Salesforce Pardot: What makes it the real deal?

By: Chris Robinson, Account Director at Bubblebox

Now that we’ve secured a solid understanding of Marketing Automation by means of a brief introduction and a detailed use case, let’s take a look at what makes Pardot, Pardot.

As we’ve mentioned: we want digital marketing efforts to augment the cause and messaging that’s important to your organization – not detract from it! Pardot makes it easy. Pardot boasts a clean and simple user interface that is easy to navigate. The platform is home to a number of features that bring campaign visions to life, including an easy-to-use email builder, a form and landing page builder, an all-in-one view of any prospect, comprehensive reporting, and much more.

Keep reading for more about these features and more importantly, how your organization can leverage them effectively.

Email Builder

Pardot allows you to build beautiful emails that are ready to send to the people who matter. The platform comes with ready-to-use templates that simply await your organization’s personal touch. Easily create emails that showcase your organization and personalize them to maximize impact. Automatically address prospects by name, include relevant personal information as necessary, add images from events or fundraisers based on a prospect’s location, and more.

 

 

Once created, you’re able to customize the sending details. This includes the date and time you’d like to send it, and most importantly who will receive it. Pardot allows you to select lists of prospects, as well as lists of people who you do not wish to send to using a Suppression List. For example, you may wish to send an email update to all of your stakeholders – except anyone who may have received an email from your organization in the last 3 days. Pardot can handle that.

You’re also able to choose what happens when a prospect opens, clicks or unsubscribes to email communications. For example, if a prospect clicks on a specific link, you may wish to send an autoresponder email. If someone clicks on a link and donates to your organization, create automatic emails that include thank you content and links to share directly on social media. This feature gives you insight into your recipient’s actions and ensures they are treated accordingly. Stimulating engagement starts with the perfectly crafted email.

 

Form Builder

Lead Capturing and Progressive Profiling help make Pardot an all-in-one lead nurturing platform. Forms and landing pages help capture information about people who visit your website and interact with collateral. Progressive Profiling ensures that a prospect doesn’t have to enter the same information more than once. Pardot’s form builder is straightforward and easy to use. Simply choose the fields and data you wish to include and just drag and drop to change the order.

Prospect Record

Pardot provides you with a 360 degree view of your prospects, with quick Prospect Record that
shows all of the information you have (and could ever want!). See most recent activity on your organization’s website and interactions with Pardot-monitored collateral, like ebooks, white papers, landing pages, and more. Understand an individuals lifecycle of engagement with Pardot to better understand the stages of engagement: Do they begin as donors? Volunteers? How do people come into contact with your organization? Use the Prospect Record as a tool to not only understand the story of one individual, but to provide data and insight to help tell the story of your organization.

Effective Segmentation

Pardot provides you with a number of options when it comes to segmentation. Create one-time lists, lists that refresh and populate automatically based on specific criteria, or run rules that ensure prospects are assigned to representatives in your organization as necessary.

Manage list membership on the Prospect Record, and manually add tags (like social media hashtags) to a prospect or asset to indicate themes, or simply find items quickly.

Take advantage of Pardot’s Lead Scoring and Prospect Grading, which allows you to differentiate between stakeholders. Lead Scoring is the process of ranking a prospect’s level of interest based upon their interactions with your website and collateral. Prospect Grading, on the other hand,  is the process of determining whether or a not a prospect or their business is sales qualified based on their characteristics. Read more about using these features here on the Bubblebox blog.

Powerful Reporting

The platform’s reporting capabilities provide insight into the success or effectiveness of marketing assets, prospect lifecycles and conversions. Insights like these help your team pivot and make necessary changes to ensure future campaigns can be bigger and better, amplifying the impact of your marketing efforts. Take a look at some of Pardot’s beautiful reports.

Delve into the details of who read your emails, how, when, and what links were clicked.

Better understand how your forms or landing pages are being used by analyzing key metrics.

Make organizational decisions based on Pardot lifecycle reports.

The moral of the story? Pardot makes crafting campaigns easy. With a user interface that commands attention, the platform helps users take charge of a campaign from beginning to end. Out of the box, Salesforce Pardot offers the tools an organization needs to be successful; it is through optimization and leveraging these features effectively that the platform becomes intricately woven into the fabric of your organization.

Bubblebox is proudly an international Impact Partner with Salesforce.org. We support Salesforce technologies, helping organizations ensure their technology investments are working for them. Through implementation, training and consultancy services, our team strives to support you and your cause in all that you do.

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