The first-ever ParDreamies awards, which were presented during the ParDreamin’ 2021 VIP After Party, celebrate solutions marketing and IT professionals built to reach their goals using Pardot. These solutions are especially impressive because they each rose to solve a specific challenge while utilizing technology to automate their way to greatness. Winners of the ParDreamin’ awards get bragging rights for their team and company, a sweet swag pack, and a fancy trophy to remind them how awesome they are every day.
The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:
- Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
- Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
- Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
- Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
- Best in Show
Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Extending Pardot category, which recognizes API-driven solutions.
Extending Pardot with LexisNexis Canada
The team at LexisNexis Canada, a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics tools, was encountering the problem related to siloed data. So, they developed a solution to pull product subscription information into Pardot. This allows the team’s marketers to pull their own campaign lists, which reduces list turnaround time and miscommunication errors. They can now see fresh data for 12 products, and drill down to “module level” subscriptions for their two flagship products.
Quick Facts:
- The Pardot v4 Batch Import API
- Pardot custom fields
- Developers delivered work in four waves
- Automated QA testing
- Formal refactoring phase
- Navigated Pardot switch to OAuth
Challenge the team wanted to solve
For as long as LexisNexis Canada had a marketing automation tool, they relied on an external data team to pull campaign lists. However, 30% of their requests were simple product status updates, like “I want a list of everyone who cancelled their subscription to Product X, within geography Y.” The team’s marketing director, Collin Smith, wanted to put product subscription information into Pardot, thus allowing marketers to pull their own campaign lists. The team aimed to reduce list turnaround time and decrease miscommunication errors.
Hurdles they overcame during the project
The main obstacle: handling risks and complexity. Prior to this project start, this exact mission was attempted in the past. And it failed. The systems at LexisNexis Canada are complex because they’ve been in business so long (since before 1995, which is ancient for a software company!).
The team handled the risks and complexity of the project by delivering work in waves with close involvement from marketing stakeholders.
Other major obstacles included discovering which non-obvious data points were vital for the project, handling the Pardot switch to OAuth, and dealing with users who change their email addresses.
Results after implementing the solution
The team at LexisNexis Canada unlocked the ability to see 81,000 additional subscription data points inside Pardot. Marketers from the company can also see 45,000 “subscription modules” and 32,000 extra demographic details about Pardot prospects. This is information that was hidden from them before the solution implementation.
Marketing managers and coordinators can now create lists on their own in under ten minutes. This is in contrast with the old way that took three days and involved an external team.
The Pardot v4 Batch Import API was key to getting this work done.
The project was submitted by Jacob Filipp, and the team handling the project included:
- Programming – Alla Fradkin
- Database work – Corey Heasley
- Marketing director – Collin Smith
Learn more and keep it going
The project was a huge success, but it took several people and a great deal of expertise and resources to make it happen. Here are resources you can use to replicate the project in your own Pardot instance or get inspiration to do something similar.
- Pardot API Documentation
- Pardot API and Getting Ready with SSO Users
- Salesforce Trailhead: Extend Pardot Automations
Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way.
