Email Marketing Archives

Getting Started with a Pardot Email Preference Center

An email preference center creates a happy medium for you and your readers.

It’s a place where your readers can let you know what interests them so you can work with them to deliver relevant content. And it also fulfills that all-important duty you have to provide a way for your readers to opt out from all non-operational email communications.

Here are the basics you should know when building your email preference center in Pardot.

Why should you build an email preference center?

In Pardot, any email you send must include either an option to unsubscribe or manage preferences via PML or HML tags (%%unsubscribe%% or %%email_preference_center%% for PML or {{Unsubscribe}} or {{EmailPreferenceCenter}} for HML). Read this post for more on that.

While an option to simply unsubscribe will get the job done, an email preference center will give your prospects the option to limit (or potentially even increase) correspondence from your marketing team rather than opting out entirely. An email preference center allows prospects to select just the correspondence they want to receive.

Depending on whether your company is only getting started with Pardot, you’ve been sending Pardot emails for a while, or you’ve inherited a hot mess of a Pardot org (been there, done that), the process of setting up an email preference center will vary in complexity, but once you see those opt-outs decrease, it will be worth it!

How Pardot email preference centers work

Let’s go through the basics of a Pardot email preference center and some tips to get you started.

To add a list to an existing email preference center, create or edit a static or dynamic list in Pardot. When creating or editing a list, select the “Public List” checkbox to display said list in your email preference center.

You can then give your list a label, which is the option that prospects will see on your email preference center, and an optional description that will appear underneath the label. (Prospects will not see the Pardot name for the list; they will only see the label and the description.)

Here is a list’s basic information in Pardot:

And here is how it appears on the Sercante email preference center:

Using static and dynamic lists in email preference centers

You can use both static and dynamic lists for email preference centers. But there’s a catch.

Any prospect will be able to see a static list and opt into or out of that list by checking the box next to that list. Only prospects who are already members of a dynamic list will be able to see a dynamic list on an email preference center.

If a prospect is a member of a public dynamic list, the prospect will be able to opt out of communication from that list by unchecking the box associated with that list on the email preference center. Prospects cannot opt themselves into a public dynamic list, only opt out.

When you view a public list in Pardot, you’ll be able to see the opt-in status for each prospect:

Dynamic list use case for email preference center

Personally, I prefer using static lists on email preference centers, but there are valid use cases for dynamic lists.

For instance, let’s say you have specific communications, like a newsletter, that you want to send to current clients. You could have a prospect field for “persona” on the prospect record, and then create a dynamic list that looks for everyone with a persona of “current client.”

You can then use that dynamic list on your email preference center and as your distribution list for client communications. Only those with the persona of “current client” would see the list option on the email preference center and be able to opt out of that specific dynamic list.

Always follow privacy laws

Of course, regardless of whether you use static or dynamic lists, you must abide by opt-in and privacy laws.

This is the part where I tell you I am not a lawyer and this blog post is not legal advice. Consult your lawyer on who you have the right to email, folks.

(Maybe insert the ever-popular not a lawyer meme here?)

What preferences should prospects have?

Now that we understand the basics of list membership, let’s talk about what list options we can provide for prospects. Consider how you typically segment your audiences for email marketing. Do you have blog subscription options? Do you email certain people about certain products?

Here are a few options you to consider:

Lists by product category (ex., chocolate, cookies, candy)
Lists by service offering (ex., private chef, cooking classes, private cooking lessons)
Lists by type of event (webinars, conferences, etc.)

When you’ve settled on the options you want to include on your email preference center, start building your lists.

If prospects have opted into specific contact previously, be sure to honor those preferences and only include prospects on lists that respect those preferences.

How do you honor prospect preferences?

Once your email preference center is up and running, you need to be sure you can abide by the preferences that a prospect has expressed. That means if they’ve opted out of receiving blog communications, you need to exclude them for all future blog sends.

The easiest way to do this is to use an EPC list as the send list for your email. If someone is opted out of the list, they will not receive an email.

However, let’s say you are creating a different send list based on other, more specific prospect criteria because you want to send an email to blog subscribers who have expressed interest in a particular topic.

You have two options: 1) look for public list opted-in status when creating your send list or 2) create a dynamic suppression list that looks for public list opted-out status.

Option 1: Look for public list opted-in status when creating your send list

When creating a send list for an email, include the following parameter:

Prospect public opt-in status > is not opted out > [EPC LIST NAME]

Option 2: Create a dynamic suppression list that looks for public list opted-out status

For this option, create a dynamic suppression list for the relevant EPC list using a single criteria:

Prospect public opt-in status > is opted out > [EPC LIST NAME]

Then, use this list as your suppression list for your email.

Staying organized and documenting everything

There are a lot of moving pieces when you stand up an email preference center. If you are not the only person in your Pardot org, or if you just want to do your future self a favor, stay organized and document everything.

Here are my favorite tips.

Create a spreadsheet to track your list decisions

When working on email preference centers, create a spreadsheet that documents all of the details for every public list.

Here are the columns I typically include on my own personal tracking spreadsheet:

Internal List Name
List Label
List Type (static or dynamic)
List Description
List URL
Notes (Typically, this includes how you decided which prospects to include on this list when initially creating the list)
Completion Actions & Automations that Populate List
How is consent for list membership handled?

Make it easy to find your EPC lists

If your Pardot org is anything like mine, you have a lot of lists. It can be difficult to weed through and find the lists that are included in your email preference center.

When looking at all current lists, you can quickly sort by “public list” to see any public lists that are included on an EPC:

However, I like tagging all of my public lists “epc” and all of the dynamic suppression lists mentioned above “epc suppression” so I can quickly see all lists related to my email preference center.

Create a how-to guide for your Pardot users

Be sure anyone who sends emails in Pardot knows how to honor prospect preferences. If filling out a form or form handler should add a prospect to a public list, instruct your team on the appropriate completion action to use.

I created an eight-page guide for my team. It’s located in our Google Drive, on our team Asana board, and pinned in our team Slack channel. Is that overkill? Probably. Does it help me sleep at night to know everyone knows the ins and outs of emailing from our Pardot org? Absolutely.

Email preference center example

We used several elements of the Sercante email preference center in this blog post. To help you pull our examples together, here’s what the Sercante email preference center looks like.

Get help with your email preference center

Setting up an email preference center can be daunting. There are a lot of considerations, both in terms of marketing strategy (how will I segment my database?) and legal compliance (how do I avoid a lawsuit?).

Ultimately, by providing prospects with the option to select the communication they want, you’ll limit the amount of prospects that get frustrated by yet another email they’re not interested in and unsubscribe. If you’re thinking about taking the plunge and want support from a team of experts who can also guide you through compliance questions, getting more list subscribers, and designing something on-brand, drop us a line.

The post Getting Started with a Pardot Email Preference Center appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Christina Magoulis|2022-02-21T21:05:45+00:00February 21st, 2022|Categories: Compliance, Content Marketing, Email Marketing|

Nonprofits on Salesforce: How to leverage Pardot for marketing and more

Nonprofits that are using Salesforce have much to gain by incorporating Pardot into their marketing strategy.

But, isn’t Pardot only meant for teams following a B2B marketing strategy? While Pardot is built for B2B marketers, lots of nonprofits follow the business-to-business marketing model to deliver a diverse range of services to communities.

Here’s how nonprofits of many shapes and sizes use Pardot to drive marketing, fundraising, and volunteer management strategies.

Why use Pardot instead of other marketing automation platforms?

Missions of all nonprofit organizations of the world are as diverse as the communities they serve. With that in mind, the marketing automation platform you choose must meet the specific needs of your team. You may already be using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or HubSpot. And migrating to Pardot may be the thing you’ve been looking for to scale your marketing efforts and open departmental silos at your organization.

Pardot is a lead generation and nurturing tool that falls under the Salesforce umbrella.

Here are three main questions you should ask yourself when determining if Pardot is right for your organization.

Does your organization already have a Salesforce org in place?
What is your marketing team trying to achieve?
What resources are available to your organization?

Take a few minutes to consider these questions. Pardot is a powerful tool, but it can only make teams successful when it’s the right tool for the job.

Pardot for nonprofits on Salesforce

If your organization is already a Salesforce customer, then using Pardot for marketing may be the right choice for you. Pardot is built on the Salesforce platform. That means, it’s fairly easy to pass data from Pardot to other Salesforce clouds that are connected to your org.

One of the advantages of using a combination of Salesforce clouds is the ability to view Salesforce as the single source of truth when checking on the health of your organization. It also makes it easy to gather valuable reporting data you can use to show the results of your work and the impact your organization has on the community.

You can see Pardot data inside other Salesforce products, like Sales Cloud, Nonprofit Success Pack, Nonprofit Cloud. Philanthropy Cloud, and Education Cloud. This creates a connection between marketing and other teams at your organization, whether they’re fundraising, sales, or volunteer recruiting teams.

For example, content from Pardot is available inside Salesforce. That means your marketing team can control branding and content usage in other departments and create consistent experiences for everyone.

However, you can still use Pardot at your nonprofit organization if you’re not on Salesforce. Check out this article to learn more.

What Pardot does for marketing teams at nonprofits

Pardot works great for small teams, which means it may be ideal for smaller nonprofits with limited resources. Beyond connecting teams that use Salesforce by eliminating data silos, Pardot provides nonprofits with the tools they need to nurture prospects throughout long engagement cycles.

Marketers at nonprofits use Pardot for many reasons. But here are the main ones:

Fundraising and Donor Communications

Many nonprofits rely on individuals and companies to provide the funding they need to accomplish their organizational mission. Pardot allows nonprofits to track engagement with prospective and existing donors so they can see the results of specific marketing campaigns. They can adjust their marketing strategies to focus on the types of campaigns that result in the greatest fundraising success.

The engagements these nonprofits track are related to content and email marketing efforts. Nonprofit organizations leverage their website, social media, Pardot landing pages, paid advertisements and other marketing channels to generate interest in their organization.

Pardot collects engagement data as people interact with the organization’s content. After nurturing prospective donors for an extended period of time, fundraising teams can use the engagement data reporting to pinpoint the most interested individuals and companies. Then, they can swoop in at the perfect time because they know when prospective donors are most likely to make a donation. And, they have rich data they can use for impact reporting and budget justification.

Volunteer Recruitment and Management

Recruiting volunteers and managing the day-to-day operations of a nonprofit organization is no easy task. In general, the teams at nonprofits wear many hats and do what they do more out of passion than pay grade. That’s where Pardot comes in. It’s a versatile tool built to ease the burden for small marketing teams with limited resources.

Pardot can help to recruit and manage volunteers for nonprofits similar to the way it tracks prospective donors. You can pull volunteers into Pardot by uploading their information through a .csv file or syncing to a custom field in Salesforce.

You can also gather prospective volunteer data in Pardot. To do that, you create a conversion point, like a form on a ‘Become a Volunteer’ page on your website. Then, create a Pardot campaign for that form so you know people in that campaign have interest in volunteering for your organization.

Once they decide to start volunteering, you can use Pardot for onboarding and to keep them informed and engaged after they join. Pardot Engagement Studio allows you to create automated journeys for your volunteers. Then, they get the communications they need in the right place and at the right time based on engagement activity.

You can even track whether or not volunteers are getting proper training. For example, using a Pardot Engagement Studio Program, you can send emails containing training sessions recorded through Zoom over a 30-day period for new volunteers as they join your organization. The Pardot-Zoom integration allows you to see whether or not new volunteers watch the training videos. Then, you can understand the effectiveness of the training and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Fundraising Events

Nonprofits use fundraising events to get the community involved by promoting a culture of giving. These events are often the culmination of all the hard work teams endure throughout the year, and they drive budgetary allocations for the entire organization.

Things have changed in recent years for nonprofit organizations that use event-based fundraising tactics. Giving the option to participate in events virtually has become commonplace and essential for many organizations. That’s where Pardot becomes a game-changer.

Pardot is ideal for all types of events — in person, virtual, or hybrid. You can track prospect engagement in all of these situations using Pardot, and marketing automation makes it easy to build a journey that builds excitement while providing essential information for your event.

But how can you track in-person event attendance, you ask? Since Pardot is built on the Salesforce platform, you can enlist the help of a Salesforce developer to build custom apps. Then, in-person attendees can use the app to check in to the event and specific presentations. Or, you can use a third-party event platform to host a hybrid event. This allows you to pull engagement data from the platform into Pardot through integrations.

Resources for nonprofits marketing with Pardot

Now that you know how Pardot works for marketing teams at nonprofits, you can start thinking about your next steps. Evaluate your current marketing processes to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and where there are opportunities for improvement. Then, you can start to explore Pardot to weigh it against other marketing automation tools available and see if it’s a good fit.

Keep it going with these resources to learn more about nonprofit marketing with Pardot:

Tell us how your organization is handling marketing and donor communications in the comments. And reach out to Sercante to see if Pardot is the right option to take your organizational goals to the next level.

The post Nonprofits on Salesforce: How to leverage Pardot for marketing and more appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-29T16:52:00+00:00November 29th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Content Marketing, Data Management, Email Marketing, Engagement Studio, Events, Integration, Non-Traditional Use Cases, Salesforce|

How to Empower Higher Ed Marketing Teams with Pardot

Higher ed institutions around the world are embracing a digital future with the shift to marketing with Pardot.

The traditional way of reaching prospective students, donors, and community partners is being replaced by personalized digital marketing tactics. And Pardot is the key to connecting institutional departments while providing right-time and right-message marketing.

Enter Pardot. Marketing teams at higher education institutions that are also Salesforce customers can finally feel like they’re part of the action. That’s because Pardot is built on the Salesforce platform, which enables marketing teams to connect their data and content to other departments at their institution. And Pardot allows marketers to generate valuable leads, nurture relationships, and convert more prospects throughout the power of marketing automation.

This is how Pardot empowers marketers working in higher education to reach their goals.

Pardot Connects Higher Ed Marketers to Other Departments

Have you ever had the feeling that your marketing team is on an island? Well, if the college or university you’re at already has an existing Salesforce org in place, then you’re in luck.

Pardot is a Salesforce product. That means it connects seamlessly with other Salesforce clouds in place at your institution. You can pass data (e.g., prospect activity) and content (e.g. email and landing page templates) for better cross-departmental collaboration.

Pardot has a cloud product for just about any type of company and organization. That includes clouds different departments in higher education may be using already. For example, here’s how the technology stack may look for a mid-size regional university.

Prospects get better experiences with higher ed institutions through Pardot

Pardot is great for B2B companies because they have a long sales cycle. This cycle includes lead generation, nurturing, and multiple opportunities and sales over a long period of time. Many institutions of higher education operate in a similar fashion.

Current students may come from a long line of repeat students and family legacy.

They may engage with your institution by attending as undergraduate students. While at your university, they require student success resources so they keep coming back each semester. After graduation, they may slowly start giving back as their earnings increase each year. And finally, their children will make it to your mailing lists as the time to look at colleges arrives.

Pardot ensures a consistent and personalized experience for everyone in your funnel. And it gives you the opportunity to tailor your efforts based on tangible insights through engagement activity tracking.

Here’s how it works.

Lead Generation

You create a conversion point, like a form on a ‘Schedule a Visit’ page on your website. Then, create a Pardot campaign for that form so you know people in that campaign have interest in visiting your university campus.

Pardot creates a prospect record for everyone who completes the form. Then, you’ll start to see engagement activity on the prospect record as they interact with your content (e.g., web pages and emails) thanks to the power of web tracking cookies.

Prospect Nurturing and Student Retention

pardot engagement studio example — Pardot Engagement Studio Program Example

Once you get prospects into your funnel, the goal is to keep them engaged so your institution is top of mind when they finally make a decision about where to go to school or spend their annual donation budget.

You can accomplish that by creating content that provides value for your audience — whether it’s educational, entertaining, or inspirational. Your content marketing strategy will include a robust website with rich content resources. Then, you can use Pardot to track the effectiveness of your content efforts.

Then, you can start nurturing your prospects by sending them on personalized and automated content journeys with Pardot Engagement Studio.

You can even use Pardot to drive student retention initiatives. For example, your team can create an Engagement Studio Program that delivers wellness and educational resources to current students. You can use the data from that program to identify students who need outreach from a school advisor or administrator.

Marketing Reporting

Higher ed institutions are feeling the crunch when it comes to scaling marketing efforts with limited budgetary resources. And nothing helps to justify budget allocation more than solid marketing reporting metrics.

Pardot provides a set of built-in reports, which are the day-to-day reports for marketing teams. From emails to forms, these reports show the performance of marketing assets created in Pardot, and they allow you to monitor and make adjustments to assets.

Salesforce reports and dashboards allow you to customize your reports. Additionally, it can be the first step in helping to align the marketing team with other departments within the college or university.

That means, you can sync data from Pardot into Salesforce, such as data collected from forms. Then, you can create Salesforce reports using the data and start using shared marketing and advancement or student recruiting dashboards.

Resources about Pardot for higher education marketers

Understanding why your college, university, or higher education institution should migrate to Pardot is the easier part. Convincing your colleagues and leadership team may be another story.

One thing’s for sure. Your marketing team can finally feel like part of the greater team by migrating to Pardot if the rest of the institution is operating on the Salesforce platform.

Learn everything you need to know to make the case and upgrade your marketing strategy for the all-digital future by checking out these resources.

Thinking about making the switch? Tell us about your current marketing strategy in the comments. And reach out to Sercante when you’re ready to implement Pardot at your higher education institution.

The post How to Empower Higher Ed Marketing Teams with Pardot appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-18T20:58:00+00:00November 18th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Content Marketing, Data Management, Email Marketing, Engagement Studio, Salesforce|

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:

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 Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-16T21:43:54+00:00November 16th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Content Marketing, Data Management, Design, Email Marketing, Engagement Studio, Events, Integration|

ParDreamies Grassroots Innovation Pardot Award Winner: BrandEd Holdings

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

Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
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 Grassroots Innovation category, which recognizes small teams with a big impact using Pardot.

Grassroots innovation with BrandEd

The team at BrandEd Holdings successfully migrated from siloed data systems to implement Pardot at their organization with a team of only two full-time employees in 60 days. The project is especially impressive because they also changed the way their department handles leads to optimize their entire marketing process and strategy. They did this all while using the Pardot Sandbox and implementing multiple business units and multiple product interests for each business unit.

Quick Facts:

Complicated requirements – multiple business units, multiple products within each unit, tailored user journeys based on business unit/product choices, and tracking path for each customer-business unit-product combination
More than 70% of their prospects select more than 1 program of interest, so communication needs to be coherent and unduplicated as much as possible.
Some Pardot features did not meet our requirements, so they devised creative solutions.
Utilized Pardot Sandbox to validate functionality

Challenge the team wanted to solve

BrandEd works with non-traditional educational brands to turn their knowledge bases into educational offerings. The company has two sub-entities within one umbrella organization. Data for the sub-entities needed to be segregated for tracking purposes and day-to-day management, but it ultimately needs to be aggregated.

BrandEd also has multiple products within each sub-entity, which means a lead could be interested in more than one. As a result, communication needs to be coherent and unduplicated, as much as possible.

Additionally, teams were completing a great deal of work manually that could be automated through Pardot. For example, the teams were using Outlook for sending emails when they could send marketing emails through Pardot and capture valuable reporting metrics.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

The team at BrandEd implemented Pardot Business Units, a relatively new concept, as well as figured out a way to capture, track and manage multiple product interests for the same lead record (i.e., allowing prospects to select more than one program of interest upon form submission), and map them to Salesforce. And they did all of this in-house with no consulting help, besides Sercante Training coursework.

They had two full-time employees; one who had never worked with Pardot.
There was limited material for the Pardot Sandbox and Pardot Business Unit set up.
The team reimagined their marketing strategy as they were implementing.

Results after implementing the solution

After the 60-day implementation, the small-but-mighty team celebrated their successes. They implemented Pardot so that it would work seamlessly for multiple business units and products, and their Pardot instance allows them to track the user journey in Salesforce and Pardot.

After implementation, the team enjoyed the confidence of knowing everything will work as expected. That’s because they utilized the Pardot Sandbox to validate functionality.

And finally, they discovered how important their work is to optimize the process for selecting more than one program of interest. The BrandEd team found that more than 70% of their prospects select more than one program of interest. If they had not designed a creative solution (sans code development), they would have had to create multiple lead records in Salesforce and prospect records in Pardot to solve that issue.

Learn more and keep it going

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 Grassroots Innovation Pardot Award Winner: BrandEd Holdings appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-15T20:08:54+00:00November 15th, 2021|Categories: Data Management, Email Marketing, Events, Pardot Business Units, Salesforce|

ParDreamies Extending Pardot Award Winner: LexisNexis Canada

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

Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
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 Extending Pardot category, which recognizes API-driven solutions.

Extending Pardot with LexisNexis Canada

The team at LexisNexis Canada, a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics tools, was encountering the problem related to siloed data, So, they developed a solution to pull product subscription information into Pardot. This allows the team’s marketers to pull their own campaign lists, which reduces list turnaround time and miscommunication errors. They can now see fresh data for 12 products, and drill down to “module level” subscriptions for their two flagship products.

Quick Facts:

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

Challenge the team wanted to solve

For as long as LexisNexis Canada had a marketing automation tool, they relied on an external data team to pull campaign lists. However, 30% of their requests were simple product status updates, like “I want a list of everyone who cancelled their subscription to Product X, within geography Y.” The team’s marketing director, Collin Smith, wanted to put product subscription information into Pardot, thus allowing marketers to pull their own campaign lists. The team aimed to reduce list turnaround time and decrease miscommunication errors.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

The main obstacle: handling risks and complexity. Prior to this project start, this exact mission was attempted in the past. And it failed. The systems at LexisNexis Canada are complex because they’ve been in business so long (since before 1995, which is ancient for a software company!).

The team handled the risks and complexity of the project by delivering work in waves with close involvement from marketing stakeholders.

Other major obstacles included discovering which non-obvious data points were vital for the project, handling the Pardot switch to OAuth, and dealing with users who change their email addresses.

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - LexisNexis Canada

Results after implementing the solution

The team at LexisNexis Canada unlocked the ability to see 81,000 additional subscription data points inside Pardot. Marketers from the company can also see 45,000 “subscription modules” and 32,000 extra demographic details about Pardot prospects. This is information that was hidden from them before the solution implementation.

Marketing managers and coordinators can now create lists on their own in under ten minutes. This is in contrast with the old way that took three days and involved an external team.

The Pardot v4 Batch Import API was key to getting this work done.

The project was submitted by Jacob Filipp, and the team handling the project included:

Programming – Alla Fradkin
Database work – Corey Heasley
Marketing director – Collin Smith

Learn more and keep it going

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 Extending Pardot Award Winner: LexisNexis Canada appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-12T18:50:45+00:00November 12th, 2021|Categories: Data Management, Email Marketing, Events, Integration, Salesforce|

ParDreamies Personalization Perfection Pardot Award Winner: Restaurant 365

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

Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
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 Personalization Perfection category, which recognizes right-time, right message marketing solutions.

Personalization Perfection Pardot Campaign with Restaurant 365

Things have been out of sorts for most industries in the past two years, but the restaurant industry is among one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Restaurants around the world had no choice but to switch to take-out only or close completely. At the same time, many restaurants were experiencing staffing shortages and had to increase their prices due to rising food costs.

Restaurant 365 is an all-in-one restaurant management platform that serves independent restaurants, multi-concept restaurant groups, franchises, and accounting firms. The Restaurant 365 platform is the leading all-in-one, restaurant-specific, cloud-based accounting, inventory, scheduling, payroll and HR solution to simplify day-to-day restaurant operations, lower cost of goods sold (CoGS) and optimize labor costs.

Pardot Campaign Solution Summary

Senior Marketing Operations Manager Brittany Rhyme saw the challenges restaurants were facing. She wanted to ease the burden for them using the power of the Pardot platform and personalization enhancements to create optimal and engaging experiences for existing clients and prospects.

She accomplished these goals by creating a quiz-style interactive experience via the Outgrow and Pardot integration paired with a personalized and interactive experience using custom fields and dynamic content on Pardot Landing Pages.

Hurdles to Implementing Campaign Solution

The two main hurdles Brittany experienced while managing the project were related to cross-departmental contribution and implementation.

She had to work across departments to get the campaign created, which required her to sync with CSM and product teams to perfect the quiz content (questions and results). While this slowed the implementation process, it was an essential part of the campaign’s success.

Additionally, the sales teams were eager to test the quiz, and they forwarded the email with the landing page results to other team members. Email forwarding caused results in the landing page dynamic content to fail. She addressed that challenge by implementing campaign training for internal teams.

Landing Page (Dynamic Content + Custom Fields)

Pardot Campaign Results

The campaign has been successful in reaching several reporting metric goals Brittany and her team had for the project.

Perhaps the greatest result was an increased outbound lead flow to the sales development representative (SDR) team during a quarter that typically has low prospect engagement (Q3). This was the team’s first try at this type of interactive content, and the new type of helpful quiz-style content allowed them to generate net new leads to the database.

The team saw equally impressive reporting metrics for other goals as well. The Pardot campaign helped the team to crush their objectives and key results (OKR) goals as well as their overall marketing qualified lead (MQL) goal.

They also experience unexpected results. The campaign helped to “wake the dead” in terms of stagnant/lost opportunities in the database with the engaging quiz content.

OKR Achieved: 79 quiz completions/50 goal

Learn more and keep it going

Now that you’ve learned about the campaign solution, you can take that knowledge and use it in your own Pardot instance. Here are a few resources to help you replicate the project.

Restaurant 365 Solution in Full Detail – Brittany Rhyme presented the award-winning solution in greater detail for the Austin Pardot User Group, and the recording of that presentation is available here.
Outgrow and Pardot integration documentation

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 Personalization Perfection Pardot Award Winner: Restaurant 365 appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-11T11:42:44+00:00November 11th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Email Marketing, Events, Integration|

Announcing the 2021 ParDreamies Pardot Award Winners

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

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

Here are the winners of the 2021 ParDreamies Pardot Awards.

ParDreamies 2021 Best in Show Award

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

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

The fun way to profile your prospects

Submitted by Claudia Hoops for Destined

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - Destined

Summary:

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

Quick Facts:

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

ParDreamies 2021 Personalization Perfection Award

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

And the Personalization Perfection Award goes to…

Engaging prospects with quiz-style content

Submitted by Brittany Rhyme for Restaurant365

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - Restaurant 365

Summary:

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

Quick Facts:

Outgrow + Pardot integration
Dynamic Content
Custom Fields
Pardot Landing Pages

ParDreamies 2021 Social Impact Award

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

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

COVID-19 Learning & Policy Center

Submitted by Miriam Childs for Lexipol

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - Lexipol

Summary:

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

Quick Facts:

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

ParDreamies 2021 Grassroots Innovation Award

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

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

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

Submitted by Pooja Goel for BrandEd

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - BrandEd

Summary:

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

Quick Facts:

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

ParDreamies 2021 Extending Pardot Award

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

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

Project Octopus: Bringing customer subscription status into Pardot

Submitted by Jacob Filipp for LexisNexis Canada

Summary:

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

Quick Facts:

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

Pardot Award Honorable Mentions

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

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

Honorable Mention: Hot Job Email Using Dynamic Content

Submitted by BJ Dodenbier for Flexcare Medical Staffing

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

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

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

Hot jobs for traveling nurses
Hot jobs for traveling allied clinicians

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

Honorable Mention: Pardot Business Card Scanner App from MarCloud Technologies

Submitted by Tom Ryan for MarCloud Technologies

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - MarCloud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submitted by Tammy Begley for Destined

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - Destined email templates

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

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

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

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

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

Submitted by Pankaj Verma for Accenture

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - Accenture

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

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mention: Pardot + Salesforce = Personalization Perfection

Submitted by Cara Woo for Cloudtegic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submitted by Jenny Parnell for InterWorks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mention: Custom Pardot / Zoom Integration

Submitted by Julia Hoffman for FARO / Sercante Labs

ParDreamies 2021 Pardot Award Winners - FARO and Sercante Labs

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mention: Driving Business and Investment across the African Continent

By Africa Events Limited

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

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

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

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

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

By Ben Lamothe for BDO Digital

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

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

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

Thanks to everyone who shared their Pardot stories

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

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

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

By Ambre Juryea-Amole|2021-11-01T20:28:23+00:00November 1st, 2021|Categories: Career, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Events, Non-Traditional Use Cases, Salesforce|

Marketing Hocus Pocus: 6 Pardot Horror Stories to Avoid

The life of a marketing and sales consultant is never boring at Sercante, working with companies of all shapes and sizes on tasks both large and small.

The days flow along in a sensible cadence … until …

Are you a Halloween horror story fan?

Marketing has its own kind of terror — not in the chainsaw/demonic way, but on the topics of spam, user roles, missing form follow-up, sync mishaps — you get the picture.

Read on — if you dare! (But really, you should — you’ll learn a few tricks.)

Avoid these 6 Pardot horror stories

Soothsayer Sales Team?

Picture this: You’ve placed a clean and crisp “contact us” form on your website. It’s nice and trim (not too many fields) and has prominent placement on a main page. The sales team is rubbing their hands together in anticipation of ALL of the leads.

Your worst fears come true: The sales team gets nothing, zilch, nada, zero — NO leads.

You frantically look around for the culprit. Finally, the ugly truth bubbles to the surface: The beautiful “contact us” form is missing a critical step. (Are you hearing the “Psycho” sound? I am.)

Pardot Horror Story 1: An inspection reveals that form completions aren’t being assigned or sending notifications to the sales team.

Of course. The sales team doesn’t have a crystal ball and can’t “see” the leads without a little form-based action.

It’s time for you to optimize your form setup so leads make it to the right people.

Read this post for more details »

Ghostly Links

Your day starts with an urgent note from your boss: “An email must be sent asap on ProductX because sales numbers aren’t as expected.”

Between back-to-back calls and a multitude of Slack messages, you prep the email, to get it ready for the final copy you are not-so-patiently awaiting. The copy arrives,and you review it while on yet another call, then drop it into the email you already started. Cool. Looks good .

You send a test to the boss, copywriter and your own inbox, and review the test email while still on a call (you are crushing the multi-tasking game ).

You wait for approvals, then wait some more, and finally message your boss (“Please respond so I can get the email out!”). He comes back with a not-so-convincing “Yeah, it’s fine — send it” (and you never hear back from the copywriter).

You hit the “send” button — “asap” as requested — unaware of the horror to come.

Ding! The email hits your inbox. Ding! Ding! Emails from coworkers: “The button doesn’t work.” Uh-oh.

While distractedly rushing to get the email done, the link in the CTA button was forgotten.

Pardot Horror Story 2: Everyone’s messaging you to say your CTA button leads nowhere because it’s a dead link .

Anyone in charge of sending emails has been there — I feel you. It’s easy to miss test-clicking a link. And, as we all know, a rushed task is an invitation for errors.

Implementing a better quality assurance process can help you feel confident the next time you hit the ‘send’ button.

Read this post for more details »

The WitchWhich List Mystery

One day your database size is X, the next day it is X+5000! Where did the extra records come from? Magic? Sorcery?

You dig around, looking at new records trying to find the answer.

Hmmm — you see a few imports that you did not perform. Only one other user has import access — your boss. You message her: “Hey, I see you imported some lists into Pardot. Can you tell me where they are from?” She proudly comes back with, “We purchased a few small opt-in lists!”

Oh boy.

Pardot Horror Story 3: You find out that the zombie prospects in your Pardot org came from purchased lists.

Say it with me now: “Purchased lists are noncompliant with Pardot.”

Seriously, Pardot will put a hex on your account if you use those purchased prospects. Don’t do it. Just don’t.

(Learn more about Pardot’s Permission-Based Marketing Policy – which, by the way, you must agree to EVERY time you import a list!)

Read this post for more details »

Zombie Admins

There are four default Pardot user roles defined by their level of access/ability (Administrator, Marketing, Sales Manager, and Sales).

Salesforce user profiles are mapped to Pardot user roles.

You’re with me, right? Great.

According to the Thesaurus, “administrator” is also authority, commander, head, official, head honcho. You would probably agree that this would be a title reserved for the very top-most spots (I’m thinking 1-5, depending on how large the organization is).

How about 31,634 users with the Administrator role .

Yes, we’ve actually seen that IRL (this sounds like a Farmers Insurance® ad).

Pardot Horror Story 4: You discover that most of the users in a Pardot org have Administrator user roles.

Keep the zombies at bay: Be selective with assignments to the Pardot Administrator role!

With admin access comes great power. Determine who really needs full access to everything in Pardot when assigning this role.

Marketing-Killer Troll

Once upon a time, ABC Company sent out emails marketing its products and services to an opt-in list. People on the list were not a match for ABC Company, so they opted OUT of receiving emails.

Seeing this made ABC Company very angry, so they consulted the Troll living in the basement. Smashing his club into the ground, Troll decided these people MUST receive the emails .

Every email was then sent as an operational email. Every. Single. One.

Who knows where this story is going?

An operational email is just that: operational. As in: service announcements, transactional messages, legal notices. As in: NOT marketing.

If you send an operational email and it does contain marketing information, then it is SPAM.

Pardot Horror Story 5: A quick check reveals that all emails are being sent as operational emails.

Don’t be a marketing killer, don’t send unsolicited messages and get shut down (or worse).

Read this post for more details »

The Prospect Sync Coffin

Something is killing your synced information. Leads and contacts are dropping like flies directly into the Pardot Recycle Bin .

No, it’s not the work of a serial killer, but it could be the work of a Marketing Data Sharing mismatch.

Pardot Horror Story 6: You realize prospects are being sent to the recycle bin because of a Marketing Data Sharing (MDS) criteria mismatch.

If you rely on specific data values to control information that syncs from Salesforce to Pardot (leads, contacts, opportunities, custom objects), then you are likely using Marketing Data Sharing (MDS).

When data values change in the field that the MDS criteria is using, the match won’t happen and prospects will be archived. If you import prospects that don’t match the MDS criteria, they’ll automatically be stuffed into the recycle bin too.

Explore the gotchas and learn how to set up MDS in this post »

Marketing Shouldn’t Spark Fear

Your daily life in marketing shouldn’t rival ghost stories or legends of monsters. With proper planning and constant education, it can be a quite happy tale.

Here are 4 ways to start:

Market with morality.
- Make sure you understand Pardot’s stance on permission-based marketing.
- Build a good base of GDPR knowledge.
- Put yourself in the shoes of your recipients and send helpful email messaging, not spam.
Stay on top of updates and new features.
- Get product and service notifications delivered to your inbox.
Always be learning.
- There is a TON of free content for you to discover, from Trailhead to blogs (like this one!), and more.
- Bookmark your favorites — or add them as startup tabs in your browser — for easy access.
- Get certified — Salesforce offers a lengthy list of options.
Join a community
- Get involved in a conversation on the Trailblazer Community, follow hashtags on LinkedIn or Twitter (such as #pardot, #marketingautomation), add channels to Slack (#emailgeeks, #pardashians), and more!
- Again, keep your eye on marketing blogs (The Spot for Pardot, Salesforce Ben, Jenna Molby, Greenkey, to name a few).

Reach out to the team at Sercante if you need help along the way. Or tells us about your biggest marketing horror story in the comments section… if you dare.

The post Marketing Hocus Pocus: 6 Pardot Horror Stories to Avoid appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Pam Carey|2021-10-20T21:04:32+00:00October 20th, 2021|Categories: Compliance, Content Marketing, Data Management, Email Marketing|

Implementing Pardot External Activities Natively in Salesforce

Pardot is delivering a whole new way to leverage your prospect data in the Salesforce Winter ‘22 release. Our earlier blog post covers this new feature and how to set up the Pardot External Activity in Salesforce so any third-party service can begin sending these activities to Pardot via API. This post explains what third-party services need to do to send these activities to Salesforce using Salesforce declarative solutions (Flow/Process builder).

At a high level, we need to:

Configure Salesforce to allow our solution to call the Pardot API
Implement Salesforce APEX code to handle the Pardot API request
Add an action to a Flow to make use of our new code
Test

This solution is a little more technical than our post on Zapier. Once you are done, you will end up with a Flow like this:

Configure Salesforce

Any time we want to work with the Pardot API, we need to “authenticate” with Salesforce in order to get an Access Token.

First, follow the steps in our earlier blog post Connecting to Pardot API from APEX. By the end, you should have:

A brand new Connected App (to avoid issues, don’t re-use previously created Connected Apps unless they were created using the instructions above)
Named Credential for connecting to the API

Salesforce APEX code

To build this capability, we need to create an @InvocableMethod so that our Salesforce declarative automations can see it and call it to do our bidding.As with any code solution, there are a variety of ways that we can tackle this. The code sample below will work for readers with one Pardot Business Unit. The original code file (and APEX Tests) can be found in our GitHub repository: export-activities-sfdx

public with sharing class PardotExternalActivityPublisher {
    public static final Integer HTTP_REQUESTS_PER_BATCH = 50;
    public static final String ONLY_ONE_BUSINESS_UNIT_ID = '0UvB00000004000AAA';
    public static final String NAMED_CREDENTIAL = 'APEX_Pardot_Credential';

    public class ExternalActivity {
        // @InvocableVariable(label='Business Unit Id')
        // public String businessUnitId;
        @InvocableVariable(label='Extension' required=true)
        public String extension;
        @InvocableVariable(label='Type' required=true)
        public String type;
        @InvocableVariable(label='Value' required=true)
        public String value;
        @InvocableVariable(label='Prospect Email' required=true)
        public String email;
    }

    @InvocableMethod(label='Send Activity to Pardot')
    public static void sendActivityToPardot(List<ExternalActivity> activities) {
        //Very quickly pass this request into the ASYNC Queue, eliminating delays for Users
        System.enqueueJob(new QueueablePardotCall(activities));
    }

    /**
     * Handles Asynchronously firing each Activity to Pardot
     */
    public class QueueablePardotCall implements System.Queueable, Database.AllowsCallouts {
        private List<ExternalActivity> activities;

        public QueueablePardotCall(List<ExternalActivity> activities) {
            this.activities = activities;
        }

        public void execute(System.QueueableContext ctx) {
            //depending on how many Activities we are processing, 
            //we might hit the APEX limit of 100 Web Callouts
            List<ExternalActivity> remainingActivities = new List<ExternalActivity>();
            Integer processedCount = 0;

            for(ExternalActivity activity : activities) {
                if(processedCount < HTTP_REQUESTS_PER_BATCH ) {
                    HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
                    req.setHeader('Pardot-Business-Unit-Id', ONLY_ONE_BUSINESS_UNIT_ID);
                    req.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
                    // req.setHeader('Pardot-Business-Unit-Id', activity.businessUnitId);
                    // activity.businessUnitId=null;

                    req.setEndpoint('callout:'+NAMED_CREDENTIAL+'/v5/external-activities');
                    req.setMethod('POST');
                    String body = System.JSON.serialize(activity, true);
                    System.debug('Submitting: ' + body);
                    req.setBody(body);
                    Http http = new Http();
                    try {
                        http.send(req);
                    }
                    catch(Exception e) {
                        //we fire it off and don't do anything if there's an error
                        //probably not the best approach for Production, though it will
                        //be up to you how to handle it
                        System.debug('There was an error submitting the External activity');
                        System.debug('Message: ' + e.getMessage() + '\n' +
                                        'Cause: ' + e.getCause() + '\n' +
                                        'Stack trace: ' + e.getStackTraceString());
                    }
                    processedCount++;
                }
                else {
                    //we will process this in the next batch of Payloads
                    remainingActivities.add(activity);
                }
            }
            if(!remainingActivities.isEmpty()) {
                System.enqueueJob(new QueueablePardotCall (remainingActivities));
            }
        }
    }
}

To use this code, make sure you replace the Business Unit ID at the top of the code with your Business unit ID (to find this, navigate to Salesforce Setup > Pardot Account Setup).

For readers with multiple Pardot Business Units, remove the constant ONLY_ONE_BUSINESS_UNIT_ID and then uncomment the businessUnit lines throughout. You will need to either specify the Business Unit ID in your Flow, or you could write additional APEX to iterate through your Pardot Business Units by working with the PardotTenant object in Salesforce.

You might also want to specify how you want to handle any exceptions you get from making the Pardot API call. In our example, we simply write exceptions to the debug log.

Our APEX code does assume that the Contact has synced over to Pardot already. If you can’t make this assumption, you may consider calling a Pardot Form Handler to make sure that the prospect is in Pardot already. We have an APEX example for that too (which follows a very similar pattern, so it should be easy to merge them).

Adding an Action to a Flow

Once the APEX has been deployed, you will now be able to use it declaratively.

In our example, we have a Zoom Webinar Member (which is a Junction Object between a Zoom Webinar and a Contact).

To set this up in a Flow:

Navigate to Setup > Flows
Select “New Flow” or edit an existing Flow
Select the + symbol to add a new Element, select “Action”
In the “Search all actions” window, locate “Send Activity to Pardot”
Provide a meaningful Label and Description
Set your input values
1. Extension: Enter the name of the Marketing App Extension you created in Salesforce
2. Prospect Email: Source the email from one of the fields/variables in your flow
3. Type: Enter one of the activities you set up and associated with your Marketing App Extension in Salesforce
4. Value: Enter (or source from a field/variable) the unique value to identify this Activity, event IDs work great here
Click “Done”

Test

Once all elements of your Flow are ready, testing can begin. Activate your Flow and perform the action you are using to trigger the Flow. After a couple of moments, check the Pardot prospect you are testing with, and you should now see all the information you passed through.

Testing is a little bit tricky, for two reasons:

We are executing this functionality asynchronously, meaning a problem won’t show up in Salesforce like you are used to seeing. Debug logs will be your friend here. But don’t worry, there isn’t too much to sort through.
If the Named Credential or anything else isn’t quite set up right (from step 1), Salesforce and debug logs aren’t very helpful in troubleshooting. You will have to painstakingly go through the instructions again to make sure that nothing was missed / done incorrectly.

Considerations

The Export Activity API call only works for known prospects, and it will not work if the email address is not already associated with a prospect in your Pardot Business Unit (this is why we have the form handler in our example).
If you have multiple Pardot Business Units, there is no intelligence of “choosing the right one.” You need to target the right one with your APEX solution, which assumes all prospects going through this code are from the same Pardot Business Unit. As we mentioned in the APEX section, you have the flexibility to code whatever you need to handle your business case.

For assistance with this or other Pardot External Activities, reach out to Sercante!

The post Implementing Pardot External Activities Natively in Salesforce appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By Adam Erstelle|2021-10-20T19:06:34+00:00October 20th, 2021|Categories: Content Marketing, Data Management, Email Marketing, Engagement Studio, Integration, Release Notes, Salesforce|

12 Next

Why should you build an email preference center?

How Pardot email preference centers work

Add subscribe list to existing email preference center

Here is a list’s basic information in Pardot:

And here is how it appears on the Sercante email preference center:

Using static and dynamic lists in email preference centers

Dynamic list use case for email preference center

Always follow privacy laws

What preferences should prospects have?

How do you honor prospect preferences?

Option 1: Look for public list opted-in status when creating your send list

Option 2: Create a dynamic suppression list that looks for public list opted-out status

Staying organized and documenting everything

Create a spreadsheet to track your list decisions

Make it easy to find your EPC lists

Create a how-to guide for your Pardot users

Email preference center example

Get help with your email preference center

Why use Pardot instead of other marketing automation platforms?

Pardot for nonprofits on Salesforce

What Pardot does for marketing teams at nonprofits

Fundraising and Donor Communications

Volunteer Recruitment and Management

Fundraising Events

Resources for nonprofits marketing with Pardot

Pardot Connects Higher Ed Marketers to Other Departments

Prospects get better experiences with higher ed institutions through Pardot

Lead Generation

Prospect Nurturing and Student Retention

Marketing Reporting

Resources about Pardot for higher education marketers

ParDreamies Categories

Best in Show with Destined

About the Award-Winning Solution

Challenge the team wanted to solve

Hurdles they overcame during the project

Results after implementing the solution

Learn more and keep it going

Grassroots innovation with BrandEd

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Extending Pardot with LexisNexis Canada

Learn more and keep it going

Personalization Perfection Pardot Campaign with Restaurant 365

Pardot Campaign Solution Summary

Hurdles to Implementing Campaign Solution

Pardot Campaign Results

Learn more and keep it going

ParDreamies 2021 Best in Show Award

The fun way to profile your prospects

ParDreamies 2021 Personalization Perfection Award

Engaging prospects with quiz-style content

ParDreamies 2021 Social Impact Award

COVID-19 Learning & Policy Center

ParDreamies 2021 Grassroots Innovation Award

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

ParDreamies 2021 Extending Pardot Award

Project Octopus: Bringing customer subscription status into Pardot

Pardot Award Honorable Mentions

Honorable Mention: Hot Job Email Using Dynamic Content

Honorable Mention: Pardot Business Card Scanner App from MarCloud Technologies

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

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

Honorable Mention: Pardot + Salesforce = Personalization Perfection

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

Honorable Mention: Custom Pardot / Zoom Integration

Submitted by Julia Hoffman for FARO / Sercante Labs

Honorable Mention: Driving Business and Investment across the African Continent

By Africa Events Limited

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

By Ben Lamothe for BDO Digital

Thanks to everyone who shared their Pardot stories

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Soothsayer Sales Team?

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The WitchWhich List Mystery

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The Prospect Sync Coffin

Marketing Shouldn’t Spark Fear

Configure Salesforce