6 Quick Tips from Pardot Geniuses

It’s no surprise that marketing automation is one of my favorite topics to talk and write about. And with the abundance of tools, strategies, and approaches for B2B marketers, marketing has become even more interesting.

Here at Salesforce, we know quite a few Pardot Geniuses that have years of marketing automation experience and love to share the secret sauce behind their marketing magic.

Check out these tips and tricks from Pardot Geniuses that can help any marketing automation user — novice or veteran — see rapid returns on their efforts.

Bailey Wilson, nCino

Genius Tip: Automation Rules and Completion Actions

Repeat automation rules and form field-based completion actions are great for routing form submissions based on specific values. There are times when you may want to use one form and have a different set of actions based on the selections on the form.

Repeat automation rules allows for prospects to match a rule more than once and can be used for a wide range of things. One of my favorite use cases is routing form submissions based on values. This way, you can use one form to meet all of your needs.

Form field-based completion actions are also great, as you don’t have to use up your automation rules for routing or notifications. Instead, all you need are a few form handlers for your different options and your form.

A “Contact Us” form is one example of where someone could use form field-based completion actions. If you included a drop down field for people to select why they’re reaching out, you could use a form handler for each reason to route submissions to the appropriate team.

Kelli Meador, Pardot Consultant

Genius Tip: Page Actions

For some of us in B2B organizations, we find ourselves in certain situations that require us to create lengthy forms. As much as I love progressive profiling, my team encountered a situation where we needed one specific time-stamped form to collect the most recent information from our prospects. This form had about 30 fields and was broken into three steps across three pages.

After launching the form, we noticed a bit of a drop off after step two and needed a solution to follow up with those prospects.

Thankfully, getting creative with our Pardot strategy happens to be my superpower! Using Pardot page actions, we solved the form abandonment issue by creating a follow-up email to those who dropped off on step two.

The first step for us was to create page actions for each page, or “step,” of the form:

• Form Step 1
  • Page action = Apply tags: form name step 1
• Form Step 2
  • Page action = Apply tags: form name step 2
• Form Step 3
  • Page action = Apply tags: form name step 3

The next step was to create a dynamic list with targeting criteria of: “Has tag ‘step 1’ and doesn’t contain tag ‘step 3′”

The last step was to use the dynamic list to feed our Engagement Studio program that started with a wait step of one day before sending out the abandoned form follow-up email.

And that was it! We could now follow up on form abandonment with a fully automated program!

Pro-tip: You can use this same strategy for prospects already in your system who may have looked at one of your landing pages but didn’t fill out the associated form!

Eric Boller, Nextiva

Genius Tip: Development Environments

Many times, seemingly small changes in your marketing automation platform can have profound implications. Diligently plan the changes you’d like to make and think through any ramifications before making the change. Marketing automation and CRM platforms are complex environments. While the change you want to make may seem simple, it very well could have an unintended effect.

Luckily, Salesforce and Pardot provide tools to make this process much less risky. One of these tools is a development environment. If you don’t already have one, contact Pardot Support to get one created. You should test most of changes in your development environment before going live in production. This, along with other standard development processes, will help avoid issues.

Emilio Reyes LeBlanc, Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising

Genius Tip: Reporting on the Pardot Last Activity Field

Sales reps can struggle to find value in cold leads. Who can blame them? Unless they can identify which ones are more interested than others, proactive outreach would seem to be little more than a call center exercise.

Pardot to the rescue!

Marketers can empower their colleagues by sharing information on contacts that have been engaging with marketing assets by building reports in Sales Cloud that leverage the Pardot last activity field. This identifies – among other things – when someone most recently clicked a marketing link, visited the company web site, or downloaded a file hosted in Pardot.

Because a lead engaging with marketing is more likely to be responsive to a sales call that one who hasn’t, these reports can provide sales reps with a strategic pivot by which they can structure their cold lead outreach strategy.

Valerie Tarangelo, Publicis. Sapient

Genius Tip: 1:1 Pardot Emails for Sales

A 1:1 Pardot email is a GREAT way for marketing teams to enable sales users to send personalized emails to their contacts that are on brand and trackable. Plus, they reduce the effort required by a sales rep to stay in touch with their clients and prospects while offering greater personalization than a list email.

While standard list emails provide some personalization based on data, we often find that a salesperson has something very specific they want to say. The 1:1 email feature allows sales team to send prospects a professionally designed and written email that allows them to include personal information—such as “Hi Joe, based on our conversation last week at lunch, I thought you’d like to come to this event we’re hosting next month.”

The benefits of 1:1 emails are: less salesperson time and effort to stay connected to their contacts, increased personalized conversations, consistent brand design and tone, the ability to track the effectiveness of the conversation, and helps build the alignment between marketing and sales groups.

Jason Schleweis, TriZetto Provider Solutions

Genius Tip: Completion Actions to track Marketing ROI

Use completion actions to track marketing ROI! The next time you send an email, build an Engagement Studio program, or create a web form, use supplemental automation to “Add to Salesforce Campaign.”

Now, when opportunities are created in Salesforce by your sales team, it automatically tracks the primary campaign source by pulling in the most recent marketing campaign that the prospect engaged with. Each won opportunity becomes money in the bank for Marketing! With the right metrics, you can even “pay” for new Pardot features by demonstrating to your organization how much additional revenue your marketing efforts have generated.

Headed to Dreamforce? Hear more tips and tricks from Pardot Geniuses by attending our Pardot Trailblazer Spotlight and Happy Hour event.

Pardot Trailblazer Spotlight: Top Insights from B2B Marketing Experts

When: Wednesday, September 26, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Where: The Pardot B2B Marketing Station in the Pied Piper, Palace Hotel

Join us for this pre-Dreamfest happy hour event as we bring together a powerhouse of Trailblazers in B2B Marketing to share best practices, tips and tricks, and their stories of leveraging Pardot for amazing results. Space is limited to the first 75 attendees, arrive early to secure your seat.