Marketing Automations Archives - Page 11 of 11

Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
October 17, 2017

My SNAFU with Repeating Automation Rules in Pardot

Andrea Tarrell

Even with an abundance of documentation, there will always be some degree of trial and error with new features. Real life is pretty much always much nuanced than your typical 500-word blog post lets on.

I ran into a “gotcha” moment with Pardot’s recently-added capability to repeat automation rules that I didn’t find referenced anywhere. I’m sharing this story so that you can avoid any surprises when using this awesome new feature in your org.

What I WANTED the repeating automation rule to do

I had an easy peasy use case: RSVPs for an office party. My company had a small list we were targeting that included employees, long term clients, partners, etc – so a great audience for a little experimentation.

The basic logic – if the prospect RSVPs yes, send them a confirmation email and do some stuff. If they RSVP no, don’t send an email but do some other stuff.

The detailed set-up

So to put this into action, I created a custom prospect field called “Office Party 2017 RSVP” with yes and no as the response options. Then I created a Pardot form and landing page for the event RSVPs:

If a prospect completed the form to say they’ll be attending, then we wanted the automation rule to:

send a confirmation email to the prospect
add them to a Salesforce campaign with the status of “RSVPed Yes”

That looked a little like this:

If a prospect completed the form to say “nope can’t come”, then we wanted to:

add them to an “RSVPed No” suppression list
add them to a Salesforce campaign with the status of “RSVPed No”

That looked a little like this:

I turned on the repeat functionality for these rules, because for events like this, we often run into situations where people come back and fill out the form again to add additional colleagues to the list. We wanted to be able to re-send the event confirmation email triggered by the automation rule in these cases.

Seems like a fairly simple and straightforward use case, yes?

What the repeating automation rule ACTUALLY did

So, this didn’t quite behave how I was expecting.

Turns out, if you check the little “Repeat Rule” box, and a Prospect meets the criteria… and continues to meet it… it will keep firing. Over, and over, and over.

In this scenario, the first rule was checking all prospects to see if they had RSVPed Yes. If they did, *boom*, confirmation email sent and add that prospect to the Salesforce campaign.

Then the next day… it checked all prospects again to see if they had RSVPed Yes. If they ever had (today, yesterday, the day before) and the field value was still “yes,” then *boom*, confirmation email sent and add that prospect to the Salesforce campaign. Even if that prospect had matched the automation rule prior and the actions had already been applied.

In other words, Pardot was just looking to see if the prospect met the criteria, yes or no — it wasn’t just looking to see if any NEW prospects met the criteria (which is the behavior I would expect, and is more consistent with how Salesforce workflow rules operate).

TL;DR: people who signed up for the bash got a confirmation email Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before I fixed it on Monday morning. Face, meet palm.

How to fix it

The fix was super simple: adding a step in the match criteria referencing the form submit. Like so:

Apparently, this rule criteria DOES operate by looking to see if any NEW prospects meet the criteria instead of re-matching anyone who has ever submitted it.

Lessons learned? If you’re using time-delayed actions or repeat rule functionality, try to leave yourself enough time to run a real test. I know, I know, this isn’t always feasible if you’re on deadline and you have automated actions taking place over several days… but a girl can dream, right?

Also, take the “best practice” examples shared on the interwebs with a grain of salt. Re-reading a few of the blogs I consulted before building my rule, I realize now that these were 100% theoretical – because they would have run into this exact same issue had their authors actually executed them in real life following the step-by-step they shared.

So what’s YOUR story?

If you’re willing to be an open book for a moment, I’d love to know — what’s the most cringeworthy mistake you’ve made in email marketing? If you’ve been doing this for more than 5 minutes, you know you’ve got one.

Share in the comments, or if you’re not quite ready to broadcast it, ping me at [email protected]. I’m working on a little project related to this…

Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
March 3, 2016

How to Display Dynamic Content on a Page Using URL Parameters

Jenna Molby

In this tutorial, I will show you how to show/hide dynamic content based on URL parameters for any web page. This solution uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead of backend coding, so you will be able to use it with Marketo, Pardot, or any other system that allows a bit of custom code.

VIEW DEMO

The HTML

Wrap each one of your dynamic content sections in a DIV and add a class called dynamic-content. Also, give each DIV a unique ID. We will reference these later in the JavaScript.

<!-- Default Dynamic Section -->
<div id="default-content" class="dynamic-content">
  This is the default content
</div>
<!-- Dynamic Section 1 -->
<div id="apples" class="dynamic-content">
  I like apples
</div>
<!-- Dynamic Section 2 -->
<div id="oranges" class="dynamic-content">
  I like oranges
</div>
<!-- Dynamic Section 3 -->
<div id="bananas" class="dynamic-content">
  I like bananas
</div>

The CSS

There’s only one line of CSS needed to hide all the elements on the page since JavaScript will be used to show/hide the content.

.dynamic-content {
    display:none;
}

The JavaScript

This is the complicated part. First, we need to parse the URL and check for a specific parameter. For this example I will be using the parameter name “dc”, so in this case, my URL would look like this:

https://jennamolby.com/my-webpage?dc=mycontent

This is the piece of code to parse the URL. You can change “dc” to be whatever parameter name you want.

// Parse the URL parameter
function getParameterByName(name, url) {
    if (!url) url = window.location.href;
    name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, "\\$&");
    var regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + name + "(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)"),
        results = regex.exec(url);
    if (!results) return null;
    if (!results[2]) return '';
    return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, " "));
}
// Give the parameter a variable name
var dynamicContent = getParameterByName('dc');

Use jQuery to show/hide dynamic content

To make things easier, we’ll use jQuery to show/hide the content, in conjuction with the javascript. You can add in as many conditions as you want, just make sure you always include default content just in case parameters are misspelled or not in the URL.

<script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
 $(document).ready(function() {
	// Check if the URL parameter is apples
	if (dynamicContent == 'apples') {
		$('#apples').show();
	} 
	// Check if the URL parameter is oranges
	else if (dynamicContent == 'oranges') {
		$('#oranges').show();
	} 
	// Check if the URL parameter is bananas
	else if (dynamicContent == 'bananas') {
		$('#bananas').show();
	} 
	// Check if the URL parmeter is empty or not defined, display default content
	else {
		$('#default-content').show();
	}
});
</script>

The full JavaScript code

Here’s the full piece of javascript and jQuery code.

<script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	// Parse the URL parameter
	function getParameterByName(name, url) {
	    if (!url) url = window.location.href;
	    name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, "\\$&");
	    var regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + name + "(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)"),
	        results = regex.exec(url);
	    if (!results) return null;
	    if (!results[2]) return '';
	    return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, " "));
	}
	// Give the parameter a variable name
	var dynamicContent = getParameterByName('dc');
 
	 $(document).ready(function() {
 
		// Check if the URL parameter is apples
		if (dynamicContent == 'apples') {
			$('#apples').show();
		} 
		// Check if the URL parameter is oranges
		else if (dynamicContent == 'oranges') {
			$('#oranges').show();
		} 
		// Check if the URL parameter is bananas
		else if (dynamicContent == 'bananas') {
			$('#bananas').show();
		} 
		// Check if the URL parmeter is empty or not defined, display default content
		else {
			$('#default-content').show();
		}
	});
</script>