Emails & Forms

For many Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) customers, using Pardot provides them with the tools necessary to communicate with their distinctive audience(s) in a personalized way. 

One common way to do this is to create dynamic customer-centric journeys that send emails on behalf of individual sales reps and help to promote new products or to educate audiences on a specific topic. After all, this is one of the main reasons organizations buy Pardot — to drive the sales pipeline.

But what happens when you need to send emails from different teams in your organization?

Follow along with this blog and learn a few tricks to create new experiences for your Prospects for sales, service, and other parts of your business by leveraging the CRM user lookup feature in Pardot.

Use CRM user lookups to send Pardot emails on behalf of other departments at your company or organization

One of the advantages of Pardot automation for email is the ability to leverage relationships in Salesforce between your sales reps, account owners, and other key service players with your Pardot leads and contacts. 

Here are some examples below:

SDR (Lead Owner) to Prospect (Lead)

Account Executive (Account Owner) to Prospect (Contact)

In fact, here are the standard out-of-the-box relationships you can leverage from Salesforce in Pardot.

• Account Owner – Send the email from the prospect’s account owner in Salesforce.
• Assigned User – Send the email from the user who owns the prospect record.  If the prospect is synced to Salesforce. this is the Lead or Contact Owner.
• Specific User – Select from a list of your Pardot users to use as the email’s sender.
• General User – Set a general address (like [email protected]) or a non-Pardot user to be the sender of the Email.

You can usually cover 97% of all your use cases using one of these options while drafting your Pardot list emails or engagement studio programs.

While most organizations don’t have a need for custom relationships, yours may be different. And that’s okay.  

What if you need a different/custom user connection? 

In your Pardot emails, you can always edit the Sender to say General User. This sends the email on behalf of that person as long as they have the same email domain you have validated in Pardot (@company.com).



However, that’s not always the best outcome. Sometimes we need more dynamic solutions.

In that case, we may want a relationship outside of Sales/Marketing for specific customer service-centric journeys like the one below:

Service Manager (Custom CRM Relationship) to Prospect (Lead or Contact)

In the scenario above, the User/record relationships were built in Salesforce and shared with Pardot in order to build out a service team to prospect customer journeys — think CSAT, follow-up surveys, etc. 

Did you know you know you can create custom relationships AND send emails on their behalf?

Watch the demo below to set up your own custom CRM relationships between Users and your Prospects:

You can also follow along with these steps.

After you set this up, you can take advantage of this field right away with CRM user lookup.

This is what it looks like:

A quick note: Sometimes fields need a few minutes to sync. Be patient, go grab coffee and come back to this. In our experience, it is never more than a few minutes.

What are other examples of custom CRM user lookups?

Honestly, the possibilities are endless. Here are some options:

• Regional sales manager
• Customer service representative
• Technical support specialist

Don’t forget to check out our other cool ideas like A/B testing for you to leverage these different sender options within your organization in the most effective ways.

Where can I use these relationships?

These CRM user lookups are built into Salesforce, so you can use them in both Pardot and Salesforce. Within Pardot you can leverage them in the following ways:

• Email templates
• List emails
• Rules on automation rules, dynamic lists, and segmentation rules
• Potentially on the new conditional completion action criteria rules

This field cannot be used to send email notifications to the User linked to this Prospect. 

Additionally, we did not see them in Engagement Studio Programs as rule options. But remember, you can build a list to act as your criteria instead of using the field directly. 

Can I have more than one custom relationship?

Absolutely. This is out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce, which can now be repurposed for Pardot-specific processes. 

Most organizations we have worked with have less than (3) custom User lookups. The only caveat is to make sure you name them correctly so there is no confusion while using them. 

As you see above, you can pick from a picklist (CRM User lookup fields) under the Prospect CRM User Custom option, and choose which one you want to leverage on that particular email. 

How do you test to make sure everything is working fine? 

The best way to test this information is up to date in Pardot is to go through the following checklist:

• Review User mappings
  • If the User is deactivated or not in Pardot, this will fail.
• Create a list of Prospects using the new field created and make sure the values are being reflected in Pardot.
  • Watch the video earlier in the blog for a few troubleshooting steps.
• Run a preview test in your email test tab.
  • Enter a few email addresses you know to have this field updated and see how it works out.
  • You can create fake prospects to sync for this testing or build in Sandbox if you have access to one.

CRM user lookups make life easier for Pardot admins

Thank you for following along! Check out part two of this blog where we cover how to avoid email personalization missteps.

If you have any questions about this feature or how to use it in Pardot (MCAE) please give us a shout here. 

Have you ever finished working on an email template in the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Email Builder with all of its convenient features like:

• Removable sections
• Repeatable sections
• The ability to move sections up and down within the template

…only to start editing a landing page, and you become extremely frustrated with the fact that you can’t do the same things in the Pardot Landing Page Builder? 

In this post, we’re going to cover a way that we can basically replicate all of these features for the Pardot Landing Page Builder!

Watch a demo video to learn these hacks

Before we dive in, here’s a video to walk you through the three Pardot Landing Page Builder hacks from this blog post.

Pardot Landing Page Builder hacks — an overview of the approach

To achieve these features in the Pardot Landing Page editor, we’re going to add a little snippet of code at the end of our layout template. It goes between the closing </body> tag and the closing </html> tag. 

The code snippet styles the different sections, or individual elements, of the page that we want to be able to alter from within the editor.

<code pardot-region="hide_elements">
    <style>
        #sectionName {
            /* styling goes in here */
        }
    </style>
</code>

From there, we can add the different styles to each element  based on the different features we are wanting the element to have.

An important note

The first time you open this WYSIWYG editable code block for a Landing Page, it is going to include a <![CDATA]]> tag in the code. You will have to remove the tag before any of the changes you make in that code block will take effect.

Landing Page Builder Hack #1: Removable Sections

To make “Removable” sections for the Pardot landing page editor, we need to add the display property into the styling for the element we want to be able to remove. This will give us the ability to edit the display property from within the WYSIWYG editor. 

Then, we will basically toggle the display property from display: flex (or display: block if that’s the normal styling for the element) to display: none. This will “remove” the section, or element, we want to hide!

<code pardot-region=”hide_elements”>
    <style>
        /* Change display:flex to display:none to hide an element */
        #visibleSection {
            display: flex !important;
        }
        #removedSection {
            display: none !important;
        }
    </style>
</code>

Landing Page Builder Hack #2: Repeatable Sections

To create “Repeatable” sections, we’re going to use a very similar approach to the “Removable” sections. We’re going to leverage the display property again. 

The key here is to include extra copies of the section you might want to repeat in your layout template from the start, and then use the display property to hide the ones you don’t need in that Landing Page. Or alternatively, have the sections start as hidden and come back in and change the styling to show the sections if you need them.

<code pardot-region="hide_elements">
    <style>
        /* This will show the section 2 of the 3 possible times */
        #Section1a {
            display: flex !important;
        }
        #Section1b {
            display: flex !important;
        }
        #Section1c {
            display: none !important;
        }
    </style>
</code>

Considerations for “Repeatable” Sections

• While this does effectively create a “repeatable” section for the landing page, it is important to note that we are not actually duplicating the sections from within the landing page editor. This means that the number of times you can “repeat” a section will be limited by the number of times you include that section in the original layout template.
• Keep in mind that your editable regions in a layout template are marked by pardot-regions and these must all have a unique name. When we copy a section of our landing page to make it “repeatable” we will need to go in and update the pardot-region names as well. For example, Section1-Image might become Section1a-Image and Section1b-Image and so on.  If you don’t update these names when you copy a section, you will receive an error message when trying to save the layout template. 

Landing Page Builder Hack #3: The Ability to Move Sections Up and Down on the page

If we have sections included in our Layout Template that we want to rearrange based on the Landing Page, we can add another property into our code block. This is called the order property. This works as a sort of ranking system where the section with the lower values will appear first on the page. 

By default, we will assign each section a value to give them their original placement on the page. But by including the order property in our styling, we can adjust that order later on from within the WYSIWYG landing page editor. 

Considerations for “Movable” Sections

• This will only work for sections, dividers, etc. that are children of a flex container in the html code. That’s because the order property only applies to flex elements. If your code isn’t set up with the main sections in a flex container, then unfortunately this approach isn’t going to work for you. The good news is that you can probably restructure your code (or we can help!) so you can make use of this “feature” for your landing pages.
• The default value for the order property is 0. This means if you have Section A defined as order: 1, and then you add Section B but don’t define an order value for it, it will appear before Section A on the page.

<code pardot-region="hide_elements">
    <style>
        /* Use order to adjust which elements appear first on the page, with 1 being the first */
        #Section1 {
            order: 1;
        }
        #Section2 {
            order: 2;
        }
        #Section3 {
            order: 3;
        }
    </style>
</code>

More like workarounds than features

It is important to keep in mind — these are not features of the Pardot Landing Page editor. Instead, these are more of a creative approach to achieve some of the functionality we all often find ourselves wanting. 

If you run into issues with any of the approaches in this post, please reach out to us and we can help you obtain your desired experience with the Landing Page editor. Or, tell us how you did in the comments!