fancy features and customizations. 

Enhancement #3: Push emails from Lightning Experience into Engagement Programs

We were all excited to start creating emails in the drag-and-drop editor in Salesforce Lightning Experience. But, we were limited in how we could use those emails.

After Winter ‘22, you can push those emails from Lightning Experience into Pardot Engagement Studio programs. All you have to do is create your emails and activate them for use in automations.

What you should do: Evaluate how your team creates Pardot marketing assets

All of these enhancements to the way marketers build assets in Pardot are meant to make the tool easier to use. It may make sense for your team to adopt them or look toward other options. You can figure that out by evaluating your team’s current process for building marketing assets like landing pages and emails.

Document your team’s current processes and talk to them about what works and doesn’t work well for them. Also, pay attention to how much time they are spending on these tasks so you can determine if it makes sense to invest in upgrades or external resources.

Highlight 4: Extending Pardot through integrations

Salesforce is highly customizable thanks to integrations. And new ways to extend Pardot through integrations are going live all the time.

Here are a few Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release enhancements that use integrations to extend Pardot functionality.

Enhancement #1: Send Slack notifications to Pardot users via completion actions (beta)

Interacting with prospects at the right time and in the right way is key to earning their trust. And now you can enable your sales team to capture those moments even more.

A Winter ‘22 enhancement allows you to set a completion action that notifies Pardot users in Slack when prospects interact with marketing assets. Because the Slack acquisition is still unfolding, this new feature also gives us a glimpse of what’s to come now that Slack is officially under the Salesforce umbrella.

Enhancement #2: New enablement resources and the Pardot API v5

Salesforce developers who work with Pardot will have access to the Pardot API v5 with the Winter ‘22 release. This update also includes super helpful enablement resources for Salesforce developers who are new to working with the Pardot API.

Enhancement #3: Pardot Extensibility Enhancements

You probably use third-party apps all the time for things like webinars and virtual events. But using the data from those third-party apps in Pardot can be difficult without heavy lifting. 

The Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release is opening the doors to capturing and using that third-party data in Pardot. You can now collect prospect data in third-party apps and bring it into Pardot by setting up a Marketing App Extension.  

What you should do: Integration brainstorming session

Have a brainstorming session to discover ways you can use integrations more effectively in your Pardot instance. You can kickstart the session by completing the sentence “wouldn’t it be nice if Pardot…” as many times as you can. Then, rank those sentences you created and focus on the ones that will have the greatest impact on your marketing efforts.

Implementing those integrations you identified through your brainstorming may go beyond your team’s capabilities. If that’s the case, you can reach out to Sercante Labs to find out how you can make it happen.

Pardot is getting bigger and better all the time

B2B marketers who come to Pardot are usually looking to scale their efforts and grow in a way that makes sense. These latest enhancements from the Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release get Pardot marketers closer to those goals by saving them time and resources. 

Adding more user-friendly design capabilities addresses a major pain point for many Pardot customers. And extending Pardot through integrations and feature upgrades is preparing Pardot orgs of all sizes for the future.

Contact the team at Sercante to get help implementing these enhancements in your Salesforce org and Pardot instance. And leave us a comment below to let us know what you think about the Winter ‘22 Release.

The post Four big Salesforce Winter ‘22 Pardot highlights appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-08-18T18:53:52+00:00August 18th, 2021|Categories: Content Marketing, Design, Email Marketing, Integration, Release Notes|
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Using Preview & Preheader Text in Pardot to Encourage Opens: Questions & Answers

BY KIM CONNELL

It’s an increasingly competitive environment to try to catch anyone’s attention — your prospects, your customers, even that dude on Tinder (okay, kidding on that last one).  But seriously — our span of attention just keeps getting smaller, and our inboxes keep getting fuller.  

So how’s an email marketer to stand out in this environment? 

and we have a few levers to play with:

  1. The subject line
  2. The sender
  3. The preview text

Let’s dig into #3 and our options to stand out. 

But wait, what is preview text? 

Preview text is the text that is displayed along with the subject line, sender, and date in the main view of your email inbox.

Preview text is not displayed by all email clients, but most of the major email clients will typically display the first 35-140 characters of your email.

Show me an example…

It has become a common practice to hide preview text that is not visible in the email body to only serve as preview text.

Here’s a great example from Starbucks. Their preview text is “The cheery glow of 50 Bonus Stars.”

Here’s the open email. As you can see, the preview text is not visible within the body of the email.

Can I use preview text in Pardot templates? 

Yes!  Preheader text is visible text that appears at the top of an open email.  This gets pulled in as preview text in email clients that support it. 

The default Pardot templates include this:

But it’s…. how do you say…. kind of ugly. 

Sorry.

It is.  

How can I style my email to make this look great for users?

You can use HTML and CSS to make your preheader text look a bit more subtle and fit your overall design aesthetic.

Here’s an example from ComiXology. Their preview text is “Last Day to save up to 75%…

In this case, the text is actually visible in the body of the email as small text directly at the top of the design:

Preheader text is easy to implement if you have a design that allows for it because it is visible and easy to edit in your email templates.

What if I want to totally hide my preview text?

If you don’t want to use a visible preheader, but you still want to populate the preview text, you can also hide this in the HTML of your email. 

The following code can be added directly below the opening <body> in the HTML of your email:

<div style="display: none; font-size: 1px; color: #333333; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; ">
      Add your own preview text here
</div>

A word of caution: It can be easy to forget to update since it is not visible in the email layout, so it’s a great idea to add it to a pre-send checklist or QA process if you have one. As an additional precautionary measure, you may want to remove the “Add your own preview text here” text entirely, or replace it with a generic default that would work for any email you send.

Any other tips or hacks for preview text?

Glad you asked. Yes.

Pushing body content OUT of the preview text

As I mentioned earlier, most of the major email clients will typically display the first 35-140 characters of your email. That’s a pretty big range, though.

Email clients will start by grabbing the preheader text, and then if there’s still “room,” will grab from the next text it finds in your email. This can yield some unexpected results.

You might want to include the Preview Text Hack, which is a hidden string of non-breaking spaces and zero-width non-joiners inside of a hidden div directly below your preview text div.

Because the preview text character limit varies vastly between different email clients, it’s a good idea to test your preview text, and add more non-breaking spaces and zero-width non-joiners if needed.

Why would you want to do this? It looks cleaner, and can actually make your email stand out. Take this Uniqlo email, for example:

Even in this small image, the Uniqlo email stands out because it’s the only one that isn’t being drown by words in the preview text pane.

You also avoid the “view in browser” dilemma. If you think of preview text like a second subject line, you don’t want to forfeit this valuable real estate for text like “view in browser”:

Making Preview Text Invisible – the Easy Way

Another great hack is to make preheader text “invisible” by setting the text color to match the background color behind it. This way you can make it visible to edit the text, then make it invisible prior to testing and sending!

Making Hidden Preview Text Editable in the Pardot Editor

If you want your users to be able to edit hidden preview text without going into the full HTML, here’s a little trick:

<div pardot-region="hidden-preview-text" pardot-region-type="simple" style="padding: 5px; ">
    <div style="display: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all;">
    </div>
</div>

Breakdown:

  • Use a wrapper div that includes pardot-region and pardot-region-type="simple"
  • Add a little bit of padding to the wrapper, otherwise the person editing the template will not be able to edit the region
  • Create a child div inside of the wrapper with all of the required styles to make the preview text hidden across all email clients: style="display: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all;"
    • This code WILL appear in the simple editor and cannot be removed in order for this to work. If someone else will be editing the preview text, you’ll need to educate them on only editing the text inside of the div and how to access this region
    • The hidden preview text will need to be placed in between the child div tags. Here’s a full example:
      <div pardot-region="hidden-preview-text" pardot-region-type="simple" style="padding: 5px; ">
      <div style="display: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all;">
      THIS IS THE HIDDEN PREVIEW TEXT :)
      </div>
      </div>
  • Add the “Pushing body content OUT of the preview text” div below this code snippet if you’d like to use that hack in addition to this

You should now see a small editable region appear at the top of the editor. It will be the height specified in the padding, so 5px high in this case. Clicking on this region will open the Simple Editor:

What other questions do you have about preview and preheader text?

Any creative solutions you’ve come up with for using preview and preheader text to entice opens? Any productivity hacks, lessons learned, or tips for success?

Let’s hear it in the comments!

By |2019-08-19T11:00:39+00:00August 19th, 2019|Categories: Design, Email Marketing|
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Using Preview & Preheader Text in Pardot to Encourage Opens: Questions & Answers

BY KIM CONNELL

It’s an increasingly competitive environment to try to catch anyone’s attention — your prospects, your customers, even that dude on Tinder (okay, kidding on that last one).  But seriously — our span of attention just keeps getting smaller, and our inboxes keep getting fuller.  

So how’s an email marketer to stand out in this environment? 

and we have a few levers to play with:

  1. The subject line
  2. The sender
  3. The preview text

Let’s dig into #3 and our options to stand out. 

But wait, what is preview text? 

Preview text is the text that is displayed along with the subject line, sender, and date in the main view of your email inbox.

Preview text is not displayed by all email clients, but most of the major email clients will typically display the first 35-140 characters of your email.

Show me an example…

It has become a common practice to hide preview text that is not visible in the email body to only serve as preview text.

Here’s a great example from Starbucks. Their preview text is “The cheery glow of 50 Bonus Stars.”

Here’s the open email. As you can see, the preview text is not visible within the body of the email.

Can I use preview text in Pardot templates? 

Yes!  Preheader text is visible text that appears at the top of an open email.  This gets pulled in as preview text in email clients that support it. 

The default Pardot templates include this:

But it’s…. how do you say…. kind of ugly. 

Sorry.

It is.  

How can I style my email to make this look great for users?

You can use HTML and CSS to make your preheader text look a bit more subtle and fit your overall design aesthetic.

Here’s an example from ComiXology. Their preview text is “Last Day to save up to 75%…

In this case, the text is actually visible in the body of the email as small text directly at the top of the design:

Preheader text is easy to implement if you have a design that allows for it because it is visible and easy to edit in your email templates.

What if I want to totally hide my preview text?

If you don’t want to use a visible preheader, but you still want to populate the preview text, you can also hide this in the HTML of your email. 

The following code can be added directly below the opening <body> in the HTML of your email:

<div style="display: none; font-size: 1px; color: #333333; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; ">
      Add your own preview text here
</div>

A word of caution: It can be easy to forget to update since it is not visible in the email layout, so it’s a great idea to add it to a pre-send checklist or QA process if you have one. As an additional precautionary measure, you may want to remove the “Add your own preview text here” text entirely, or replace it with a generic default that would work for any email you send.

Any other tips or hacks for preview text?

Glad you asked. Yes.

Pushing body content OUT of the preview text

As I mentioned earlier, most of the major email clients will typically display the first 35-140 characters of your email. That’s a pretty big range, though.

Email clients will start by grabbing the preheader text, and then if there’s still “room,” will grab from the next text it finds in your email. This can yield some unexpected results.

You might want to include the Preview Text Hack, which is a hidden string of non-breaking spaces and zero-width non-joiners inside of a hidden div directly below your preview text div.

Because the preview text character limit varies vastly between different email clients, it’s a good idea to test your preview text, and add more non-breaking spaces and zero-width non-joiners if needed.

Why would you want to do this? It looks cleaner, and can actually make your email stand out. Take this Uniqlo email, for example:

Even in this small image, the Uniqlo email stands out because it’s the only one that isn’t being drown by words in the preview text pane.

You also avoid the “view in browser” dilemma. If you think of preview text like a second subject line, you don’t want to forfeit this valuable real estate for text like “view in browser”:

Making Preview Text Invisible – the Easy Way

Another great hack is to make preheader text “invisible” by setting the text color to match the background color behind it. This way you can make it visible to edit the text, then make it invisible prior to testing and sending!

Making Hidden Preview Text Editable in the Pardot Editor

If you want your users to be able to edit hidden preview text without going into the full HTML, here’s a little trick:

<div pardot-region="hidden-preview-text" pardot-region-type="simple" style="padding: 5px; ">
    <div style="display: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all;">
    </div>
</div>

Breakdown:

  • Use a wrapper div that includes pardot-region and pardot-region-type="simple"
  • Add a little bit of padding to the wrapper, otherwise the person editing the template will not be able to edit the region
  • Create a child div inside of the wrapper with all of the required styles to make the preview text hidden across all email clients: style="display: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all;"
    • This code WILL appear in the simple editor and cannot be removed in order for this to work. If someone else will be editing the preview text, you’ll need to educate them on only editing the text inside of the div and how to access this region
    • The hidden preview text will need to be placed in between the child div tags. Here’s a full example:
      <div pardot-region="hidden-preview-text" pardot-region-type="simple" style="padding: 5px; ">
      <div style="display: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; max-height: 0px; max-width: 0px; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all;">
      THIS IS THE HIDDEN PREVIEW TEXT :)
      </div>
      </div>
  • Add the “Pushing body content OUT of the preview text” div below this code snippet if you’d like to use that hack in addition to this

You should now see a small editable region appear at the top of the editor. It will be the height specified in the padding, so 5px high in this case. Clicking on this region will open the Simple Editor:

What other questions do you have about preview and preheader text?

Any creative solutions you’ve come up with for using preview and preheader text to entice opens? Any productivity hacks, lessons learned, or tips for success?

Let’s hear it in the comments!

By |2019-08-19T11:00:39+00:00August 19th, 2019|Categories: Design, Email Marketing|
Read More