Help! My Account Engagement Email Looks Broken

If your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) email looks broken and you can’t figure out why, then you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ll look at common errors you may uncover when coding your email in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

Things to look for when your Account Engagement email looks broken

You may be struggling with these common problems in HTML email code within your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. But don’t worry, we’re here to guide you through resolving these issues step by step.

Images appear broken

One common issue that marketers face is broken images in their email campaigns. It can be frustrating when images don’t load properly, especially on different devices and email clients. To address this, ensure that your image URLs are correct and properly linked in your HTML code. Additionally, optimize your images for faster loading times and consider using alternative text to provide context if an image fails to load.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

Is your image too big? 

Large image file sizes can cause slow loading times or may not display at all. Optimize your images for the web by compressing them without compromising quality. 

Is your image in the correct format? 

Additionally, confirm that the image is in the correct format (e.g., JPEG, PNG, GIF). At the date of this blog, not all email clients will support .webp format.

Are there SSL/HTTPS issues? 

If your Account Engagement account or website is using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or HTTPS, ensure that the image URLs are also updated to use HTTPS. Browsers may block or display broken images if there are mixed content warnings due to insecure (HTTP) image URLs on secure (HTTPS) pages.

Is the “pardot-region” inserted in the code correctly? 

When customizing or replacing images in Account Engagement using the WYSIWYG editor, it’s crucial to be mindful of the “pardot-regions” in the HTML code. These regions define editable sections that allow you to modify the content, including images.

When updating your HTML code, it’s important to pay attention to the “pardot-width” and “pardot-height” attributes within the code that correspond to your image holder. By explicitly matching these attributes with your image holder dimensions, you ensure that Account Engagement doesn’t automatically adjust the size, potentially distorting or exceeding the intended size of the image holder. In the example below, by setting the “pardot-height” to be auto will allow the image to automatically adjust and not stretch on a mobile device.

My image appears cut off when adding it using the text editor? 

The template may use an attribute mso-line-height-rule:exactly that controls the line-height of text in Outlook. This can crop the image to be that size. Change the attribute to mso-line-height-rule:at-least to give it more flexibility. It is okay to change all of the attributes to at-least.

Darkmode

Dark mode compatibility is another challenge to consider. With the increasing popularity of dark mode, it’s important to ensure that your emails display correctly in this setting. Test your emails in both light and dark mode to identify any color or readability issues. Use CSS media queries to adjust the styling specifically for dark mode, ensuring a seamless experience for your subscribers.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

Do you have dark mode meta tags? 

Dark mode (or light mode) meta tags offer an opportunity to enhance the visual presentation and user experience of your website. These tags provide hints to the browser or email client about how the content should be displayed when the user is in dark mode.

Do you have CSS media queries? 

Dark mode-specific CSS media queries are similar to mobile responsive media queries in the sense that they allow you to target specific conditions and apply different styles accordingly. While mobile responsive media queries focus on adjusting layouts and styles based on screen sizes, dark mode-specific media queries target the user’s preference for dark mode and enable you to modify the appearance of your content accordingly.

When using dark mode-specific media queries, such as (prefers-color-scheme: dark) or @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark), you can detect whether the user has enabled dark mode in their browser or operating system settings. This information helps you adapt the colors, backgrounds, and text within your HTML and CSS code to provide a more suitable and visually appealing experience for users in dark mode. See example code.

Are you swapping your image between dark and light mode? 

Certain images may rely heavily on specific colors or color combinations that work well in light mode but might not be as effective or visually appealing in dark mode. By swapping images, you can create alternative versions that are optimized for each color scheme, enhancing the overall aesthetic and cohesiveness of your email design. See example code.

Is your white text turning black in Outlook? 

Outlook’s dark mode implementation may override the color styles you’ve set for your text, resulting in white text appearing as black. In dark mode, Outlook attempts to adjust the color scheme for better visibility, which can cause unexpected changes to your email’s appearance. You can add the below code to the head tag that will target the Microsoft Outlook email only.

By utilizing this code, you can apply specific CSS styles that will only affect Microsoft Outlook emails. Adjust your desired styles within the provided <style> block.

Here’s an example of how to use a class within an element:

Here is the full tutorial by Nicole Merlin that addresses Outlook emails in dark mode.

Access a complete list of email clients that support dark mode, along with additional tips for optimizing dark mode in your emails, by referring to the following resource.

Preheader text

The preheader text, also known as a preview snippet, is essential for enticing recipients to open your emails. However, it can sometimes get cut off or displayed incorrectly. To avoid this, keep your preheader text concise and within the recommended character limit. Test it across different email clients to ensure it appears as intended.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

Do you need this hidden? 

The decision to hide or display preheader text in emails can vary based on several factors, including design preferences, marketing strategies, and the specific goals of the email campaign. If you decide this needs to be hidden on the overall look of the email, you can include a <style> tag within the <head> section of your HTML code. Use CSS selectors to target the desired element and apply the appropriate styling to hide it. See example ‘A’ below.

In this example, the CSS code targets the element with the class name .preview within  the #emailContents container and applies specific styles when the screen width is at least 600 pixels. The #emailContents id is specific to Account Engagement and should allow the editor to edit the content using the WYSIWYG editor. The content within the element is otherwise hidden with the style=”display: none; mso-hide: all” inline style sets the display property to none


 

Remove unwanted characters from the preheader text

Preheader text should be brief and concise, ideally within the range of 80 to 100 characters. Focus on delivering a clear and compelling message that entices recipients to open your email.

If you prefer not to display any preheader text, you can simply leave the preheader content empty. However, be aware that some email clients may automatically populate the preheader with default content, such as the first line of text from the email body. To mitigate this, consider adding a space or non-breaking space (&nbsp;) in the preheader to override any auto-populated text. See example ‘C’ above.

My link’s not working

Broken links can be frustrating for subscribers and can negatively impact your click-through rates. To avoid this, thoroughly check and test all the links in your email. Double-check the URLs for accuracy and ensure they are properly formatted.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

Did you write the correct format? 

Double-check that the URL of the link is accurate and properly formatted. Ensure that the link includes the necessary protocols (e.g., “http://” or “https://”) and does not contain any typographical errors or missing characters.

Is your link broken? 

If the destination page of the link is no longer available or has been moved or removed, the link will not work. Verify that the target webpage is active and accessible.

URL encoding issues 

URLs with special characters or spaces may encounter encoding problems. 

Make sure that the link is correctly encoded using URL encoding standards (e.g., replacing spaces with “%20” or special characters with their corresponding encoded values).

Non-clickable link

If the link is not properly coded as an anchor <a> tag with the appropriate href attribute, it will not function as a clickable link. Ensure that the link is wrapped within the <a> tag and that the href attribute contains the correct URL.

Blocked or filtered by email client

Some email clients may block or filter certain links for security reasons. If the link appears to be working when tested in other environments, it could be due to the specific email client’s settings or policies.

Incompatibility with mobile devices

Links that are designed or formatted in a way that is not mobile-friendly may not work properly on mobile devices or within certain email clients. Optimize your links for mobile responsiveness to ensure they function as intended.

URL redirection issues

If the link involves URL redirection, make sure that the redirection configuration is correct and functioning properly. Incorrect redirection settings can cause the link to fail.

I want to use a custom font

While Account Engagement does not provide font hosting, you can still incorporate custom fonts in your email campaigns by using web-safe fonts or linking to externally hosted font files. You can host the font files on your own server or utilize third-party font hosting services, then reference them in your email’s CSS using @font-face rules. This way, you have more control over the font selection while still working within Account Engagement’s limitations.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

Choose a web-safe font or a font that supports email clients

Email clients have limited font support, so it’s best to use web-safe fonts or custom fonts specifically designed for email use. Select a font that is available on most operating systems and widely supported by email clients to ensure consistent rendering.

Host the font files

Upload the font files to your web server or a font hosting service. You’ll typically need the font files in different formats like WOFF, WOFF2, TTF, or EOT to maximize compatibility across email clients. 

Define font-face rules in the CSS

In your CSS code, use the @font-face rule to declare the font family and specify the font file URLs. Include the different font formats to cover a broader range of email clients.

Replace ‘YourCustomFont’ with the desired font name and adjust the file paths in the url() function to reflect the location of your font files.

My font link is being counted as a click

In Account Engagement, links are typically tracked and counted as clicks to provide valuable engagement metrics and insights for your email campaigns. However, when you include a font link in your email, it may unintentionally be counted as a click due to the way Account Engagement tracks link interactions.

This can happen because Account Engagement’s tracking mechanism treats all links as clickable elements by default. When recipients open your email and the email client fetches the font file from the linked source, Account Engagement’s tracking system registers this as a click event.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

How are you using custom fonts?

To avoid font links being counted as clicks in Account Engagement, you can use the @import method instead of the traditional <link> method to include custom fonts in your email.

Here’s an example of how to use the @import method:

Background images

Background images in HTML email templates offer creative possibilities for crafting distinctive layouts, adding depth, and showcasing products. They have gained popularity as a design element. However, it is important to consider certain factors when incorporating background images in your Account Engagement email design.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

Not all email clients support background images

Some clients may block or ignore background images, resulting in an email that doesn’t display the intended design. Test your email across different email clients to ensure consistent rendering. 

Inline CSS

To maximize compatibility, inline CSS is typically recommended for background images in HTML emails. Use the style attribute directly within HTML elements to define the background image and related properties.

The example includes the necessary code to make the background image show in Microsoft Outlook, as well as most popular email clients.

Image size and optimization

Optimize your background image by compressing it to reduce file size while maintaining acceptable quality. Large image files can increase email size and load time, negatively impacting the recipient’s experience. Aim for an optimized image that doesn’t exceed the recommended file size for emails.

Fallback background color

In case the background image doesn’t load or isn’t supported, provide a fallback background color that complements your design. This ensures that the email still looks visually appealing even without the background image.

Accessibility

Consider accessibility guidelines when using background images. Include alt text for background images so that users with screen readers or email clients that don’t display background images can still understand the context of the email. And of course, it is not recommended or best practice to use text in background images.

Buttons in Outlook

Buttons collapsing or not displaying correctly is another challenge in HTML email coding. To avoid this, use table-based layouts for buttons and set explicit width and height values. Test your buttons across different email clients to ensure they remain consistent and clickable.

Here’s a checklist of things to look for:

I want rounded corners in Outlook. 

VML (Vector Markup Language) can be used to create buttons with rounded corners, especially in older versions of Outlook that don’t fully support modern CSS features like rounded borders (border-radius). VML allows you to make custom shapes and apply rounded corners to elements. 

Check out this example of an HTML button with rounded corners using VML:

We strongly advise against using this method in HTML email templates within Account Engagement, as it requires replacing the link in two separate locations, which can be easily overlooked if not approached with caution.

Why did my button padding get stripped? 

If you’re facing a situation where the padding of your button appears to be removed or stripped, it is likely because of a collapsing issue in Outlook. To troubleshoot this problem, ensure that the link you are testing is an active and valid link, rather than just using a placeholder like “#” or a dummy link. Using inactive or placeholder links can be the root cause of the problem and result in the unexpected removal of padding from your button.

Create error-free Account Engagement emails

At Sercante, we understand the common pitfalls of HTML email code in Account Engagement, and we’re dedicated to solving them for you. 

With our technical expertise and attention to detail, you can rest assured that your email campaigns will be visually appealing, engaging, and seamless across all platforms and devices. 

Say goodbye to HTML email code frustrations and hello to successful email campaigns that captivate your audience. Reach out to us for help creating well-crafted emails and templates in Account Engagement.

Original article: Help! My Account Engagement Email Looks Broken

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Help! My Account Engagement Email Looks Broken appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-09-13T21:17:49+00:00September 13th, 2023|Categories: Emails & Forms, Pardot, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Email Campaign Efficiency: Tips for Saving Time and Boosting Results

It’s time to launch another email campaign and the anxiety sets in. You have a variety of people on different teams who want their eyes (and opinions) on your emails before you can launch them. This back and forth can be overwhelming and gets buried in 50+ long email threads

Stop the madness! Let’s talk about how to organize the chaos — making your life easier when it’s time to launch an email campaign. Here are a few email campaign tips.

Use an Email Brief

It’s a blank sheet of paper for most clients and they get overwhelmed with where and how to start. Sometimes you need to partner with someone who has a plan you can easily take, customize it to your needs, and boom! You have a starting place now. 

Let’s talk about what exactly you should include in an email brief.

What to include in the email brief

Campaign Overview and Objective 

  • Start with a brief description of the campaign’s purpose and main objective
  • Use it as an opportunity to define its purpose with absolute clarity and give helpful background to your team who will be viewing the brief
  • Clearly state what you want to achieve, such as increasing sales, promoting a new product, driving traffic to a website, or building brand awareness

Metrics and Reporting

  • Clearly define the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure the success of the campaign
  • Stick to goals that translate into clear, measurable objectives
  • Link to the report you plan to use once the campaign is launched

Email Content and Format Crafted for the Target Audience

  • Specify the type of content you want to include in the email, such as text, images, videos, or interactive elements
  • Indicate any personalization elements or segmentation strategies you want to implement to make the email more relevant and engaging to the recipients

Email Schedule

  • Provide the proposed sending date and time for the email

Call-to-Action (CTA)

Internal Timeline 

  • A clear timeline can let team members get involved and stay moving quickly. 
  • Include internal deadlines for teams to owe you items or are giving you approval

Identify and Fix Recurring Pain Points

Continuous edits to email HTML and copy is a common pain point among clients. There are tools like Stensul that can make your life easier because it keeps all the edits out of email threads. 

It is essential to have integrations and features like these to have the capacity to scale operations and to accommodate increases in volume while meeting requester’s timing requirements, all without the need to hire additional staff or compromise on quality. 

Check out this webinar with Sercante & Stensul together where they share tips for integrating an email creation platform into your strategy to ease common pain points.

Create a plan, look for ways to add efficiency, and repeat

Ok so let’s recap!

The first thing you’re going to do is draft and use a brief. If you’re stuck, start with the email brief items listed in this post.

Then you’re going to document your process and iterate on it! 

The goal is to make your campaign launch life easier each time. When you identify a pain point, test out a solution for it and see if the process gets even better.

Original article: Email Campaign Efficiency: Tips for Saving Time and Boosting Results

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Email Campaign Efficiency: Tips for Saving Time and Boosting Results appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-08-23T19:06:40+00:00August 23rd, 2023|Categories: Emails & Forms, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Account Engagement Lightning Builders and Scoring Categories

Account Engagement (fka Pardot) Scoring Categories and Lightning Builders are two great features to amp up your marketing and segmentation efforts, but they don’t exactly connect like typical Account Engagement assets. This blog will walk you through what you can and cannot do when it comes to combining these two features.

Where we run into issues

Account Engagement Scoring Categories can be super impactful for orgs with multiple services, offerings, products etc. These categories allow you to break down a Prospect’s interest in your different offerings so you can better tailor your messaging and next steps. 

However, Scoring Categories rely on Account Engagement folders, if an asset lives in a folder that is assigned to a Scoring Category then any engagement with that asset is attributed to the Scoring Category, but the Lightning Builders don’t use folders. So can Scoring Categories be used with Lightning Builder assets? The answer is yes, but it’s complicated. 

Scoring Categories and the Lightning Email Builder

When List Emails or Email Templates are sent from Account Engagement, your default Scoring model will adjust the Prospect’s score as the Prospect engages with the email. If this List Email or Email Template is saved in a Scoring Category folder, then the resulting Score would be associated with that category. 

When Lightning Builder Email Content is sent to Prospects as a List Email or “activated for automation” and used as a template, there is no association with folders and therefore Scoring Categories. However, you can still adjust the Scoring Category in three ways:

1. Email Content Completion Actions

When sending Email Content you have the option to add completion actions for email opens, email clicks, and unsubscribes. Any of these options can be used to add or remove points from a Scoring Category.

2. Engagement Studio Program Actions

Lightning Builder Email Content can also be used within Engagement Studio programs. Just make sure you’ve selected “activate for automation” to push the Email Content down to Account Engagement:

In your Engagement Studio program, select the Email Content in your “Send Email” Action, add the relevant trigger (Email Click, Email Open, etc.), and then adjust the Prospect’s Scoring Category if they take said action. 

3. Custom Redirect used in the Email Content

If you have an especially important link in your email, such as a button to register for an event, you can also create a Custom Redirect for the link. 

Custom Redirects are associated with Folders, so any engagement with the link will update the Prospect’s Score within the category. You can also add a Completion Action to the Custom Redirect to add additional points above your default Scoring model. 

Scoring Categories and the Lightning Landing Page Builder

When Landing Pages are built within Account Engagement, Page Views, Landing Page Successes, and Landing Page Errors will automatically update the Prospect’s Score in accordance with your default Scoring model. If that Landing Page is stored in a folder associated with a Scoring Category then the default scores will go to the Scoring Category rather than the overall score. 

When the Landing Page is built in the Lightning Landing Page Builder, there is no association with folders and therefore Scoring Categories. However, you can still adjust the Scoring Category in two ways:

1. Form Completion Actions

The Form the Lightning Landing Page is using will be stored within Account Engagement and associated with a folder, but form fills completed via a Landing Page are associated with the Landing Page only. However, if your Form has a Completion Action to update a Scoring Category when it is filled out, this will be fired when the Prospect fills out the Form via a Lightning Landing Page.

2. Automation Rules

You can also create an Automation Rule to adjust a Prospect’s score if they have filled out a Lightning Landing Page. However, keep in mind this would only fire on the initial Landing Page completion. You can have the Automation Rule repeat, but it would keep giving the Prospect points each repeat even if they did not fill out the Landing Page again.

Go Use Scoring Categories with the Lightning Builder

So there you have it! Yes, you can use Scoring Categories with Lightning Builder assets, but it’s not in the ways you’d expect. 

What other questions do you have about the Lightning Builders? Let us know in the comments!

Original article: Account Engagement Lightning Builders and Scoring Categories

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Account Engagement Lightning Builders and Scoring Categories appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-08-23T11:25:21+00:00August 23rd, 2023|Categories: Emails & Forms, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

How Inactive Prospects in Account Engagement Impact Your Strategy

Prospect inactivity tells us just as much about a prospect as their activity does. An inactive prospect has a lower interest level and less openness to learn more about your organization than prospects who are active.  

In this blog, we will address what makes a Prospect inactive vs. active, how inactive Prospects can impact your organization, and ways to clean up your database. 

Inactive Prospects in Account Engagement vs. Active Prospects

Inactive Prospects exist in every instance of Account Engagement, but what makes a Prospect inactive? I can tell you what doesn’t change their status to active. 

The following Prospect activities will NOT change a Prospect status from Inactive to Active:

  • Email Sends
  • Email Opens
  • Email Bounces
  • Opportunity Creation

So what does change a Prospect’s status from inactive to active? 

These are the activity indicators we’re looking for:

  • Form Submission
  • Page Visits
  • Link Clicks

Inactive Prospects can also be Prospects who are classified as “Active” but have not taken any action (i.e. form submission, page visit, or link click) in a predetermined amount of time (i.e., 6 months or 1 year). The timeline should be well thought out and considered by the marketing team. You should also adjust accordingly if needed based on the typical time it takes for the sales process to reach completion.

The Impact of Inactive Prospects

Housing inactive prospects in your org can have detrimental results to your instance if not consistently maintained. A couple of big reasons include deliverability and spam complaints, but there are more. See the full list of potential risks below.

Email Deliverability

When speaking to email deliverability, we are assessing the likelihood your email will reach its intended inbox without bouncing or being marked as spam. Prospects who have not opened any emails for a period of time or perhaps have abandoned their mailbox will be sent to spam or bounce This directly impacts your organization’s deliverability.

Furthermore, in alignment with the Account Engagement permission-based marketing policy, emails that are below 90% deliverability may trigger the Account Engagement deliverability team to check with you on your account performance and potentially freeze it.

Diluted Marketing Metrics

By sending emails to inactive Prospects, you are potentially receiving inaccurate metrics on your email performance. If you include inactive Prospects among active Prospects in your campaigns, you are skewing your open, click-through, and conversion rates by bringing them down. This leads to inaccurate portrayal of your campaign’s success.

Paid Prospects

Did you know that you pay for your Prospects? Account Engagement is set up in a way that you pay for your Mailable Prospects. Keep in mind that an inactive Prospect is not necessarily and unmailable Prospect. You can have a multitude of inactive and disengaged Prospects sitting in your account that you are paying for. Cleaning them out allows for more room for highly engaged Prospects to filter in.

Spam Reports

When we reference spam, we are referring to sender reputation, specifically how healthy your IP address is seen by target inboxes. Email services such as Google or Outlook use algorithms to filter out emails as they come in. Senders who have received consistent positive engagements, such as opens and clicks, are accepted without issues. However, senders who have been marked by negative interactions, such as deletion without opens or marking as spam, are automatically filtered into the spam folder, impacting the health of your sending IP address. This ultimately could lead to your IP address being blacklisted.

How to Maintain a Healthy Database

Now that you are aware of the impact inactive Prospects can have on your organization, let’s review ways to manage a healthy Account Engagement database

To begin, this clean up process should be done quarterly or on a routine basis as you see fit. And as a friendly reminder, any Prospect you delete goes to the Recycle Bin and can be pulled out at any time.

Use Dynamic Lists

Build a series of Dynamic Lists using a specific set of criteria to collect Inactive Prospects and then mass delete them via a Table Action, sending them to the recycle bin. 

Such lists may include:

  • Prospect has been emailed at least 1x in the last 90 days AND Prospect time last activity days ago is greater than 90 days. Again, you can set how many days feels best for your organization. You can also build multiple Dynamic Lists based on a variety of time limits.
  • Prospect has been emailed at least 1x in the last 90 days AND Prospect time last activity days ago is greater than 90 days AND Prospect score is below 100. Same thing here, customize the numbers to fit what is best for your organization.

Remove Junk Data

Any test emails you’ve created or spam Prospects who have filled out Forms are also taking up prime real estate in your mailable database. We recommend cleaning out any junk data that is not actively used for testing purposes. 

Read this blog for a complete list of Dynamic List criteria.

Create a Re-engagement Program

After cleaning up your database you may still have Inactive Prospects that you believe are still marketable.

Now, it’s time to enter Engagement Studio. Build a re-engagement program that targets Inactive Prospects in an attempt to nurture them. Anyone who still does not engage by the end of the program, can also be removed from your database. SalesforceBen offers a “Sunset Program” for this exact situation.

Shift your focus to from inactive prospects to active ones

Remember, Prospect inactivity tells us a lot about someone’s interest level in your organization. By being aware of what characteristics represent an Inactive Prospect, being aware of how that can affect your database, and taking actions to clean it up, you will see continued growth.

Need help making hard decisions about inactive prospects? That’s what we’re here for. Reach out to the team at Sercante for help navigating your prospect cleanup and re-engagement efforts.

Original article: How Inactive Prospects in Account Engagement Impact Your Strategy

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post How Inactive Prospects in Account Engagement Impact Your Strategy appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-08-10T12:11:54+00:00August 10th, 2023|Categories: Data Management, Emails & Forms, Pardot, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

How to Copy Assets Between Account Engagement Business Units

It’s here! It’s finally here! It’s the Account Engagement Business Unit Bulk Asset Copy Flow.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (f.k.a. Pardot) Business Units have become my niche over the past few years. I love setting them up and standardizing them, but I don’t love copying over assets when configuring a new Business Unit(BU). 

With the Summer ‘23 release, we can now use Salesforce Flow to copy custom fields, engagement studio programs, files, custom redirects, and email templates between Account Engagement Business Units!

Access the Account Engagement Business Unit Bulk Asset Copy Flow

During the Summer ‘23 release, your org should have received a new flow called “Account Engagement Bulk Asset Copy Flow.” 

To find this Flow: 

  1. In Salesforce, navigate to Setup > Flow
  2. Select the Account Engagement Bulk Asset Copy Flow
  3. From the Flow Builder, select Run

Note: The documentation currently states that you have to add this flow to the Campaign page before you begin. However, I did not find any way to select this flow from the Lightning Page Flow Component, I could only run it in the Flow Builder.

Set up the Flow

The flow itself is pretty straightforward. It will walk you through selecting your assets and setting the new asset details.

  1. Select your Source and Destination Business Units, select Next
  1. Select the assets to copy, select Next

Note: Keep in mind, all assets selected here will be copied to the same Folder, will be assigned the same Campaign, and use the same tracker domain. You may want to run the Flow multiple times if your new assets need to have different settings. 

  1. Confirm the Assets, select Next
  2. Select your Folder, Campaign, and Tracker Domain for your new assets
  1. Select Copy Assets

Bulk Asset Copy Confirmation Screen

If your action was successful, you will see the list of assets created on the Confirmation screen.

You don’t get an error message if your action was unsuccessful, but your confirmation screen won’t have any/all assets listed.

Considerations for Using Business Unit the Bulk Asset Copy Flow

Since this is a brand new capability for Account Engagement, there are some details and settings that do not come over when copied. I thoroughly tested each asset type and below are the considerations that I found. 

Custom Fields

When you copy custom fields from one Business Unit to another, only the following information comes over

  • Field Name
  • Field API Name
  • Field Type

The field’s mapping to Salesforce, Salesforce sync behavior, predetermined values (for dropdowns, radio buttons, etc.), and optional settings will not be configured.

Email Templates

  • When copied, the email sender will be replaced by a General User with the email [email protected]. This applies even if you have a sender hierarchy specified using “Assigned User” and ‘Account Owner.”
  • Email Templates containing Dynamic Content will not copy over.  This is because dynamic content is unique to the Business Unit. Even if you have the same Dynamic Content in each Business Unit, they will have a different asset ID and merge tag. 
  • Watch for email template nuances between BUs. If you copy an email template from Business Unit A to Business Unit B, make changes to Business Unit A’s template, then copy the template from Business Unit A to Business Unit B again, the flow will not update the existing template in Business Unit B. Instead it will create a brand new email template with the updated changes. 

Files

During my testing, I was only able to get image files to copy over view the flow. I tested .pdf, .ics, and .css files with and without Completion actions and was unable to get anything but images to successfully copy. 

Engagement Studio Programs

  • When you copy an Engagement Studio Program (ESP) to a new Business Unit, only the ESP structure is copied. The Recipient List, Suppression lists, Send days/times, and “Allow prospects to enter more than once” settings do not come over and will need to be reconfigured in the new Business Unit.
  • The assets specified in a Trigger or Action node, such as email templates, landing pages, and forms, will need to be reselected in the new ESP. However, the number of wait days specified in the node will copy over. 
  • If an Action node looks at a Prospect field (i.e. Prospect default field “Job Title” is not blank) and that field is in both business units, then the node will be copied to the new ESP with the field and value/settings specified. If the field does not exist in both business units, then the Action node will still be in the ESP but the field and value/settings will need to be reconfigured. 

Custom Redirects

When a Custom Redirect is copied from one Business Unit to another, the redirect’s Completion Actions will not copy over, however, the Google Analytics Parameter values do.

Now it’s even easier to work with Account Engagement Business Units

This new Flow is a huge step toward making Business Units easier to set up and manage. My hope is that the capabilities of this Flow will continue to grow until we can make a near identical copy of an entire Business Unit. 

What other capabilities would you like to see in this Flow? Let us know in the comments!

Original article: How to Copy Assets Between Account Engagement Business Units

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post How to Copy Assets Between Account Engagement Business Units appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-07-12T12:09:50+00:00July 12th, 2023|Categories: Emails & Forms, Marketing Automations, Pardot, Pro Tips, Release Notes, revive|

The Simple Way to Create Multi-Language Account Engagement Forms

Handling multiple languages with Account Engagement (Pardot) forms has always been complex — especially when it comes to reporting. But there is a way to multi-language Account Engagement forms.

The traditional solution — one form per language — has its drawbacks. But it’s something that’s super important for companies that use Account Engagement on a global scale to do in a logical and user-friendly way. 

Today, we’ll explore a new, more efficient method that improves reporting and streamlines the translation process.

Challenges with traditional solutions for creating multi-language Account Engagement forms

There are a few ripple effects that we have to handle when we use multiple forms to realistically capture one set of data. 

First, we need a way of figuring out which form we want to display. Commonly this is done as a piece of dynamic content driven off a known Prospect field.

Next, we need to handle submissions for a single goal across multiple forms. The approach we take can vary depending on how complex our Automations and Reporting strategies are, and it all can add up.

A new solution for handling multiple languages

We can still work within the constraints of Account Engagement (Pardot) and leverage a common web development pattern of internationalization (or i18n for short). With the power of JavaScript, we can have one Account Engagement form and feel confident that our visitors will be able to have it in their language.

JavaScript and Handlebars.js

Before we dive into the actual code (honestly my favorite), it might be helpful to talk about what we are going to use.  We have a mix of a little bit of custom JavaScript with a common JavaScript library called HandlebarsJS, not to be confused with Account Engagement Handlebars Merge Language (HML).

The custom JavaScript takes the HTML that Account Engagement will render, look for the i18n placeholders and do a real-time replacement with the translations you have set up. This gives you full control over the wording and design in each language for every page.

Both HML and HandlebarsJS (by default) use double curly braces for wrapping placeholders. We’ve chosen to help differentiate between the two easily by specifying square brackets.  

Getting into the details

So as a super simple example, you can use the label [[i18n.firstname]] to have English, French, Spanish (or any other language you want) for the value {{Recipient.first_name}}.

Example of single Account Engagement form supporting 3 languages

Ok, let’s show what this can look like. Here we have a demo form that supports three languages.

Pre-work to do for your multi-language Account Engagement forms

If you’ve previously filled out the form, we will render the form in the language you specified. If you haven’t, we’ll try to use your browser’s language. Form error messages and thank you content are all translated.

Back in Account Engagement, there are a few things that need to be done.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Edit form fields – Each Form Field needs to be edited to use a label in the format [[i18n.TOKEN]] (where the TOKEN can be a field name or anything you like
  2. Edit dropdown field values – Each Dropdown field value needs to be edited to use a label in a similar format
  3. Ensure dropdown fields store language code – The Form should have a Language dropdown field that stores the language code. Language choice labels should use a label in a slightly different format. It should use [[lang.CODE]].
  4. Check submit button text – Submit button text should be edited to use a label in a similar format.
  5. Check thank you content – Thank you content should be edited to use labels in a similar format.

Add JavaScript to the form

Once you have all your labels set up, we need to actually add the JavaScript to the form.  There are a few ways you can do this and the approach will depend on just how reusable (and large) you want your JavaScript to be.

In our example, we’ve placed the JavaScript in the Layout Template, which provides a balance of re-usability (can be used by multiple forms) and maintenance (common, but not all translations for the entire site).

Ok, time for the code. I’ve split this JavaScript into three sections, but it can all be copy and pasted into a single <script> block in your Layout Template.

Define languages the form will support

First, we have a JavaScript object that defines the languages that we will be supporting, as well as the label of that language. Feel free to adjust this as necessary, just keep the structure intact.

// the supported languages by this script
const languages = {
  lang: {
    en: 'English',
    fr: 'Français',
    es: 'Español'
  }
}

Add the translations

Next we have all of the translations

// the translations for each language
const translations = {
  'en': {
    i18n: {
      firstname: "First Name",
      lastname: "Last Name",
      company: "Company",
      email: "Email",
      industry: "Industry",
      hospitality: "Hospitality",
      tech: "Tech",
      submit: "Save now",
      language: "Language",
      formErrors: "Please correct the errors below:",
      fieldError: "This field is required",
      thankyou: "Thanks for submitting!"
    }
  },
  'fr': {
    i18n: {
      firstname: "Prénom",
      lastname: "Nom de famille",
      company: "Société",
      email: "Email",
      industry: "Secteur d'activité",
      hospitality: "Hospitality",
      tech: "Technologie",
      submit: "Enregistrer",
      language: "Langue",
      formErrors: "Corrigez les erreurs ci-dessous:",
      fieldError: "Ce champ est obligatoire",
      thankyou: "Merci d'avoir soumis"
    }
  },
  'es': {
    i18n: {
      firstname: "Primer nombre",
      lastname: "Apellido",
      company: "Compañía",
      email: "Correo electrónico",
      industry: "Industria",
      hospitality: "Hospitalidad",
      tech: "Tecnología",
      submit: "Guardar ahora",
      language: "Idioma",
      formErrors: "Por favor corrija los siguientes errores:",
      fieldError: "Este campo es obligatorio",
      thankyou: "Gracias por enviar"
    }
  }
};

For each token you want to be translated, you will need to add a translation for each language. Like how languages are set up, you can make any adjustments/additions you want… just keep the structure intact.

Add the main functionality to apply translations you defined

Next, we have the main functionality. This handles the actual work of applying the translations we have defined already.

function i18nForm(prospectLang) {
  document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(event) {
    //used to convert into handlebars. Not entirely necessary if this JS is in Layout Template, but needed if JS is in Form
    const brO = '{', brC = '}';
    let formErrors = document.querySelector('#pardot-form p.errors');
    if (formErrors != null) {
      // look for error messages in the original HTML. Pardot won't let us translate that, so we will hack it a bit here
      document.querySelector('#pardot-form p.errors').innerHTML = `[[i18n.formErrors]]`;
      [...document.querySelectorAll('#pardot-form p.error.no-label')].forEach(node => { // loops through each field error
        node.innerHTML = `[[i18n.fieldError]]`;
      });
    }
    // stores the original HTML, or what was rendered from Pardot initially (with our placeholders)
    // also converts from using square braces (to make Pardot happy) to using Curly Braces (to make handlebarsjs happy)
    const originalHtml = document.querySelector('body').innerHTML
      .replace(/\[\[/g, `${brO+brO}`).replace(/\]\]/g, `${brC+brC}`);
    // creates the Template that Handlebars can use to generate processed (translated) HTML later on
    const processTemplate = Handlebars.compile(originalHtml);

    // get the language the Browser is using
    const browserLang = window.navigator.language.substr(0, 2);
    // console.log(`browserLang=${browserLang} and prospectLang=${prospectLang}`);
    // figure out which language we are going to go with
    let currentLangCode = prospectLang || browserLang;
    let currentLangVal = '';

    // retrieves the allowed languages, as Pardot doesn't actually use the language values we need to use, they change it to numbers (blegh)
    const pardotLanguages = new Array();
    const langNodes = document.querySelectorAll('.langChoice select option');
    [...langNodes].forEach(option => { // loops through the values in the Language Dropdown, storing lang code and numeric value for use
      let lang = option.text.replace(/\[|\]|lang./g, '');
      //console.log(`lang=${lang} and option value=${option.value}`);
      pardotLanguages[option.value] = lang;
    });
    [...langNodes].forEach(option => { // loops through the values in the Language Dropdown, checking to see if one was selected
      let lang = option.text.replace(/\[|\]|lang./g, '');
      if(option.selected) {
        currentLangVal = option.value;
        currentLangCode = lang;
      }
    });
    console.log(`initially translating form to ${currentLangCode}`);

    function applyTranslations() {
      let translatedHtml = processTemplate({
        ...translations[currentLangCode],
        ...languages
      });
      //replaces the visible HTML with the translations in place
      document.querySelector("#pardot-form").innerHTML = translatedHtml;
      document.querySelector('.langChoice select').value = currentLangVal;

      //handle when the language dropdown value is changed, translating on the fly
      document.querySelector('.langChoice select').onchange = function() { // we only want to translate to a valid language
        let selectedLang = pardotLanguages[this.value];
        if (selectedLang in languages.lang) {
          currentLangCode = selectedLang;
          currentLangVal = this.value;
          // console.log(`new language is ${currentLangVal} which is ${currentLangCode}`);
        }
        applyTranslations(); // re-apply the translations when the value in this dropdown changes
      };
    }
    applyTranslations(); // apply the translations for the first time
  });
}

Enable the form to detect language for known prospects

The last thing we need to do is tie this all together. Because we want to try to leverage the Prospect Language (if a known Prospect and we have a value in their Language Custom Field), we need to add just a little bit of JavaScript to each Form, in the Form’s Look & Feel as well as the Thank You content.

<script>
  // get the language the Prospect has saved
  const prospectLang = "{{{Recipient.Language}}}"; //Pardot HML  
  // kick off translations
  i18nForm(prospectLang);
</script>

Test and revise

All that’s left to do is test it out, and then mold this example into what you need.

Considerations

Like any JavaScript examples you might find online, they are opinionated in approach. Making minor changes can sometimes break the code due to assumptions that might not be well documented/understood. I’ve left a bunch of console.log statements commented throughout the code to hopefully help you troubleshoot when things go wrong.

One of those opinions is using the “i18n” and “lang” prefixes. We think this makes the placeholders easier to read, even if it slightly complicates the JavaScript object itself. Feel free to remove this if you want, just know to make the various adjustments.

One Account Engagement form can handle all the languages you need

If your company works with audiences who speak a variety of languages, then this is the perfect solution for you to simplify the way you build forms in Account Engagement. Our new approach simplifies translating Pardot Forms, improves reporting, and offers a better user experience for a multilingual audience.

Still not sure how to approach your global marketing strategy? Then reach out to the team at Sercante for guidance along the way.

Original article: The Simple Way to Create Multi-Language Account Engagement Forms

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post The Simple Way to Create Multi-Language Account Engagement Forms appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-07-08T16:40:38+00:00July 8th, 2023|Categories: Emails & Forms, Pardot, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

Salesforce Announces Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT

Salesforce is upping their game in the race to incorporate the latest generative AI tools into their products. Announced during Salesforce Connections on June 7, Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT are coming to Salesforce customers using Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud. 

The features are gonna make it easier for marketers to reach the right audiences and generate emails, and commerce teams will create better shopping experiences and customer journeys. But, the best part is that both Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT can be connected to Data Cloud — meaning the tools can do their thing using data from any source.

History of Salesforce in the GPT game

Both Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT are dependent on Einstein GPT, which is the generative AI version of Einstein. 

For a little back story, Salesforce Einstein is the machine learning model the company rolled out in 2016 to analyze large sets of CRM data. So, Salesforce has been on the AI train for a while already. 

Einstein can do things like predict which customers or sales leads are likely to buy by looking at data from a bunch of sources. Or it can analyze data to determine the best time to send emails to your lists.

You can get it in Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement, Sales Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Service Cloud, along with other platform tools.

In March 2023, Salesforce released Einstein GPT, which combines the machine learning model Salesforce developed with the chatbot from generative AI company OpenAI. (On a side note, Salesforce is going heavy on the AI devotion and has already invested $250 million into other AI technology companies.)

So, how are Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT related to Einstein GPT?

Both Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT are powered by Einstein GPT — the AI-powered set of solutions that marries Salesforce AI with OpenAI’s technology. They are both iterations of Einstein GPT that are tailored for the respective clouds. Stay tuned because we’re seeing GPT features getting infused across all Salesforce clouds in addition to these two.

What capabilities do Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT have?

Both of the sets of features combine generative AI capabilities, which use data from OpenAI, with Salesforce Data Cloud. That means you can use customer profiles in Data Cloud that include data from any source in real time. And while you don’t have to use Data Cloud to take advantage of the Salesforce GPT features, you’ll definitely be able to do more if you have it.

So, what exactly can you do with Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT?

Marketing GPT Capabilities

We’re really gonna be cooking now by giving the people super valuable experiences through email and content marketing. We already have Einstein features in our marketing back pocket, but now we’re throwing GPT into the overall mix. That means we can use conversational language prompts to get Marketing Cloud to do things for us. 

I mean, it’s not going to organize all those random newsletter graphics you’ve been uploading to Account Engagement without using a naming convention (yet???). But it will do things like analyze the data you have and use that information to predict the best ways to improve your emails. 

Source: Salesforce

Here’s what Marketing GPT can do (so far):

  • Segment Creation | generally available Oct. 2023
    This is a whole new fancy way to build your audience segmentation strategy. You can tell Marketing Cloud to create audience segments for you using natural language prompts, and it will help you to improve your targeting using AI recommendations and audience data that’s in Data Cloud.
  • Email Content Creation | generally available Feb. 2024
    Ok, so I’m gonna have to see this one in action, but Salesforce said this feature can “reduce writing workload” by creating auto-generated emails. It can potentially be a big one for marketing teams that have the content but stumble with their email marketing.
  • Segment Intelligence for Data Cloud | generally available Oct. 2023
    This adds a fancier twist for tracking ROI. Segment intelligence combines first-party audience data, revenue data, and paid media data to show you exactly how your campaigns are doing in relation to your audience segments. 
  • Rapid Identity Resolution, Segmentation, and Engagement | generally available Aug. – Oct. 2023
    Salesforce is going heavy on the ‘transform at the speed of your customer’ theme. The mouthful that is this feature basically keeps Data Cloud segments updated in real time so messaging is always relevant and timely.
  • Typeface content platform | GA date not given yet
    Using a third-party content generator called Typeface, marketers can create branded visual assets (like email graphics or social cards) inside Salesforce. Stay tuned for this one cuz it could be huge.

These are the features that Salesforce outlined during the announcement, but we’re sure the list will grow with each Salesforce release.

Commerce GPT Capabilities

We’re also getting a bunch of generative AI features for B2C companies that use Salesforce tools for commerce. These are especially cool because ecommerce customers can be a fickle bunch. Getting them exactly what they want when they want it makes all the difference.


Source: Salesforce

Here’s what Commerce GPT can do (so far):

  • Goals-Based Commerce | generally available Feb. 2024
    This is one of those a-ha tools for businesses with big growth goals. It unites Data Cloud, Einstein, and Flow to lay out everything commerce companies need to do to reach their goals. Users give it a goal, like increase average order value (AOV) by XX%, and it gives recommendations on how to get there.
  • Dynamic Product Descriptions | generally available July 2023
    Okay, so we’ve seen how serving up product recommendations based on customer preferences has shaken things up for commerce companies. But now we’re gonna be taking it even further by introducing dynamic copy capabilities for product descriptions. It could be a serious game changer.
  • Commerce Concierge | generally available Feb. 2024
    Not all of the Commerce GPT features are specifically for Salesforce users. Online shoppers can use Commerce Concierge to find what they need using language prompts across channels from online stores to SMS messaging.

Comments on generative AI + Salesforce from the peanut gallery

My two cents: My mind immediately goes to the content creation features of Marketing GPT. There is SO MUCH copywriting that goes into marketing. And we’ve seen a whole bunch of copywriting GPT tools pop up in the last year, like the free Stensul email toolkit or paid ones like GrammarlyGo. Some people are naysaying the tools in fear that they will replace copywriting jobs, but I don’t think that’s the case at all.

In my experience, leaner marketing teams rarely have dedicated copywriters. Those responsibilities are usually lumped into other marcom roles. I see the tools giving marketers the ability to edit copy instead of writing from scratch. Then, they can have bandwidth to dig deeper with their messaging and present higher quality work that hits their audience in the feels. And being able to do that inside Salesforce just sweetens the whole deal.

I opened the floor to my teammates about what they think about Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT, and here’s what they had to say.

Cate Godley

“I’m excited to see how Marketing GPT can help marketers to craft better subject lines and calls to action to increase engagement with content. There are so many ways to use generative AI to inspire creativity in our marketing efforts, and I can’t wait to see how people are using these tools in new and exciting ways.”

Courtney Cerniglia

“As marketers, we’re constantly asked what content is resonating most with customers, what action will increase likelihood to purchase, and how we identify our highest value leads. Marketing GPT is going to help prove our assumptions and give us the data in real-time, across platforms, so we can quickly pivot and personalize experiences for customers.”

Mike Creuzer

“There have been a few inflection points where human knowledge growth hockey sticked. Gutenberg press took centuries, computers took decades, the internet took years, and this generative AI appears to be taking… months?

According to the 2023 Connections Keynote, there were 1 million users in two months for ChatGPT (if I remember correctly).

We are at the start of the next great change in pace of human knowledge and communication.

2023 is the year where AI is no longer hidden away behind RFID badged doors and is widely available to EVERYBODY in a usable, general way.

In business, AI has been baked into the tools that we use for many years now. But it’s been a one trick pony. It’s now anything WE want it to be, not just what our vendors built.”

Continue the conversation 

What are your thoughts on Salesforce and generative AI? Any hot takes? Tell us about it in the comments, or reach out to team Sercante to see how the tools fit into your overall marketing and operations strategy.

Original article: Salesforce Announces Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Announces Marketing GPT and Commerce GPT appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-06-08T19:17:37+00:00June 8th, 2023|Categories: Automations, Data Management, Emails & Forms, New Features, revive|

Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers

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

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

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

Audience Segmentation Strategies for Marketers Who Use Salesforce

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

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

Who is actively engaging with your brand?

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

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

What preferences do your customers share?

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

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

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

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

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

Which individuals have expressly subscribed to what topics?

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

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

Suppress individuals based on a subset of criteria

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

Account Engagement (Pardot) Audience Segmentation Best Practices

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

Static Prospect Lists

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

Imports

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

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

Table Actions

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

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

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

Public Lists

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

Completion Actions

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

Automation Rules

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

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

Dynamic Prospect Lists

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

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

Campaign Membership

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

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

Marketing Cloud Engagement Segmentation Best Practices

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

  1. Lists
  2. Data Extensions

Lists

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

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

Creating a List

To create a List:

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

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

Groups

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

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

Creating a Group

To create a Group:

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

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

Data Extensions

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

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

Creating a Data Extension

Follow these steps to create a data extension:

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

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

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

Go forth and segment your audience like a Salesforce marketing pro

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

Thank you to Zachary Norman for contributing to this post!

Original article: Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

Email Metrics to Track Beyond Simple Opens and Unsubscribes

Email marketers swim in constant data. While analytics often inform decision making, the flip side of that coin means your competitors also use data to do the same. To truly ensure campaigns remain fully optimized for engagement, conversions, and ROI, you need to look beyond the simple email metrics everyone tracks.

Simple statistics such as open and unsubscribe rates definitely have their place, but a deeper dive into what’s impactful and what needs improvement gives you and your teams the understanding necessary to drive effective marketing campaigns.

In this post, we look at two other advanced analytics you can use to further refine content. Then, we’ll dive into two ultra-advanced analytics that may be harder to source but offer practical, personalized insights on an individual subscriber level.

Email Metric 1: Complaint Rate

Unsubscribes tend to indicate when recipients find messages irrelevant, but when contacts mark content as spam it indicates major antagonism against your content. Measuring the complaint rate, or the percentage of times recipients mark your outbound emails as spam, ensures your team has a grasp on when content has become dangerously misaligned from consumer expectations.

Nearly half of all emails sent get classified as spam, so to hit the inbox marketers need to know how to differentiate between content subscribers will find valuable or irrelevant.

What Makes Spam Indications Unique?

Spam designations happen for many reasons, but some of the most common stem from a disconnect between the marketer and contact.

  • The recipient cannot easily find a way to unsubscribe (e.g., the link is in small font or a similar color to the background)
  • There is no option to unsubscribe (e.g., emails from sales reps marked as spam will affect the entire company domain)
  • Marketers do not respect unsubscribe requests and continue to send unwanted communications
  • Oversaturated contacts opt to skip an unsubscribe attempt and directly mark a message as spam

While some of these may not necessarily result from marketing decisions, the unique danger of spam designations rather than regular unsubscribes affect every team’s future campaigns. High spam rates discredit a brand and more importantly cause future emails to go straight to spam folders.

Overcoming Poor Email Deliverability

Marketers must keep the complaint rate low to maintain a good sender reputation and to avoid email providers marking content as spam. Email marketers generally accept a complaint rate of less than 0.1 percent, while a rate above 0.5 percent often indicates issues with email content or list quality.

To avoid this, marketers can take several steps to reduce complaint rates and boost deliverability. Here are some best practices to consider.

  • Permission-based email lists: Only source subscribers who have given explicit permission to receive emails through a confirmed opt-in process. Avoid buying email lists, as these often contain contacts who haven’t opted in to receive emails from your organization.
  • Segmented email lists: Personalizing email lists based on subscriber behavior, demographics, or interests provides recipients with relevant content they are more likely to engage with, reducing the likelihood of spam designations while boosting conversion rates.
  • Engaging subject lines and content: A/B test and experiment with email subject lines that accurately describe the content of the email while ensuring the content doesn’t mislead or come off as overly promotional. Engaging content typically includes useful tips, exclusive discounts/promotions, or relevant industry insights.
  • Professional designs and mobile-optimized emails: Seeing as how the majority of emails are now opened on mobile devices and younger consumers prefer mobile shopping and user experiences, brands need to give the right first impression with clean-looking emails optimized for mobile as well as desktop engagements.
  • Include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link: Sometimes it’s better to cut your losses rather than risk long-term damage. Make it easy for contacts to opt out with a noticeable unsubscribe link in the footer of emails, otherwise you incentivize spam designations. The good news – if you follow the above steps, the risk of unsubscribes is low.

Be sure to consistently monitor campaigns after the fact for further insights. When you do encounter feedback such as spam complaints, unsubscribes, and email replies, respond in a timely and professional manner to not only build trust with subscribers but also spot any developing issues.

Email Metric 2: Event Lag

In a utopia, subscribers receive communications and immediately convert. Unfortunately, that rarely does happen, so marketers need to investigate whenever a delay between send time, open, and click happens. Event lag, which measures the time between these milestones, provides marketers with insights into content effectiveness.

You can easily measure event lag: just subtract the time at which a contact took the desired action (e.g., link click, website purchase) from when the email was sent. For campaigns across time zones, adjust expectations to account for the difference. You can also swap conversion time for open time(s). With this data, you can understand whether content prompts immediate action or leaves an email wasting away in subscriber inboxes.

According to a Campaign Monitor study, the median click-to-open rate, which tracks how many subscribers who opened an email went on to click a link, across all industries clocks in at around 10.5 percent. Campaigns that perform below this benchmark should make good candidates for further speculation into event lag and supplemental analysis.

Creating More Actionable Emails

Improving subscriber response times is crucial to optimal engagement, conversions, and customer satisfaction. Here are some tips to improve response times in your marketing emails.

  • Scrutinize your offers: Event lag times vary depending on the type of desired action. For example, consumers often take longer purchasing high-ticket products compared to low-cost items or requests. Therefore, if lengthy event lag times hold back your campaigns, switch up your calls-to-action to encourage easier conversions. For example, a B2B SaaS company can lower the stakes of their email CTA by switching from a demo request to a product page that lets recipients make decisions at their own pace.
  • Adjust timing: Sometimes event lag stems from an easily determined source — timing. If you find most emails to certain geographies have extended lag times, then since the content clearly gets clicks, adjusting to more palatable local send times could be the necessary fix.
  • Automated emails: Implementing automated follow-up email campaigns to welcome new subscribers, encourage action on abandoned carts, or send personalized behavior-based recommendations take advantage of recent positive engagements to foster immediate action.
  • Segmented email lists and content: Again, sending personalized emails based on subscriber behavior (for example, see above) or preferences creates more relevant experiences, improving response time.

Ultimately, the most important factor is to track and analyze your event lag data regularly, using that information to optimize your email campaigns over time to improve engagement and conversions.

Now that we’ve established advanced metrics to determine who is most/least engaged, let’s take a look at how to apply insights to your most radical subscribers.

Email Metric 3: Most-Engaged Subscribers

Every brand loves their MVPs, but are you doing enough to truly maximize the value they bring to your organization?

The Pareto Principle notes roughly 80 percent of sales come from just 20 percent of customers. Knowing this, maximizing loyalty and upsell opportunities among your most-engaged subscribers becomes crucial for marketers.

How to Recognize

To determine which subscribers have the highest brand loyalty, aggregate the following metrics.

  • Open Rates: The subscribers who consistently open your emails clearly find value in the content you send. Look at how often contacts open emails (and when they don’t) at an individual level to gain future segmentation insights.
  • Click-Through Rates: Use a similar approach for click-through statistics. Subscribers who consistently follow calls-to-action trust your brand.
  • Conversion Rates: Identify the subscribers who consistently take the desired actions of your emails. You can further segment contacts based on what actions they take post-click (e.g., those who purchase a certain product).

Create a scoring system out of these metrics that ranks subscribers based on their level of engagement. To do so, assign a score to each metric, add up the scores for each subscriber, then rank subscribers based on their total score. Going forward, target the most-engaged subscribers with personalized content or special offers to encourage continued engagement.

Priming for Further Action

Once you’ve determined your most-engaged subscribers, foster further conversions and long-term brand loyalty with the following strategies.

  • Personalized content: Segment your most engaged subscribers and personalize your content to cater to their specific desires. Effective segmentations pull data from past purchase history, browsing behavior, and engagement to create more relevant content that drives repeat conversions.
  • Exclusive offers and promotions: Reward your most-engaged subscribers with exclusive offers and promotions, including early access to sales, discounts, or freebies. These can even become personalized, such as promos for birthdays or anniversaries.
  • Ask for feedback: Use your most-engaged subscribers as a focus group to gather feedback on new products or services, website updates, or other business initiatives. This feedback from your best revenue stream identifies pain points and areas to improve, and fixing these shortcomings minimize the risk of churning your other subscribers.
  • Encourage social sharing: Take advantage of strong brand loyalty to encourage word-of-mouth sharing through social media or conversations with friends and family. These campaigns expand your reach and help attract new subscribers who are likely to engage in a similar manner.

Engagement is a two-way street, so ensure you continue to engage your brand’s most loyal followers with creative and personalized communications. In the long run, these customers become your organization’s foundation.

Email Metric 4: Least-Engaged Subscribers

Finding ways to elicit just an open from your least-engaged subscribers, on the other hand, fills marketers with migraines. These contacts have high event lag (or no engagement at all) and are at high risk to increase your complaint rate.

Knowing this, marketers must discern when to retarget low-engaged subscribers and when to remove them from lists altogether. With email deliverability and brand reputation at stake, list quality trumps quantity.

Improving relationships with your least engaged subscribers is a tall task, but several strategies can reset the relationship.

  • Segmented email lists: Notice a theme? Build audience segmentations based on engagement levels, and use this info to create campaigns that target your least-engaged subscribers. Use data such as their past purchase history or browsing behavior to create personalized messages tailored to these groups’ interests that resonate and drive conversions.
  • Re-opt-in campaigns: A re-opt-in campaign involves sending an email asking if identified subscribers still want to receive your emails and allowing them to confirm their subscription. This measure helps clean up email database and ensures you only target subscribers interested in hearing from you.
  • Evaluate email frequency: If you’re sending too many emails to your least engaged subscribers, they may tune out or unsubscribe. If you see high unsubscribe or complaint rates, evaluate how to reduce email frequency, reprioritize campaigns, or change the timing of email sends to see if engagement levels improve.
  • Prioritize: Multiple teams sending multiple email campaigns to the same contacts in theory increase the likelihood of conversion, but in practice it leads to marketing fatigue and high unsubscribe rates. Develop a system for campaign prioritization to ensure subscribers do not disengage due to an overwhelming amount of messages.
  • Incentives and promos: For true holdouts, consider offering incentives such as personalized discounts or freebies to rekindle interest in your brand and increase the chances of future engagement.
  • Different types of content: Try experimenting with different types of content, such as videos, interactive quizzes, or infographics, to see what resonates with your least-engaged subscribers. This keeps your content fresh and encourages continual engagement.

Overall, re-engaging with your least engaged subscribers in email marketing can take time and effort, but by focusing on personalized content, segmentation, and incentives, you can increase the chances of them engaging more with your brand over time.

Final Thoughts

As with all things email marketing, knowing how each subscriber interacts with your messages informs how to best continue each relationship. To really understand who is at risk for dis-engagement, monitor in-depth trends like complaint rate and event lag, so you have an accurate and fresh view of which campaigns resonate and which ones alienate.

It all starts with audience segmentation. If you feel your emails lack the personalization that drives action and conversions, learn how DESelect Segment empowers marketers of all technical abilities to create complex, personalized audiences in half the time.

Original article: Email Metrics to Track Beyond Simple Opens and Unsubscribes

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Email Metrics to Track Beyond Simple Opens and Unsubscribes appeared first on The Spot.

By |2023-03-30T18:49:02+00:00March 30th, 2023|Categories: Analytics & Reporting, Emails & Forms, Pro Tips, revive, Strategy|

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

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

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

Field Types and Compatibility

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

Account Engagement

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

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

Salesforce

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

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

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

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

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

Salesforce and Account Engagement Field Compatibility 

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

Account Engagement Custom Fields

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

Option #1 – Checkbox

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

Example Form with Checkbox Field Type 

Example Form with Checkbox Field Type

Option #2 – Multi-Select

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

Example Form with Multi-Select Field Type

Example Form with Multi-Select Field Type

Additional Field Options & Considerations

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

Options that Should Always be Selected 

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

Record and Display Multiple Responses 

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

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

Account Engagement Forms

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

Forms with Checkboxes

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

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

multi-select picklist info

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

form fields preview multi-select picklist

Form with Multi-Select Picklists

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

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

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

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

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

Form fields preview

Importing Multi-Select Picklist Values 

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

Import – Record and Display Multiple Responses NOT Selected

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

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

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

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

Import – Record and Display Multiple Responses Selected

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

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

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

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

salesforce mascots - multi-select picklist values

Updating Multi-Select Picklist Values 

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

Automation Rule – Record and Display Multiple Responses NOT Selected

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

Salesforce mascots multi-select picklist

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

Multi-Select Picklists

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

Form with Multi-Select Picklists 3

Automation Rule – Record and Display Multiple Responses Selected

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

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

Form with Multi-Select Picklists 2

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

Form with Multi-Select Picklists

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

Parting Words 

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

Further Reading

Questions?

Contact the Sercante team for help.

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

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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

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