Before we dig into the meat of this post and some cool ways you can personalize your marketing efforts with Pardot Advanced Dynamic Content, let’s take a step back and start with…
“What is Advanced Dynamic Content?”
Advanced Dynamic Content displays custom HTML based on the Prospect’s criteria and allows you to customize messaging to the prospect.
For example, if am trying to sell Pardot to a Sales executive, I might use the subject line, “Increase your close rate with Marketing Automation”, but if I am trying to sell Pardot to a Marketing Automation Manager, I might use, “Automate and personalize your Prospect journey with Pardot”.
Where to use Pardot Advanced Dynamic Content
Advanced Dynamic Content can be used on Pardot Forms, Landing Pages, and emails and is available for Plus and Advanced editions.
But wait, why should I worry about personalization in the first place?
Prospects are increasingly expecting a personalized experience and personalization has consistently been shown to increase sales and engagement. Personalization can increase sales by 19%, email opens by 29%, and email clicks by a whopping 41%! (Source: https://www.pardot.com/blog/5-incredible-examples-personalized-marketing/)
Customers are also more likely to switch brands if their experience is not customized. (Source: Salesforce State of Marketing Report: https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/assets/pdf/datasheets/salesforce-research-fourth-annual-state-of-marketing.pdf)
Isn’t Handlebars Merge Language replacing Advanced Dynamic Content?
Nope! HML adds a new tool to your arsenal for delivering tailored content to your prospects, but there are use cases for both Dynamic Content and HML. With HML you can write if statements right in your emails, while Advanced Dynamic Content provides you more of a library of prewritten content to use based on the Prospect’s data. Learn more about HML in our blog here. And if you really want to get tricky, learn how you can use HML and scoring categories to fuel dynamic content in our blog post here.
Ok, back to the topic at hand. What are some fancy ways you can use Advanced Dynamic Content?
Use dynamic content on standard areas of your email templates
If you have standard language on every single one of your email templates (such as Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policies, legal mumbo-jumbo, etc.) and this language ever changes, you will have to edit every single one of your email templates. To avoid this pain, make this standard language dynamic content. That way, if it ever changes, you only have to update it in one place!
For example, if your standard footer language looks something like this:
Set up your Dynamic Content with a variation that will match all prospects and enter your standard footer content into each variation.
Finally, replace your standard footer content with your Dynamic Content tag.
(You’ll need to leave the unsubscribe or email preference center link outside of the dynamic content because Pardot needs to see that one of these links is on your email drafts.)
Use dynamic content to manage translations
If you have an international client base, consider adding Dynamic Content to your forms and landing pages. This example does rely on you capturing the language the prospect speaks somewhere on the prospect’s profile.
Create content for each stage of the prospect lifecycle
Pardot has 5 Lifecycle Stages for prospects:
- Visitor: an anonymous individual who has visited your website or Pardot-tracked assets
- Prospect: a Visitor who has converted and is associated with an email address.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): a prospect that has been assigned to a user
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): a prospect who has been assigned to a user and associated with an opportunity in Salesforce
- Won Deals: the opportunity the prospect is associated with is changed to “Closed Won”.
The stage a prospect is in is not recorded on each prospect’s profile, but you can easily make that happen with a few automation rules and these instructions.
Once you identify which Lifecycle stage the prospect is currently in, you can use your Dynamic Content to personalize messaging based on the stage.
For example, if you’re connecting with a prospect who is still in the MQL stage, you may highlight the features of your products or offerings. However, if you are connecting with a prospect who is in the “Won Deals” stage, they’re likely more familiar with the features of your products and offerings already, so they may want to hear about recent case studies or new features you’ve added.
Customize a “next step” CTA for the prospect
When a prospect fills out a form, the subsequent thank you or success page should not be a dead-end. With dynamic content, you can use these pages to show prospects a “Next Step” CTA that is personalized to them.
For example, if this is a brand new prospect, you may ask them to subscribe to your emails or link to an overview of your products so they can learn more. If the prospect is a current customer and subscriber, serving up the same content as you would for the brand new prospect is not going to be relevant, so show current customer white papers, case studies, or use the CTA for a cross-sell opportunity.
Ongoing personalization through Pardot
As you can see, personalizing your marketing is something customers have come to expect and, fortunately, it’s totally doable in Pardot! All you need is a use case and a little creativity.
What are some interesting ways you’ve used advanced dynamic content? We’d love to hear in the comments!
