According to a B2B Marketing research study, less than 50% of marketers are optimizing all of the benefits of their marketing automation platform.
Pardot’s Client Services team is dedicated to ensuring our customers are not only fully utilizing their instance, but also achieving their own marketing goals with Pardot and Salesforce.
Throughout the year, we’ve been posting Pardot Pro Tips on our Online Success Community. (Quick plug, if you’re a Pardot customer and NOT a member, I highly encourage you to join!)
I’ve consolidate a few of my favorite #PardotProTips below, and will be revealing some additional tips in part two of this series. Not a Pardot user? Scan the list for ideas!
Pro Tip #1: Automation Rules
If you’re looking for a new creative way to use automation rules, consider creating rules to take action on prospects who have performed a specific combination of activities.
For example:
If you want to send an email whenever someone views a specific landing page but does not convert (this can be great for form abandonment on high-value or bottom-of-funnel content), you can use a completion action on the form to apply a certain tag, then use an automation rule that says when the landing page is viewed AND the tag ISN’T that specific tag, send the email.
Kylie Nickles | Sr. Client Advocate
Pro Tip #2: Naming Conventions
Adopting a naming convention for your marketing automation system will save you time, keep you organized, and give you the insightful reporting you’re looking for. Whether you’re brand new to Pardot or have been using it for years, with the new year upon us, now is a great time to clean up your account and embrace naming conventions! Here are some examples of naming conventions that we recommend to our clients:
Email Templates
Format: Topic/Offering_Audience_Date
Example: XYZ Webinar Invite_ XYZ Contacts_Mar2015
Example: Monthly Newsletter_All Prospects_Jan2015
Lists
Format: Type of Prospects_Purpose/Use_Date
Example: Telecom Contacts_Drip Program_FY15Q1
Example: All Contacts_List Email_FY15Q2
Landing Pages
Format: Topic/Offering_Date
Example: X Product Promo_FY15Q4
Example: Training Resources_FY15Q1
Please see our full article on setting up naming conventions — complete with a helpful worksheet — here.
Katie Collier | Implementation Specialist
Pro Tip #3: Keep Your Inbox Clean
There’s a neat trick with Gmail specifically that will ignore everything after a + sign in your email address, but will still send the email to you. Meaning, I can sign up for a form with skyler.fake+spam@gmail.com, set up a filter in my gmail to look for +spam, and any time anyone sends to that address it’ll go straight to the trash. The benefit of having your prospects do this is that it’s crystal clear they’re just not interested in receiving your email. It’s also super easy to look out for in Pardot — you’d just need to set up an automation rule that checks to see if an email address contains +spam, then set them to be marked as Do Not Email. That way, you don’t have to waste time, energy, and database space with someone who has clearly told you they’re just not interested in what you’re sending them.
Skyler Holobach | Email Compliance Manager
Pro Tip #4: Recency and Frequency
Email fatigue occurs when buyers get tired of email. They start to ignore messages, then delete, unsubscribe, or send to spam.
Pardot’s Recency and Frequency rule type allows you to quickly query your prospect database to generate a list of prospects who have been contacted by you recently.
Create a dynamic list, using the rule: ‘Prospect has been emailed’ at least :: X :: times in the last :: X :: days/weeks.
This functionality creates a suppression list of people who have been emailed a certain amount of times in a certain time period (days and weeks).
Richard Lewis | Sr. Client Advocate
Pro Tip #5: Clean-up Your Data
Sometimes leads will get entered into your system with improper capitalization of the first name or last name field. For example, “Adam Waid” gets imported as “ADAM waid.” Leaving these records improperly formatted can make you look unprofessional in your email marketing if you use personalization tokens with your emails. There’s a quick and easy fix: export your data to an Excel sheet, and then use the “PROPER” function to correct everything. You can fix your entire database in under 10 minutes. Then, upload your spreadsheet and append your lead records. Instructions are here.
Pro Tip #6: Audit Your Drip Campaigns
There are a lot of different types of drip campaigns that you can use. Regularly auditing your drip campaigns can yield a huge ROI. Here are a few sample questions to consider when going through your drips:
- Are your drip campaign goals measurable? i.e. What is a latent lead? How much are you looking to increase CTRs? How can you measure reengagement?
- Are the names for your drips scalable and easy to remember?
- Review the tone, style, and wording of actual drip emails.
- Are there too many emails sending to a single prospect?
- Are you tagging recipients who pass certain stages so you can identify what kind of content they engaged with?
Finally, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with everything could be doing with marketing automation, my advice is to start small. Don’t spend hours locked in a boardroom trying to come up with a comprehensive strategy. Make minor adjustments to your campaigns now and start testing what’s working. Try implementing a few of the Pro Tips above. Also, if you have other Pardot Tips you’re willing to share, post them on our Success Community.