Marketing Automations Archives - Page 10 of 11

Marketing Automations, Pro Tips, Strategy
July 14, 2019

Conversational Marketing: What is it & What Does it Mean for Pardot Customers?

Maura Rivera

Hey Pardot friends, Maura here from the team at Qualified. I’m excited to have the chance to connect with this group of Pardot superfans!

Today I want to dive into the hot topic of conversational marketing and what it means for the world of Pardot.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Conversational marketing: What is it?

For decades B2B companies have invested tons of time and money to find, nurture, and drive qualified leads to their corporate website. And as readers of this blog well know, they’re using B2B Marketing platforms like Pardot to make that all happen.

But when these hard-earned website visitors arrive, companies have to hold their breath and hope that visitors will find a form, fill it out, and patiently wait for sales to contact them. Marketing teams are doing an awesome job getting sales-ready prospects to their site, but it’s not easy to get them across the finish line and handed over to sales. This is what Adam Blitzer, the founder of Pardot, calls the “last mile problem”.

Enter conversational marketing.

Conversational Marketing opens up an entirely new channel for your sales team: your corporate website. This new technology empowers your sales reps to have real-time conversations with your most qualified prospects, resulting in more leads and more opportunities.

Check out our post all about Conversational Marketing to dive in further.

Qualified is a conversational marketing solution built natively on the Salesforce platform

Here’s a quick breakdown of how Qualified works:

Identify your most qualified website visitors based on a set of custom rules that you create, like which webpage they’re exploring or if they meet specific criteria in Pardot (more on this below)
See a LiveView of exactly how visitors are exploring your site and engage with them at precisely the right moment
Jump into a sales meeting right on your website using a suite of online meeting tools including chat, screen-share, and voice-calls
Set up bots to connect with unqualified visitors or schedule sales meetings when your reps are offline
Last but not least, instantly create leads and opportunities in Salesforce

Now for the fun part: Integrating Qualified with Pardot

With Qualified for Pardot, you can qualify website visitors based on Pardot prospect data before routing to sales. This makes your qualification engine smarter and helps your sales team have contextual sales conversations with your most important prospects.

For instance, you could qualify a website visitor if:

Pardot grade > B+

Or you can qualify a prospect if

Pardot grade > B+ AND they visit your pricing page

The second someone is “qualified”, a magic door automatically opens right on your website for your sales rep to have a conversation with your Pardot prospect.

You can leverage Pardot to qualify visitors in a bunch of different ways:

Pardot email campaigns:

The second someone clicks through a Pardot email campaign, use a completion action to add to their Pardot score, qualify them based on a scoring threshold, and instantly kick off a live sales conversation.

Pardot landing pages:

Qualify prospects when they land on Pardot landing pages, like ABM landing pages or landing pages tied to a particular campaign.

Show dynamic content based on field values in Pardot:

Notify your reps when known Pardot prospects return to your site and greet them by name, because you have all of their prospect data at your fingertips.

You can also route that person differently based on data you have in the system. When someone fills out a Pardot form, for example, you can instantly qualify that prospect based on the data they submitted.

For example, if the form asks for title and the prospect completes it as a VP, qualification rules can immediately fire and prompt your reps to jump in and engage with them.

You can also qualify / route visitors directly to sales who have a healthy score or grade.

The possibilities here are endless. Beyond score and grade, you can qualify prospects based on any standard or custom Pardot prospect field.

Campaign-level UTM parameters:

When you’re running highly targeted marketing initiatives, in some cases, ANY interaction with a particular asset or campaign can instantly qualify a visitor to talk to sales.

Examples of these campaigns can include: search marketing campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns, social media campaigns, ABM campaigns, paid placements, and Pardot email marketing campaigns. You can use campaign names or IDs as parameters in your URLs to trigger instant qualification of prospects engaging with these targeted initiatives.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some helpful resources if you want to dig further into the integration:

What are your thoughts on conversational marketing?

We want to hear what you think about Conversational Marketing and what it means for the Pardot ecosystem.

How do you think this will bring value to your sales teams and your lead nurturing process? What questions do you have?

Let’s hear it in the comments!

Emails & Forms, Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
June 22, 2019

A Better Way to Add Long Lists of Values to Rule Criteria in Pardot Dynamic Lists

Andrea Tarrell

Dynamic lists in Pardot rock. They’re one of my favorite things to demo to a customer who has been working with Mailchimp or a legacy MAP that’s not connected to Salesforce.

The awesome part: You define rule criteria once — and then your dynamic list uses that rule to add and remove prospects from that list based on the criteria. Wahoo!

To those of us who have been on the platform for a while, this is old hat — but it is downright earthshattering for marketers who have had to manually export/import lists for every campaign they rule.

A not awesome part, though: Sometimes you have a LONG list of criteria to include, and making those updates gets really tedious. (more…)

Data Management, Emails & Forms, Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
June 21, 2018

When Email Suppression Lists Meet AMPSEA

Andrea Tarrell

Okay. I’m taking deep cleansing breaths right now over a really unfortunate discovery.

I’m talking about when suppression lists meet AMPSEA.

Wait, what’s AMPSEA?

Some people love it. Most OG Pardot peeps loathe it. Or at least harbor vague resentment while recognizing its utility.

AMPSEA stands for “allowing multiple prospects with the same email address.” It represents switching from email address as the unique identifier to using Prospect IDs, which was an important milestone in Pardot’s growing up as a platform.

If you got your Pardot org before June 14, 2016, you have the option to opt into AMPSEA. If you got your org after this date, AMPSEA is enabled by default. And either way, once it’s enabled, you can’t disable it.

Good reasons for AMPSEA (yes, there are some)

There are some legitimate use cases for having duplicate contact and lead records with the same email address, like:

Two people who share an email address
Different business units who maintain separate contact records in Salesforce
A consultant that works with two companies and should get emails targeted at both (small aside: Salesforce now lets you relate the same contact record to multiple accounts… but Pardot doesn’t recognize that, at least not yet.)

How does an AMPSEA org handle 2 people with the same email address on an email send?

Two prospects with the same email address included as recipients for your list email? No problem — Pardot is smart enough to only send it to them once.

Two prospects with the same email address included as recipients in your Engagement Studio program? No problem — Pardot is smart enough to only send it to them once. Per this help article:

“Pardot’s drip and engagement programs allow only one prospect per email address per program. This deduplication ensures that an email address associated with multiple prospects doesn’t receive more than one copy of the same email.”

All good so far.

One prospect on the recipient list, and another prospect with a matching email on the suppression list? This is where it gets sloppy.

AMPSEA + Suppression Lists = A recipe for disaster

If you have one prospect on the recipient list, and another prospect with a matching email on the suppression list… the first prospect receives the email. Even though that email address is the list that you’re telling Pardot “DUDE DON’T EMAIL.”

I ran some tests on list emails to see what happens if the same email is on “send to” and “don’t send to”:

…and my test record got the email.

I tried it twice.

How can this be.

Cue the existential crisis.

Why this is a gaping flaw in the process

I actually can’t believe I haven’t run into this before. This is a HUGE issue that effectively means if you have duplicates, you can’t use suppression lists reliably.

Here are some pretty logical and common scenarios where this will wreak havoc:

Example #1: Suppressing customers

We’re running a “last call” type of promo for a customer. Anyone who hasn’t already purchased is getting a 10% off call-to-action. Anyone who HAS purchased should not get this offer — we’re not trying to give out refunds or make people feel like they missed a deal.

So we suppress anyone who has purchased… but if there’s a prospect with a duplicate email out there, that email address is getting sent the offer.

Example #2: Suppressing people with active opportunities

One of my customers has like 5 dupes for every contact in their system because they use Salesforce web-to-lead forms for partner referrals. They need a better process, and they know it.

But in the meantime, they still want to send emails out to help drum up new demand for sales. They suppress anyone who has an open opportunity… but again, if there’s a record with a duplicate email out there, that record and that email address is receiving the offer.

NO MEANS NO: Suppression lists should trump recipient lists

The flaw here is that suppression is looking at the unique identifier on the records (which is not email when you have AMPSEA).

I want to suppress that email address from receiving the mailing.

Before anyone screams “GDPR,” chill — opt outs and bounces are handled differently. When someone is unmailable, that status is applied globally across all records sharing that email address.

Why, how, & what now? [yelled into the sky while shaking my fist at the Par-gods]

What do you do with this workflow if you have duplicate contacts or leads in your system (as every single customer does)? How do you send emails with confidence, with the knowledge that you can reliably suppress the people that shouldn’t get certain types of emails?

I don’t have a workaround for this yet. My team put in a support ticket or three to see if we can get recommendations and ideas.

The most frustrating thing about this to me is that it is documented NOWHERE. Nowhere. Trust me, I’ve looked.

Anyway. If/when I have a solution, I’ll report back. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Is this the behavior you would expect in an AMPSEA org? Does this mess with your campaign workflow? How would you…. or have you… solved for this?

Data Management, Marketing Automations, Pro Tips, Strategy
June 17, 2018

How to Round Robin Prospects in Pardot without Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Brittany Rhyme

If you have an internal SDR or BDR team and are looking to round robin prospects, you may have learned that Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules don’t make this super easy to do out of the box. Or, it may be more challenging to get configuration changes made in Salesforce if you don’t have full admin access in that system.

My team was looking to do round robin (RR) assignment using Pardot only, but with a few extra requirements:

Kick off the RR process from multiple forms
Break RR assignment into industry groups
Send the prospect an email after a form submit from their assigned user
Have the ability to customize the first touch email for different sales users

The play-by-play to wow your sales team with round-robin functionality in Pardot

Here’s a basic how-to for what I set up as well as all the moving pieces in Pardot you need along the way.

1. Add all users to Pardot

First things first, you’ll want to make sure all your SDRs/BDRs are users in Pardot. It’s worth noting that even if they don’t have Salesforce licenses, you can still get them set up with Pardot licenses without paying anything additional or changing your contract.

2. Define the logic for Round Robin Groups

Work with your sales leaders to determine the most effective way to segment your leads. In my case, we were focused on segmentation by industry. This example could also be applied by product, geographic area, or to mirror an internal sales team structure – whatever fits your company’s needs.

3. Build groups in Pardot

The example I’ll walk through is for a group for inbound website prospects for Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leads titled, “CRE BDR Round Robin Inbound Group”.

In Pardot, navigate to Admin > User Management > Groups. Click “Add User Group” and you’ll be prompted to enter some basic details:

Once it is created you will want to add everyone on your BDR team to this group by editing their groups under their Admin >User Management > Users > gear icon “Edit Groups”.

4. Create a list to correspond to your group

Create a list! Yes, this step is that easy.

As an example, our naming convention was, “CRE BDR Inbound Website Form List – Round Robin”.

5. Use completion actions on forms to feed the list

Attach that list to form(s) that are CRE industry specific. As many forms as you want!

6. Use an automation rule to trigger assignment

Remember that list from step 4? This is where that comes in. Create an automation rule with the criteria in the screenshot below.

This is an important process, so we elected to run the rule in real time.

7. Build an Engagement Studio Program for the notification

Once prospects were RR’ed, we wanted to create a Salesforce task for each BDR and send out that first email on behalf of a BDR. We built this in Engagement Studio:

You’ll need to use that list you created in Step #4 again – this will be your recipient list. I also always add suppressions for active clients, MQLs, SQLS, etc.

The first action in our ESP is “Assign to Group.” Is this redundant with step 6? Maybe. But we included as a safety net, just in case the automation rules are running slow.

If you have custom emails that are different for team member, the next action should be a rule checking for the “Assigned User”. I used this because we have Calendly links and other unique content that is specific by BDR.

The next steps should be the email you wish to send and the creating the Salesforce task. Anything else you add is up to you!

As another safety net, I like to get notified if prospects finish the ESP – because it is most likely an existing client, MQL or SQL has filled out a website form.

8. Update as your teams change

Look at that, you built a RR in Pardot!

If you ever have a BDR on PTO or leave the company simply remove them as a user from the Group — no need to change any of the pieces! Leads will stop being assigned to them once they are removed from the group.

Huge thank you to Brittany for sharing this example of leveraging Pardot to its fullest potential!

Do you have a unique use case? A crazy cool solution that you built? A problem that needs solving? Share it here to get featured on The Spot!

Data Management, Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
May 22, 2018

Drawing a Blank: How Pardot Handles Empty Field Values

Andrea Tarrell

One of the tricky and little-known-things about Pardot is how the system handles blank values.

If you’ve never had a reason to, you probably haven’t thought about it. But when it DOES come up — here’s what you need to know to be ready. (more…)

Emails & Forms, Marketing Automations, Pro Tips, Strategy
February 17, 2018

A Different Kind of Lead: How to Nurture Your Employees with Pardot

Andrea Tarrell

Marketing automation was designed to support sales and achieve efficiency in reaching prospects at scale.

But the benefits don’t stop there. Nurturing can be used for many other types of business relationships — including customers, partners, suppliers, and even your employees.

Why would my employees need nurturing?

This is one of my favorite soapboxes. I firmly believe that internal communications deserve as much, if not, more attention than our customer-facing communications.

It’s not just to get that warm, fuzzy kumbaya feeling — it’s just good business. In today’s war for talent, your employees have options about where to invest their blood sweat and tears.

An ancillary benefit: if you’re just getting started with marketing automation, automating internal communications can be a great “low risk” experiment — and your HR team will likely be hugely appreciative of the extra comms help.

Opportunity #1: New employee onboarding program

The first 90 days at any organization are going to feel like drinking out of a firehose — but a little empathy can go a long way toward making this less painful.

Can you leverage lead nurturing principles to help new employees on their “buyer’s journey” — aka their path from deer-in-the-headlights newbie to fully functioning team member? What are the key questions every new hire has on day 1, day 7, day 30?

Explore using Engagement Studio to schedule communications like:

Paperwork requests
A welcome letter from the CEO
Company background & history
Automated tasks at set intervals to remind their manager or HR to check in
New kid logistics questions like dress code, where to eat in the area
Information on employee perks

Opportunity #2: Employee benefits communication

Another fabulous use case for drip nurturing is during open enrollment season for employee benefits. At most companies, the main communication tools for annual benefits renewals are:

a) the dreaded enrollment meeting where everything’s thrown at you all at once

b) a bunch of stock brochures from the insurance company that mean little to nothing to most of your employees

How might you break this complex message into bite size pieces, and leverage Engagement Studio to “nurture” employees as they build their understanding of their benefits options? Could you break out key messages into weekly or bi-weekly communications leading up to the enrollment deadline? Can you apply marketing best practices to cut through the corporate-speak and technical benefits jargon?

Fair warning: your HR may smother you in bear hugs if you offer to take this off their plate.

Opportunity #3: Analyzing success of training & internal messages

Pardot has great analytics on prospect engagement – who’s opening and clicking emails, time spent visiting a page, how long people are watching videos (if you’ve got the Wistia integration in place.)

This can give you some great intel on how employees are reacting to different kinds of content. Leveraging Pardot, you can start to understand:

What training materials people actually use
Who’s reading monthly reports
Link click activity on an employee intranet
Engagement rates with leadership communications (CEO updates, “state of the union” type comms, etc.)

What other non-traditional ways can you leverage Pardot?

Have you found success leveraging Pardot for something other than prospect engagement? What ideas do you have for expanding the impact of marketing automation in your organization?

Let your fellow readers know in the comments!