Preserving Prospect Email Preferences After the New Pardot Mailability Upgrade

The Salesforce Winter ‘22 release made the Pardot Prospect Mailability upgrade permanent for all orgs. And it also introduced four new user abilities that allow for more control over which Pardot user roles can edit the new Prospect Mailability fields.

New Fields

  1. Update Opted Out Field
    • Allows the user to edit the “Opted Out” field from the Prospect Overview page
    • Replaces “Toggle Opt-In Status” 
  2. Update Do Not Email Field
    • Allows the user to edit the “Do Not Email” field from the Prospect Overview page
  3. Reset soft bounce count
    • Allows the user to reset the soft bounce count for a prospect. When soft bounces are detected, a “reset” option will appear.
  4. Reset hard bounce count
    • Allows the user to reset a hard bounce for a prospect. 

“Update Opted Out Field” will be enabled for the Pardot Administrator role by default. The other three abilities will be enabled for the Administrator role and the Marketing role by default. Users will only be able to manually toggle these abilities on and off within a Custom User Role. 

When should you reset soft and hard bounces?

You should reset a prospect’s soft or hard bounce if the bounce(s) only resulted from a system issue, such as:

  1. The mailbox is temporarily unavailable or busy
  2. The mailbox is full
  3. An issue similar to when Barracuda incorrectly blocked vendor IPs including Pardot 

If the bounce(s) resulted from the email address not existing, the email or sender being blocked, or due to a bad sending reputation, you should not reset the bounce(s). Continuing to email prospects who have received a hard bounce for these reasons can have a severe impact on your send reputation! You can learn more about bounce codes and meanings here. 

What to watch out for

Removing a user role’s permission to “Update Do Not Email Field” and/or “Update Opted Out Field” only removes the ability to update these fields on the Prospect Overview page. Users will still be able to edit these fields via Automation Rules, Completion Actions, and Engagement Studio Programs. Due to this, I would highly recommend you read the “Ensure these new features are used correctly” section of our first Mailability Upgrade post as well as Lindsey Mark’s post about how to align your data after the upgrade.

What questions do you have about the new Mailability Upgrade? Tell us in the comments!

The post Preserving Prospect Email Preferences After the New Pardot Mailability Upgrade appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-10-20T18:40:08+00:00October 20th, 2021|Categories: Compliance, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Pardot Business Units, Release Notes, Salesforce|
Read More

Pardot External Activity: What it is and how to use it

Pardot is delivering a whole new way to leverage your prospect data in the Salesforce Winter ‘22 release. Similar to webhooks, the new Pardot External Activities feature allows users to receive data from third-party systems and use the data in automations and Engagement Studio Programs. For instance, you could record when a prospect registers for a webinar, completes a survey, or watches a video, and then trigger automations from those actions.

Pardot external activities

There are 3 main steps we will be guiding you through in this post. 

  1. Register the Pardot External Activity types in Salesforce
  2. Integrate third-party systems with Pardot External Activity (we use the API here)
  3. Leverage the new External Activities inside Pardot

To use External Activities, you must have a Plus, Advanced, or Premium Pardot Account and be using the Pardot Lightning App (remember, the Pardot Classic app is being retired).

Register the External Activity types in Salesforce

Similar to how a Salesforce Custom Object needs to be defined before you can start creating records, we need to set up an Extension and the Extension’s Types before we can record External Activity on Prospect records. A Salesforce Administrator or a Marketing Setup Administrator will need to perform these steps. 

  1. Create a Marketing App Extension.
    1. Navigate to Setup > Marketing App Extensions.
    2. Select “New.”
marketing app extensions
  1. Name your new Extension.
  2. Select “Active in Automations.” This is what allows the extension to show up within Pardot.
  3. Select “Save.”
new marketing app extension
  1. Create an associated Activity.
    1. Select the “Related” tab.
    2. Select “New” next to Activity Types.
      • This will be an action your prospects perform, such as registering, attending, or being absent from a webinar.
      • Activity types cannot be shared across extensions, so make sure you create these activities for each extension!
      • Choose activity type names that make sense to your users.
new activity type
  1. Select “Active in Automations.”
  2. Select “Save.”
  3. Assign the extension to your Pardot Business Unit(s). 

You’ll need to perform this step even if you only have one Business Unit. Extensions can be assigned to multiple Business Units. 

  1. Within the Related tab, select “New” next to Business unit Assignments.
  2. Select the first Business Unit.
  3. Select “Save.”
  4. Repeat if you’re using multiple Business Units.
new business unit assignment

Before you build/set up this external activity, check to make sure the solution you are looking to integrate doesn’t have an existing solution built. They may handle this whole side of the process for you, or you may only need to assign the extension to your Pardot Business Unit(s).

Integrate third-party systems with Pardot External Activity

This step is where we’ll connect the third-party system that is collecting the prospect’s activities and extension we built above. This step will use the Pardot API and should be included in any vendor’s solution that supports External Activity. Given this is a brand new feature, odds are External Activity is not yet supported by existing integrations.

If it is not included, you should be able to glue things together yourself. Below are three guides that will help: 

Leveraging the new External Activities inside Pardot

Now that you’ve created an External Activity and have a solution to send the prospect’s activities to Pardot, “Prospect External Activity” will be available within Automations:

rules prospect external activity

And “External Activity” will be an available Trigger in Engagement Studio:

trigger external activity

The value for the External Activity refers to the individual event, webinar, etc. These values will change for each activity and will NOT be pre-populated, so you’ll want to ensure your users know the exact values to look for when using the External Activities in Pardot. You can use the semicolon operator for a list of values.

rule match all

Keep in mind

External Activities do not update the prospect’s last activity time stamp. That means external activities will not trigger a sync between SFDC and Pardot, and they should not be used to indicate the last time the prospect took an action.

rules match all

Finally, Automations will process External Activity data even if the external activity is inactive within Salesforce. So, if you deactivate an extension, you’ll want to review the Automations and Engagement Studio Programs that are using the External Activity. Consider using tags on your Pardot Automations to help you easily find and administer them.

Requirements

  • Plus, Advanced, or Premium editions of Pardot
  • Requires the Pardot Lightning App
  • Work with your Salesforce Admin or Marketing Setup Admin to configure this. 

External Activity helps Pardot customers send information to Pardot from external systems. While many things are possible with the Pardot API, this feature does not send information from Pardot to other systems. If this is a critical capability for your org, you can help impact the Pardot Roadmap by sharing your Product and feature ideas on the  Salesforce Idea Exchange. 

Want to keep learning about External Activity? Check out these two additional blog posts:

The post Pardot External Activity: What it is and how to use it appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-10-15T17:38:10+00:00October 15th, 2021|Categories: Campaigns, Data Management, Email Marketing, Integration, Pardot Business Units, Salesforce|
Read More

Everything Pardot Admins Should Know About Apple Privacy Updates

In September 2021, Apple privacy changes will start having a big impact on Pardot email marketing reporting metrics. Are you ready to pivot your reporting strategy in response to the changes?

Apple announced some big, new privacy changes in June, and that’s what sparked the changes in email marketing reporting metrics. These changes are included with the Apple software update to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and iCloud.com. 

One of these changes, Apple Mail Privacy Protection, is getting lots of attention in the marketing operations community. That’s because of the expected impact to the email open rate metric — a key performance indicator for most marketers. However, there are multiple new changes coming with the iOS update every Pardot professional should be aware of. 

In this article, we’ll cover all three: 

  • Apple Mail Privacy Protection
  • iCloud Private Relay
  • Hide My Email

For each of these changes, we’ll share key features to be aware of plus how to get your org, team, and stakeholders ready. We know how hard these changes can be for your already-swamped team, so we’re here to help you through this. 

Respecting Apple User Privacy 

Before we get started, I want to point something out. These changes are a huge win from the perspective of Apple and their users. By using this new software version, users can decrease the amount of data companies are collecting about their behavior and interests. This gives them more control over what information they share and when. 

Our job as ethical marketing professionals is to do three things:

  1. Respect our users.
  2. Treat their data with integrity.
  3. Adapt to the ever-changing technology and regulatory landscape.

So, we’ll do our best to focus on the positive aspects of the changes by providing solutions to the challenges they present.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection

Marketers using Pardot set automations based on email opens because, typically, opening an email indicates that a prospect is interested in a product or service. But, the new Apple privacy changes will skew email open rates and make it more difficult to know when Apple users actually open an email.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has two key features: 

  1. Open tracking prevention
  2. IP protection

Essentially, Apple iOS 15 opens the email and downloads the content when an email hits a prospect’s inbox. This prevents accurate open tracking because all emails going to Apple devices will appear to be opened in reporting metrics. 

Apple also downloads the content through a series of proxy servers. This feature is obscuring the IP address of the email subscriber. As a result, Pardot can’t report on the user’s device and behavior accurately. 

How to adjust your marketing strategy

The first thing you need to do is answer the question, “What proportion of your database uses an Apple email client?” 

Here’s how to do that:

  • Review some of your recent email sends. 
    1. Go to Pardot Reports > List Emails > Email Clients (in Pardot Lightning)
  • Add up the percentages in the “Popularity” column. This will give you a ballpark estimate of the potential impact.

Is it 10%, 25%, or 50%+ of your audience? The greater the proportion of your audience using an Apple email client, the less reliable your email open rate metrics will be after the iOS 15 update.

Conversely, the non-Apple portion of your audience provides a reliable segment for email open stats and future testing (personalization, A/B, etc.)

Now that you understand the severity with which your data could be impacted, consider the following questions: 

  • Do you have any reports that include email open rate? 
  • Who views these reports? 
  • How can you proactively adjust these reports to decrease the importance of this metric? 
  • How can you communicate with your stakeholders so that they know that the open rate is no longer reliable?

Next, do a thorough review of your Pardot automations. This includes automation rules, engagement studio programs, completion actions, dynamic lists, scoring, etc. Do any of these run based on open rate? If so, develop a plan to leverage an alternative trigger like email click* or form submission.  

*I put a big asterisk next to “email click,” as this metric has been endangered for a while. Email clicks can be caused by spam filters, so be cautious when using email click as a trigger on your automations or as a key metric in your reporting. 

Ultimately, this change is a step in the right direction for marketing teams. There’s never been a better time to shift your focus from vanity metrics like open rate and click through rate to more meaningful campaign performance metrics like conversions and return on investment (ROI).

Apple iCloud Private Relay

The new iCloud Private Relay feature will be baked into iCloud. Launching as a “public beta,” this feature functions similar to a VPN, encrypting all traffic leaving a user’s device when browsing with Safari. Private Relay leverages data encryption and anonymous IP addresses that hide a user’s location and web browsing activity. 

By hiding your specific IP address, Private Relay inhibits websites from building a profile based on your activity across multiple websites and selling your data to advertisers and data brokers. 

This feature is limited to paid iCloud account users who browse with Safari and turn on the Private Relay feature. (All paid iCloud accounts will be automatically upgraded to iCloud+ as part of the update.)

iCloud Private Relay disconnects your IP address from your DNS request (website that you’re visiting), which is great news to those seeking ultimate privacy and not wanting their activity information to be sold to advertisers. Unfortunately, it also disconnects website tracking that Pardot users have in place. With temporary IP addresses assigned, website activity will be difficult to associate to a known prospect. 

This capability does not hide the prospect’s geography. That means you can still track prospect regions, and IP addresses can be identified as proxy servers.

Apple Hide My Email

Hide my email

The last change to know about is Hide My Email. This update allows iCloud subscribers to log into a website using a randomized email address that ties back to their iCloud account. 

If your company allows public users to generate accounts or offers free trials, you could encounter a scenario in which a user takes advantage of Hide My Email to acquire multiple free trials.  

Hide My Email is also another challenging feature for Pardot users. That’s because it is once again disconnecting essential data (a prospect’s real email address) from website activity tracking. 

This functionality will impact open rate statistics. That means you will have to shift to other metrics such as click-through rate. It will also affect marketers who use email open rates for retargeting, and those who use email open rate as a varying factor for dynamic content. So you’ll have to pivot those strategies if you’re currently using email open rates for retargeting or dynamic content variations.

Focus on Reporting Metrics that Matter Most 

It’s normal to fear what we don’t understand. And these new privacy changes may seem scary without knowing why they’re actually good news. 

All of these privacy changes will impact marketing as a whole, making it harder and harder to track email activity and then associate it with activity in other channels. It is also an opportunity for marketers to take a fresh look at current strategies and craft new ways to put prospects in control.

Here are suggestions to address the changes and adjust your marketing strategy:

  • Update your Email Preference Center to offer subscribers greater insight into the topics they already interact with and other topics that are available.
  • Seek ways to connect email clicks with omnichannel metrics that demonstrate customer engagement. This includes:
    1. Offline purchases
    2. Account activity
    3. Website visits
    4. Mobile app activity
    5. SMS engagement
  • Explore using link clicks, external activity such as webinar registrations, and other engagement signals instead of email opens as more accurate interest indicators.
  • Find ways to understand the sentiment of an email message, perhaps with a thumbs up/down action or NPS-type of question within an email.
  • Look for opportunities to link your marketing channels (email, website, social, etc.), and get the cross-connection data flowing.

iCloud Private Relay and Hide My Email — on top of third-party/first-party tracking cookie changes already afoot — necessitate creative thinking to make prospect activity connections that were once seamless.

Prospect Privacy is Paramount

These three Apple privacy changes are going to affect the way you currently work in Pardot. But that’s a good thing. Your prospects have more autonomy when interacting with your company through email and your website. All you have to do is adjust your strategy so you can focus on metrics that matter most rather than vanity ones.

Now that you’re better equipped to prepare for the Apple iOS 15 updates, it’s time to  formulate your game plan and switch up your marketing strategy to evolve with the changes.

You can always reach out to the team at Sercante for support while navigating it all. 

Thank you to Pam Carey and Joy Alphanso for contributing to this post.

The post Everything Pardot Admins Should Know About Apple Privacy Updates appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-09-29T10:02:23+00:00September 29th, 2021|Categories: Data Management, Email Marketing|
Read More

Using the Pardot Integration from Zoom App Marketplace

Integrating Pardot with Zoom webinars allows you to not only collect prospect activity in real time, but also track attendance, handle communications, and send sales new leads quickly and easily. Using the Zoom-native Pardot App simplifies sharing data between these two systems by allowing you to capture Zoom webinar registrants, attendees, and absentees within Pardot lists. 

In this post we’ll cover the pros and cons of this integration as well as walk you through the setup process for a webinar. 

At a high level, to integrate Zoom and Pardot you will need to:

  1. Install and set up the Pardot App from the Zoom App Marketplace.
  2. (Optional) Configure Custom Zoom Registration Fields to go to Pardot.
  3. Start creating Zoom webinars.
  4. Prepare your email notifications.

Considerations for Using the Pardot App from Zoom App Marketplace

Before we dig in, there are a few things to consider when using this native integration:

  • The integration works best when using the Zoom registration form. 
    • There is an option to use a Zoom Post URL (similar to how we think about Pardot Form Handlers). However, this option relies on the Thank You page of the Pardot Form having an additional hidden form that changes per webinar. This hidden form must be completed and requires JavaScript for a behind-the-scenes submission. That makes this option prone to human error and/or browser issues. 
  • Both email solutions leave something to be desired. You can choose between: 
    • Emails styled in Zoom with prospect-specific URLs to join the webinar. With this option you’ll lose out on Pardot tracking and personalization capabilities.
    • Your beautiful Pardot email templates with all the benefits of Pardot data, tracking, and personalization, but no Zoom webinar details or prospect-specific URLs to join the webinar. 
  • This process will not connect prospects with the associated Salesforce campaign. You’ll need additional automations if that’s part of your strategy. 
  • Each webinar requires its own setup and configuration. These take between 1-3 hours each, depending on how granular you get with automations. As a result, this integration is better suited for companies that have a low volume of webinars.
  • There is no mechanism to pull in questions and answers from webinar polls.

Install and Set Up the Zoom Integration App 

  1. Navigate to the Pardot App on the Zoom App Marketplace and sign into your Zoom account. 
  2. Select “Install” from the top right of the Pardot App listing page.
  3. Once installed, you’ll see a prompt to enter your Pardot credentials. If you are not redirected to this screen, click “Manage” from the left-side navigation, scroll down, and click “Configure”). Select “Use Salesforce SSO.”
    Use Salesforce SSO
  4. Next, install a very tiny managed package provided by Zoom. This package creates a connected app to allow Zoom to connect to your org. Click “Install Package” and install this for Admins only.
  1. While the package is installing, create a Salesforce and Pardot user for your Zoom integration. Having one user per integration helps in the event that you need to troubleshoot your Pardot org and/or integrations. Once the user is set up, log in as this user to authorize and approve the app.  
  2. Next, provide Zoom with the Pardot Business Unit ID. You can find the Pardot Business Unit ID by navigating to Salesforce Setup > Pardot Account Setup (you can access detailed instructions here).
    Enter credentials
  3. Select “Save”

Zoom and Pardot are now connected, and they are ready to work together!

(Optional) Configure Custom Zoom Registration Fields Sync to Pardot

Zoom automatically passes most of the common fields directly into Pardot. This includes: 

  • Email
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • City
  • State/Province
  • Zip/Postal Code
  • Country
  • Phone
  • Job Title
  • Organization
  • Industry
  • Questions & Comments
  • Employees

You can also create new fields in Pardot to sync Purchasing Time Frame and Role in Purchase Process from Zoom. 

Depending on what information you are looking to capture in Pardot, you may decide you want to have Zoom pass more fields into the prospect record. A good example of a field you may wish to connect is “Join URL.” This field is a prospect-specific URL that will allow the prospect to join the webinar. 

To add this field, simply:

  1. Navigate to Pardot Settings > Object and Field Configuration > Prospect Fields. Select “+Add Custom Field.”
  2. Complete the required info and select “Create Custom Field.”
  3. Once created, go back to the Pardot App in the Zoom Marketplace and select the “Custom Field Mappings” tab.
  4. Map the Zoom Registration Field “webinar_join_link” to the Pardot Custom Field that you created. Click “Add.”

Your new custom field is now connected. Future registration captured by Zoom will pass the Zoom Webinar Join URL to your Pardot prospects. But please note, the prospect record will only have values from the latest registration.

Start Creating Zoom Webinars

You will need to configure the Pardot integration for every webinar you create in Zoom. 

  1. First, create three static lists in Pardot so Zoom knows where to send the data. You will need a:
    • Registration List
    • Attendee List
    • Absentee List

Make sure you use naming conventions so these lists are easy to find in Zoom and any Pardot automations. 

  1. Next, create or locate the webinar in Zoom. Select the webinar name to view details. 
  2. Select the “More” tab and then select “Configure” within the Integration section.
    create a zoom webinar
  3. Provide Zoom with the static lists you created in Pardot. All three lists are required.
    Provide zoom with pardot static lists
  4. Click Save

Now your lists will be kept current with the right prospects!

Prepare Your Zoom Webinar Email Notifications

Getting prospects to register for a webinar is only half the battle. Now we need to get them to attend! Registration and reminder emails are key here, and getting the right message delivered at the right time will make all the difference.

Both Zoom and Pardot can be used to send these emails, each having their own considerations.

Considerations for Using Zoom Email Notifications

Zoom email settings can be configured at a Zoom Account level (i.e. for your entire company) and at a webinar level. You can customize email templates only at the Account level, and you can’t have webinar-specific templates.

  • Registration emails can include the prospect-specific Join URL and are sent immediately after registration.
  • Reminder emails can include the prospect-specific Join URL and can be sent 1 hour, 1 day, and/or 1 week prior to the webinar.
  • Follow-up emails can be sent 1-7 days after the webinar ends.

Considerations for Using Pardot Email Notifications

With Pardot, create an Engagement Studio program or Automation Rules to automatically send out your registration, reminder, “thank you for attending” and “Sorry we missed you” emails. These automations should look for Prospect that join the webinar’s three static lists.

  • If you configured your integration to send the Zoom Webinar Join URL to Pardot, this value can be included in registration emails sent from Pardot. 
  • Reminder emails can also include the Zoom Webinar Join URL, however if the prospect registered for multiple webinars in close proximity, the Zoom Webinar Join URL on the Prospect’s record may not match the webinar you are reminding the prospect about!
  • Follow-up emails can be sent whenever you like. You can even choose to send a different email template to those who register and attend versus those who register and are absent.

Try the Sercante Connector for Zoom Webinars and Pardot

As mentioned above, if you have a low volume of webinars, this process may not be an issue, especially since the integration is the low-low price of free. However, if you’re hosting one webinar per week (or more), then this process is pretty daunting. 

If you need to scale up your Zoom-Pardot integration, check out the Sercante Connector for Zoom Webinars and Pardot. 

What other tools or webinar platforms are you looking to integrate with Pardot? Tell us in the comments!

Special thanks to Erin Duncan for contributing to this post.

The post Using the Pardot Integration from Zoom App Marketplace appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-09-23T16:49:58+00:00September 23rd, 2021|Categories: Email Marketing, Event Management, Events, Integration, Zoom|
Read More

Are you Ready for the Pardot Prospect Mailability Upgrade?

Pardot announced some big prospect mailability changes in their Summer ‘21 release, and those changes are becoming permanent for everyone with the Winter ‘22 release. 

So, let’s break down exactly what’s changing, what your Pardot users need to know, and how to protect your prospects’ email preferences after this change. 

What’s changing?

Currently Pardot has two fields that control a prospect’s mailability:

Opted Out: Indicates the prospect has unsubscribed from marketing emails. Prospects who have opted out can still receive operational emails (a.k.a transactional emails) and autoresponders.

Do Not Email: Indicates the prospect cannot receive any email communications at all.

Things are about to get a lot more granular with the new prospect mailability changes. Pardot is adding a “Mailbility Insights” section to the prospect page with six fields:

mailability fields
  1. Status: Outlines which kinds of emails prospects can receive and their overall mailable status.
  2. Email Uniqueness: Records if the prospect’s email address has any duplicates in Pardot.
  3. Opted Out: Indicates the prospect has unsubscribed from marketing emails. These prospects can still receive operational emails and autoresponders. 
  4. Do Not Email: Indicates an internal user has suppressed this prospect from marketing emails. These prospects can still receive operational emails and autoresponders.
  5. Soft Bounce Detected: Indicates the prospect’s email address has returned soft bounce(s) from an email send. A soft bounce occurs when an email is recognized by the recipient’s mail server but is returned to the sender because the recipient’s mailbox is full or the mail server is temporarily unavailable. Prospects with a soft bounce may be able to receive emails at a later time.
  6. Hard Bounce Detected: Indicates the prospect’s email address has returned hard bounces from an email send. A hard bounce occurs when the prospect’s email address is invalid, the domain name does not exist, or the sender is suspected as spam and/or has been blocked. Prospects with a hard bounce are no longer mailable. 
undeliverable prospects

Previously when a prospect was marked as Opted Out, the Do Not Email field would also change to “TRUE.” This is no longer the case with the new update. 

This change also enables a new filter to view Undeliverable Prospects (a.k.a prospects who  have received a hard bounce or 5 soft bounces).

More changes to note

  • All Pardot users will have access to update prospect Opted Out and Do Not Email fields. The Pardot user role permission “Toggle Opt-In Status” will no longer restrict access to the Opted Out field. However, this may change with future releases (Pretty please Pardot product managers 🤞🤞🤞).
  • Overwrite Prospect Opt Out Field is enabled by default.
  • A prospect’s number of soft bounces can be reset (remember 5 soft bounces equal a hard bounce).
    soft bounce detected
  • Pardot will mark a prospect with a hard bounce as “Undeliverable.” But, it will no longer automatically change their Do Not Email field to TRUE.
  • The only way to resolve a prospect’s hard bounce status is to change their email address to an address that does not have a hard bounce.

New prospect mailability capabilities

The prospect mailability upgrade also includes new ways to edit, update, and use the prospect mailability fields. You can edit or manually query these fields on the prospect page through an import or via automation rules, dynamic lists, completion actions, and Engagement Studio programs.

prospect mailability automation rules
prospect email status

Ensure these new features are used correctly

With great power comes great responsibility. So, work with your users to ensure everyone understands the new mailability updates and when or when not to change a prospect’s status. 

I recommend that you:

  • Review your Pardot user roles to determine which user roles have access to change the Opted Out and Do Not Email fields. You’ll want to look for the access to create/edit:
    1. Automation Rules
    2. Page Actions
    3. Custom Redirects
    4. Files
    5. Emails
    6. Forms 
    7. Form Handlers
    8. Engagement Studio Programs
    9. Prospects

      You can learn about the permissions for the four default user roles here.

  • Train your users on bounce codes and outline which codes can be resolved and which cannot. Make sure you avoid re-contacting email addresses that will never be successful. Contacting those addresses can have a severe impact on your send reputation!
  • Read Lindsey Mark’s post about how to align your data after the upgrade. 

How should you use these new fields?

Here are a few tips that should help you navigate through the new features.

  • Mark incoming prospects as “Do Not Email” until they have explicitly subscribed to your marketing materials. This will allow you to track, score, and grade the prospect while still respecting their email preferences. 
  • Regularly review your soft and hard bounce error codes by creating dynamic lists of prospects with errors.
  • Edit (or create) your double opt-in process to ensure prospects who subscribed but have not yet confirmed their email address are marked only as Do Not Email. 

How do you plan on using Pardot’s new Mailability upgrade? Let us know in the comments!

The post Are you Ready for the Pardot Prospect Mailability Upgrade? appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-09-02T19:09:16+00:00September 2nd, 2021|Categories: Compliance, Email Marketing, New Pardot Features, Pardot Release Notes, Release Notes|
Read More

Creating a Pardot Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater

Spam and junk data is the bane of my Pardot Admin existence. Nothing irks me more than seeing sales was notified of a form fill from [email protected], or that [email protected] was added to an engagement program. However, spam is an inevitable part of any marketing automation platform and there is only so much we can do to prevent it from entering, or remaining within, the system.

Kick Out the Spams

Song references aside, there are a number of things we can do to give junk data the boot from Pardot. I typically recommend creating dynamic lists that look for spam keywords in the most common Pardot Prospect fields (more info here). Then, use these lists to review and delete junk data on a regular basis. This process works great for small and mid-sized Pardot instances. But dynamic lists alone leave something to be desired for Pardot instances that intake thousands of new prospects a day.

When using Pardot native functionalities to identify junk, I found myself wanting to know why a prospect matched my junk lists:

  • Which field on the prospect’s record was raising the spam flag? 
  • Is this legit junk or do my junk lists need to be tweaked? 

Unable to solve this issue with native Pardot functionality alone, I turned to our Prospect Updater tool to see if I could turn this into a spam identification tool. With some tweaking and a lot of input from the Sercante Labs team, I was able to create a process that not only tells me why a prospect matched my spam criteria, but also allows me to easily manage spam clean up through the use of tags and automations rules. 

Prospect Updater to the Rescue

With Prospect Updater, we moved the criteria from our junk catcher dynamic lists over to  Google Sheets and created two new Pardot fields for the updater to use; “Spam Status” and “Spam Rules Matched.” Prospect Updater then compares all prospects in Pardot to the rules in the Google Sheet and updates their “Spam Status” field with one of the following values:

  • Suspected Spam: Prospect Updater has determined this prospect matches one of the spam rules.
  • Confirmed Spam: The Prospect has been reviewed and deemed to be spam
  • Not Spam: The Prospect matches one or more of the spam rules but has been reviewed and is deemed not to be spam. The Prospect will be excluded from future Prospect Updater spam reviews. 
  • Reset: The Prospect’s junk data has been corrected. Prospect Updater will include this Prospect in future spam reviews. 

The “Spam Rule Matched” field is also stamped with which spam criteria the Prospect matched. 

Once the Prospect Updater Spam Identification process was up and running, I created new dynamic lists that collected Prospects marked as “Suspected Spam” and grouped them by the field that was spammy. This allows me to easily review and clean up these prospects on a regular basis. 

Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater

Automate All the Things

To make the spam review process even easier, I put automation rules in place that would allow me to update prospects by tagging them or changing their “Spam Status” value. That way, I could use whichever update method was easiest at the moment. 

For instance: 

  • If a Prospect is indeed spam
Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater
  • If a Prospect will always match spam but is not actually spam (i.e. Pamela Smith with email SPam[email protected])
Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater - not spam
  • If a Prospect has been edited to no longer match spam rules
Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater - reset spam

Having the “Spam Status” fields also allows me to create a suppression or “holding” dynamic list where new prospects will not be emailed until their “Spam Status” field is updated.

Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater - dynamic list rules

This process now runs like a well-oiled machine. It allows us to easily identify and kick out junk data and prevent said data from causing any damage in the short time it exists in Pardot. 

Implementing the Prospect Updater Spam Identification Process

Set up and implementation of Prospect Updater is pretty painless. The first thing we need to do is set up a connected app: 

  • Complete the form on this page to get the package from us
  • Install our Salesforce Package
  • Set up a user and pre-authorize them to use the Connected App

The team will give you all the details and support you need to get this set up properly.

While the cogs are starting to move on that process, you can schedule a meeting with the Sercante Labs team to talk through your spam use case and any other challenges you might have for Prospect Updater. It can do a lot, and your wish is its command. The Sercante Labs team will then go back and do what developers do, and push buttons and stuff. 

Once your Prospect Updater configuration is complete, the only thing left is a final training session to make sure you and your team are equipped to create, modify and maintain your new Super Spam Spotting System plus any other cool things you want to do with it (data clean up and normalization, maybe?). 

Interested? Give the Labs team a shout through the form on the bottom of the Prospect Updater for Pardot page.

Thanks to Mike Fazio & Adam Erstelle for contributing to this solution.

The post Creating a Pardot Spam Identification Process with Prospect Updater appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-08-30T18:41:57+00:00August 30th, 2021|Categories: Data Management, Email Marketing, prospect updater, Sercante Labs|
Read More

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|
Read More

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|
Read More

Beyond Dynamic Content: How to Create REAL Content Personalization in Pardot

Dynamic Content is the built-in way to use Pardot to personalize marketing assets like emails. You can improve your email marketing performance, including click-through rates (CTRs), by providing the right content based on known (or unknown) prospect information. 

However, throughout the process, many Pardot users run into limitations of Pardot Dynamic Content. They wonder how they can actually achieve personalization within their Pardot emails and newsletters.

This post will walk you through solutions to overcome common challenges with Pardot Dynamic Content. You’ll also get strategies to expand your personalization options far beyond what it can achieve. 

If you’d like to dive deeper into these strategies, then sign up for FeedOtter’s upcoming webinar on August 19 at 1 p.m. ET. You can ask questions, see tutorials and get free in-depth guides on the more complex strategies just for registering. We look forward to seeing you there! 

You can also catch a session on the topic at ParDreamin’ this year.

Overcoming Limitations of Pardot Dynamic Content

Limitation #1: Only one field criteria

One of the primary limitations of Pardot Dynamic Content is that the criteria can only be based on one field. This can make users feel frustrated when they need to use more complex criteria or multiple fields to determine which piece of content an audience member sees. 

One way around this is to use an automation rule (that embodies multiple criteria) and have it change one field you can then use for dynamic content. 

For example, you might want to send different content to these three audiences:

  • East Coast people who aren’t registered for your webinar (send an invite to your East Coast presentation)
  • West Coast people who aren’t registered for your webinar (send an invite to your West Coast presentation)
  • People who are registered for you webinar (send an eBook)

Because these audiences use multiple criteria (location and registration status in this example), you aren’t able to achieve the goal with dynamic content without some finesse. 

To achieve this, you would need to create a new field. Then you could use an automation rule so that everyone who is on the East Coast and is registered has that prospect field filled with a value that reflects “East Coast + Registered” and then do the same with your other variations.

At the end, you would have one prospect field that takes into account multiple criteria to base dynamic content on. 

Limitation #2: No “is empty” criteria option exists

Another limitation Pardot users run up against with Dynamic Content is the fact that there is no “is empty” option when creating criteria. 

The standard criteria include:

  • Is
  • Is between
  • Is greater than
  • “Contains” (for dropdowns)

Luckily this one is fairly easy to solve. If you go into the Admin section for that specific Dropdown field, you can make sure the blank value is also selected. This will allow you to use “blank” as a criteria option.

Keep in mind that this only works for dropdown field types, so it does not work for all prospect fields. 

Limitation #3: 25 Variation limit 

This limitation is not the most common one for users to come up against, especially when they first start using dynamic content. However, you might see this if you are regularly creating new options for one dropdown field that you then use as a base for your dynamic content.

You can only have 25 variations per dynamic content piece. 

You can work around this a bit by combining Handlebars Merge Language (HML) with your dynamic content. We will discuss HML as another tool for personalization later in the blog post, but it is an option (even if it comes with its own challenges.) 

Other Challenges with Pardot Dynamic Content

However, despite the tricks and tips to get around some of these common limitations, many users still feel that true personalization cannot actually be realized.

Even when criteria options are sufficient, Pardot Dynamic Content has other challenges, such as:

It’s time intensive. 

It takes a while to properly strategize and then set up the custom fields and automations you need to make dynamic content a success. Even once the framework exists, you’ll still need to take the time to reformat your dynamic content modules for each email. 

Once you’ve practiced editing these modules, it probably won’t take as long as it would have to create an entirely separate email, but it is still something to be mindful of.

It’s also prone to errors. 

Dynamic content can be difficult to test, especially if you have a lot of variations. Because it is harder to test, spotting errors can be tricky. 

You also have to keep diligent track of what Pardot Dynamic Content module is the correct one because you insert it with its numeric code — not as an actual block of content. 

Overall, many of the clients I’ve worked with have found Pardot Dynamic Content limiting from the start or they have outgrown it over time. But there are other ways to achieve personalization that are less time intensive, more user-friendly, and more automated. This includes Handlebars Merge Language, Pardot Snippets, and integrations with other software. 

Handlebars Merge Language (HML)

HML was originally the Salesforce version of variable tags. But in 2019, it was brought to Pardot as well. HML allows you to use conditional logic statements in emails and email templates to change what a user sees in an email based on fields. 

HML uses

The benefits to using HML over Pardot Dynamic Content are that you can write the condition you need directly in the email itself. Then you don’t have to recall which specific module you need. It is simply based on your field information, and you can change details within a block of content instead of creating a new block of content for each category.

HML language requires you to code everything, but this does open up design and style options in addition to changing text. With HML, you aren’t limited to what you can paste into Pardot’s Dynamic Content boxes.

The limitations to using HML are:

Technical coding and setup required

Email templates that use HML conditional statements need careful coding of the IF statements. Unlike Pardot Dynamic Content, there is not a simple way to insert conditionals. Everything must be written in HTML and HML code. If you aren’t experienced with writing code in these languages, then you may need outside help. 

Prone to errors

It can be easy to accidentally break the IF conditions or underlying code if you are updating content directly in the Pardot email builder. And as is true with Pardot Dynamic Content, conditional emails are difficult to test before release.

Limited logic

HML logic is not as robust as Pardot Dynamic Content. You can only use “field = true” logic. Most use cases will require the creation of new custom fields and workflows that map preferences to custom fields which you can use in the HML email. However, that is also true of complex Pardot Dynamic Content criteria. 

Pardot Snippets 

Pardot Snippets are static and reusable blocks of text, dates, or links you can use in emails, forms, and landing pages. You will need access to Salesforce (and/or Pardot Lightning) to create them. They are especially useful for helping marketers keep track of information they would normally copy/paste across multiple Pardot assets. Pardot Snippets are most helpful when it comes to updating event information or footers across your various assets. 

There are a few limitations to Pardot Snippets, such as:

They don’t support HTML/CSS

This means you can’t use Pardot Snippets to stylize your email. You can only use them as blocks of text. While this certainly has a time and place, I haven’t seen my consulting clients use this method to achieve advanced personalization. 

Criteria is very limited

The Pardot Snippet criteria is very limited. It is only based on Business Unit or Campaign Ownership. If you need any other logic (which you likely will if you really want to personalize your prospect’s email and newsletter content), then you’ll have to use a different method. 

Emailing Personalized Content Still Takes Time in 2021

No matter which of the Pardot-native personalization methods you choose, you still have to manually copy and paste content into the Pardot builder or Dynamic Content blocks. This pain point is the biggest reason companies shy away from personalizing these days.

If you’ve made it through this post and still want to pursue personalized Pardot emails, then I highly recommend looking for a Pardot add-on that can help you automate the email creation process using RSS or a curation process. Pardot automation add-ons can reduce errors, save you time, and make personalization a more realistic possibility.

You can learn more about personalization that goes beyond Pardot Dynamic Content at ParDreamin’ 2021. We’ll present a session to teach you how to overcome the limitations of dynamic content using powerful Pardot integrations.

View ParDreamin’ session description for Beyond Dynamic Content: How to Create REAL Content Personalization in Pardot

The post Beyond Dynamic Content: How to Create REAL Content Personalization in Pardot appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-08-11T11:06:59+00:00August 11th, 2021|Categories: Content Marketing, Email Marketing|
Read More