by Mike Walsh | Jan 31, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
When looking at marketing software for businesses, Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are two big names that regularly come up. Especially if you already use Salesforce, these two are probably your two best options for utilizing a powerful and fully integrated marketing platform with your CRM.
While both solutions are directly connected to Salesforce CRM, they do have some pretty significant differences. In this article we will be taking a closer look at both Pardot and Marketing Cloud, their strengths and weaknesses and some recommended cases for who should use which.
The Overview
While both of these programs can be very complex, and handle a wide variety of marketing needs, deciphering which one you should use is luckily not so complicated. If you need a place to start, look no further.
Pardot is aimed at B2B marketing and focuses on nurturing leads to the point of handing them off to a Sales representative. If your process is dependant upon “high touch” interactions with customers and clients, this may be the option for you.
Marketing Cloud is a more robust platform and focused on B2C marketing. If you are looking for 1-to-1 interactions with customers, through social media, subscriptions and a large database of users and customers, this is probably the option for you.
However, it should be said, the above recommendations are not hard and fast rules. Can Marketing Cloud be used for B2B? Absolutely. It depends on your needs. Can Pardot be used for B2C – potentially, but with less functionality than most companies would like for their marketing.
The Details – Pardot
Essential Features:
- Email Marketing – A WYSIWYG email editor, with a selection of pre-built templates, dynamic content and in-depth analytics on email clicks, opens and more.
- Social Media Marketing – direction connection to your social media accounts, link tracking and content scheduling for easy Social Media posts
- Engagement Program / Drip Campaigns – a personalized journey for each prospect, with responsive automation based on the prospect’s actions
- Integration with Salesforce CRM – Direct connection to the CRM lets you parse leads and data between the two, and send real-time notifications to the Sales team
- Lead Generation – Tools for landing pages, forms and lead segmentation allow you to capture leads from your website and get them ready to put into the funnel.
- Reporting and Analytics – Tracking for your different campaigns, and ROI so you know which marketing initiatives are working best.
Other items to consider:
- Pardot is generally more user-friendly. It requires less setup and customization than Marketing Cloud – however, Pardot cannot do quite as much, functionality wise, as Marketing Cloud
- Businesses can see results from Pardot without a large, or dedicated marketing team.
- Pardot is generally less expensive than Marketing Cloud
The Details – Marketing Cloud
Essential Features:
- Journey Builder – personalized multichannel customer journeys, that reach across the entire lifecycle from leads to cases.
- Email marketing – Email builder feature mobile-optimized templates, dynamic content and rich formatting (JavaScript and AMPscript).
- Social Media Marketing – Connect to your social media accounts, plan and publish your campaigns and monitor the results
- Mobile Marketing – Mobile device marketing, including two-way communications and tracking of user activities.
- Advertising – Tools to advertise on the major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and manage those ads at scale using rules and collaboration.
- Predictive Profiling – Allows you to create contact profiles, infer customer preferences, and automate marketing decisions based on the resulting customer behaviors.
- Web Personalization – Connect Marketing cloud to your website, where you can track visitors, get data on their actions, and create smart content to enhance the user experience.
- A single data platform – All of your customer data (from all sorts of sources) becomes centralized on the Marketing Cloud Platform, giving you a more complete view and tools to analyze, filter and segment.
Other items to consider:
- Marketing Cloud has a wealth of features and options, however, to fully utilize them you will need a good amount of customization and at the minimum, a small team of people to run the system.
- Marketing Cloud will most likely cost you more to set up and to purchase that Pardot.
Roundup
So there you have it. Hopefully, this has given you a bit more clarity into the two systems and which one is right for you!
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Dec 19, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Proper lead management often requires more planning and detail work than most people realize. Doing it the right way is much more than a “set it and forget it” type of mentality. However, when done properly, a few simple best practices can really boost your company and help you keep a pipeline full of qualified, and worthwhile leads.
So below, we have a short list of some of these best practices. Some are specific to using Pardot, and some are just generally good ideas when it comes to lead management in general.
1. Make sure Sales and Marketing are aligned.
For any lead management plan to work, marketing and sales need to be on the same page. When a lead enters the system, many times they are not yet “sales-ready”.
The job of marketing is to nurture these prospects through education, value, and promotion, so they get to the point where there are legitimately interested and knowledgeable enough to be ready to talk to an account executive, but also to find out more about them to determine if they are a good fit. If all goes well, you can weed out the prospects who aren’t a good fit, and begin sending sales a steady stream of qualified prospects.
This means mapping out a clear sales process in addition to the marketing process, and defining where and how leads are handed off to Sales.
2. Track anonymous visitors and use their history once they opt-in
This is one of the staple items of using Pardot. When you setup Pardot, you add a little bit of tracking code to all of your essential web pages, forms, and links. When a prospect converts by filling out a form or gives you their email, all of that data will be automatically added to their profile.
This gives you a detailed history of how they went about looking at your company, the path they took to get to conversion, data on how successful your campaigns are and hopefully specific info on the prospect themselves. All of this happens passively, but in the end allows you to improve your campaigns, and understand how best to connect with your target audience.
3. Score leads properly
Essential to know when to turn over your leads to Sales, is scoring your leads. Each and every action a prospect takes, from visitng your web pages to clicking on your links carries with it some level of interest. But don’t confuse casual interest with intent to buy. Take some time and consider exactly what actions are good indicators (such as looking at a pricing page), and score them appropriately.
In the end, it is the action-oriented items, like signing up for a demonstration, that usually indicates the really interested parties, and should be marked as your hotter leads. Understand the difference is essential so that you don’t assign un-interested prospects to Sales.
Pardot makes this extremely easy, through the lead scoring customization page. Users can alter each and every standard scoring item, as well as create all sorts of custom score objects to fit each company’s unique cycle.
4. Keep the whole sales cycle in mind
Properly nurturing a lead means working with them throughout the sales cycle. The job of marketing is to nurture these prospects through education, value, and promotion, so they get to the point where there are legitimately interested and knowledgeable enough to be ready to talk to an account executive, but also to find out more about them to determine if they are a good fit. If all goes well, you can weed out the prospects who aren’t a good fit, and begin sending sales a steady stream of qualified prospects.
You can and should use every channel at your disposal, from email to social media to partner media channels. Content offers should include thought leadership pieces, guides, tips, industry research, and other pieces of content that help them solve their daily pains and addresses the particular problem you’re targeting with your product. Just remember, that this nurturing should continue throughout the entire duration of the sales cycle, and (to a lesser degree) beyond the sale as well.
Again, Pardot makes all of this easy. With connectors to most social media channels, as well as integrated email and link tracking, you can easily stay in touch with all of your prospects and deliver content anytime, anywhere
5. Create a target buyer profile
It’s pretty straightforward, how can you find and manage leads properly, if you don’t have a target in mind? Are you selling to B2B or B2C? Small companies or enterprise? Are you looking at a particular location or vertical? Are you selling to a CEO, marketing director, or another decision maker?
Setting up one or multiple profiles that both marketing and sales can use is just another trick to make sure your lead management efforts are giving you the best results.
Pardot offers a sophisticated profile creation tool. Users can create multiple profiles using characteristic traits such as location, industry, job title, company size and more. Then, each of these characteristics can be given a grade value, resulting in each prospect being assigned an overall grade for how closely they fit your ideal buyer.
So there you have it. Some simple but powerful tactics to better manage your leads.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
Interested in getting started with Pardot B2B marketing? Already have Pardot, but need help getting the most from your investment?
The Salesforce Experts at CloudMyBiz are here to help.
Contact Us
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Oct 30, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
The Pardot Marketing platform can be one of the better additions to any company that uses Salesforce. It handles just about all of your digital marketing needs, from emails to social media to Google analytics connectors. A properly used Pardot system will give your business not only easy and efficient ways to market to potential clients but to also track exactly how they interact with you and to track what your most effective marketing strategies are.
The ace up the sleeve for Pardot though is the Engagement Studio. Engagement Studio allows you to build complex drip marketing campaigns that guide prospects through your marketing funnel in very specific ways. You can build actions, triggers and rules that run constantly, and determine the experience your prospect gets, depending on the way and the frequency with which they engage with your materials.
So in this post, we are going to give you the rundown on how to build a basic Pardot Engagement Program and talk a little bit about the benefits that you can get along the way.
Engagement 101
So first things first, you have to figure out the essential components of your marketing campaign.
- Who – Who are the prospects being emailed?
TIP: Use suppression lists to make sure you don’t accidentally send the wrong content to the wrong prospects
- Why – What is the goal of the campaign? To schedule a demo, to educate the prospect, to announce and get attendees for a webinar?
- What – What content do we need for the campaign, such as blog posts, whitepapers, data sheets, landing pages, forms, custom links, etc.?
- When – When do you want it to start? Is there a specific stopping point of the campaign, or do you want it to always be running and available for prospects to be added to?
- Where – online of course
For our example at the end of the article, we are going to look at a 3-2-1 drip for cold/inactive leads. This campaign is designed to re-engage and determine levels of interest from your prospects (if any) so you can assign them to the appropriate marketing campaign.
You can read here about the what and the why of a 3-2-1 campaign.
Once you have the foundation for what your campaign is, and what you want out of it, you are ready to begin looking at what steps you will need to build to get to where you want to go.
Engagement Steps
Every Engagement program is simply a series of steps that prospects progress along as you interact with them. You can build out super simple programs with only a couple of steps, or highly complex ones with hundreds. We find that keeping things simple tends to have the best results.
There are 4 step types available: Actions, Rules, Triggers and Stops.
Actions are what they sound like, the system will “do” something. They tend to be the most straightforward and are also what your campaign is built on. The possible actions are:
- Add to List
- Add to Salesforce Campaign
- Adjust Score
- Apply Tags
- Assign to Group
- Assign to User
- Assign to Salesforce Active Assignment Rule
- Create Salesforce Task
- Change Prospect Field Value
- Notify User
- Remove from List
- Remove Tags
- Send Email
Rules are a great way to branch prospects into parts of the campaign. The system will check for something, such as a prospect score, or salesforce campaign, allowing you to then define a particular action based upon the results. The rules available are:
- Assigned Salesforce Queue
- Assigned User
- Assignment Status
- Grade
- List
- Prospect Custom Field
- Prospect Default Field
- Score
- Prospect Tag
- Salesforce Campaign
- Salesforce Campaign Status
- Prospect Email Status
- Pardot Campaign
- Salesforce Status
Triggers are how you react to what your prospects do. You are basically “listening” for things like link clicks or email opens, and when you get them, you can respond accordingly. Triggers available:
- Email Open
- Email Link Click
- Form View or Submission
- Landing Page View or Submission
- Custom Redirect Click
- File Download
Stops are the end of a path. You can sprinkle them throughout the program, or have all paths lead to one final end. It can vary every time.
Engagement Content
All of the content you create in Pardot, files, re-directs, emails, etc., can be linked to your engagement program. It’s quick and easy to link to your content, and if you want, use the content as triggers for follow-up emails (or other actions) if they are visited or clicked.
As for the emails themselves, you need to create them as templates in the Pardot Marketing tab. This takes a bit of getting used to, but only pre-built and published templates can be sent out via Engagement Studio
TIP: Use Variable Tags to customize different parts of your email template, to give a more personal feel to your marketing material.
More on Pardot Content here
Using Wait Times
Each step you create has an option for when it will run via a “wait time”. Properly using your wait timing can be crucial. After all, you probably don’t want to send out an email or two every day of the week.
There are two options for wait times: the simple wait, and the “up to” wait.
The simple wait is as it sounds, all prospects at that step will wait the specified number of days before moving to the next step.
The “up to” wait is a bit more sophisticated and allows prospects who are engaging and seem interested, to move through the program faster, and potentially keep their interest piqued as you move them through the funnel. In this case, the prospect will wait “up to” the specified number of days for a trigger, but if that trigger is activated before the maximum wait time, the prospect will continue on earlier.
Finally, you should be aware of the engagement program pauses. At any time, you can pause a running program to edit content, change a trigger, or whatever reason. When you do, prospects will essentially remain frozen at their current step, and only when you unpause, will they pick up where they left off.
TIP: Research shows that most email opens and clicks will happen within the first 2 days. So set your wait times accordingly
More on Timing here
Engagement Studio in Action
So back to our original example, the 3-2-1 Drip Program. Here is how the flow goes for a prospect in this Drip:
A sample 3-2-1 Drip Campaign
- A direct email is sent to all prospects to start, with a hard sales pitch and a strong call to action. The idea is to find the hot leads right away, and not let them cool off by being coy.
- Anyone who clicks the custom re-direct CTA within the 2 day waiting period will be:
- Immediately removed from the drip
- Sales will be notified to contact the prospect
- And the path ended
- If the prospect doesn’t click, they move on to the next step
- The second email is sent after waiting 7 days. This email has a more moderate tone and encourages the prospect to interact with some advanced collateral, such as a whitepaper or success story
- Prospects who click any of the re-dirct links within the 2 day waiting period will then be:
- Assigned to a 30-day Engagement campaign designed to nurture the prospect for a Sales call.
- The assigned Sales user will be notified,
- And the path ended
- If the prospect doesn’t click, they move to the next step
- The third and final email comes out 10 days later. This is a general informative email, with general information about the company or product being sold.
- A prospect who clicks any link within 2 days will be assumed to have a bit of interest but needs significant information and nurturing. The results will be:
- Assigned to a 90-day Engagement Program that will hopefully push the prospect to the 30-day campaign, or trigger a contact from sales directly.
- The assigned Sales user will be notified
- And the path ended
- Finally, if the prospect has not clicked or engaged with any of these emails, the prospect will either be:
- Added to a 180-day drip (if appropriate for the sales and marketing cycles)
- Or marked as cold/dead
- And the path ended
So that’s it for our overview of Pardot Engagement Studio. For anyone out there who already has Pardot, we hope that you were able to learn something new, and for anyone in need of a better marketing solution and interested in Pardot, our team of Salesforce Experts is always happy to find a solution that is right for you.
Contact Us
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Aug 21, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Getting a large funnel of leads is a big part of the job for any marketer. However, once you have a good volume of leads, you need to do something with them. Specifically, you need to have good qualifying parameters set up so your sales team doesn’t spend a ton of time with leads who are either uninterested or just not ready. To find out who is really interested in your product, you need to set up your lead scoring properly.
When it comes to Pardot, your lead scoring is based upon specific actions taken by your prospects, such as email opens, link clicks, downloads, etc. The idea here is to establish how much the prospect is interested in you. The more engaged the prospect is with your website and your content, the more confident you can be that they are interested in you and your product/service.
Alternatively, how interested you are in the prospect is a separate scoring system in Pardot known as prospect grading. In this article we won’t be discussing grading, other than to say that it is through the grading system that you can determine your ideal lead based on industry, geography, title, etc. This grade gets attached to the prospect so that when a prospect seems interested in you, via lead scoring, you should have sufficient data to determine how much you want to engage with that prospect.
So without further ado, here are our quick tips to help you get the best results from your Pardot lead scoring.
Assign different scores for different pages and different actions.
As one of the foundations of any good lead scoring plan, you need to be sure that you have some variety in your scores. You most likely have a few pages on your site that are “more important” such as a pricing page or product detail page. These pages should have higher point values than say, “about us” or your blog page.
Similarly, not all actions are equal. While it is great that someone has clicked on a number of your emails, and maybe even downloaded a paper, it certainly isn’t as much of a positive flag as someone who has submitted a form on a contact page.
Negative scores and degradation
Negative scoring can be just as important as varying your scores for “more and less important” actions and pages. Over time, prospect scores can easily become inflated, as clicks and pageviews slowly add up. Negative scores can help keep this in check, such as assigning negative scores for views of your “Jobs” page, as you don’t want to be focusing your time on job seekers, or automatically be deducting points for a prospect who has been inactive for a certain period of time.
Keep an eye out for Spam
Unfortunately, there are a lot of spammers out there, and for whatever reason, they may be filling out forms, and being entered as prospects into your system. A couple things to look for that may indicate a spam prospect: a form that is filled out without the expected capitalizations in the name or company fields, or inputted field data that is basically gibberish words.
One other thing to keep in mind is that leads using an email address from either Gmail or Yahoo may indicate less reliable prospects. Whenever possible, try to focus on prospects with business email addresses. In any of these cases, keep an eye out for prospects whose data doesn’t seem to be in line with what you normally see. If something seems off, they might not be a good prospect.
Setup a lead scoring threshold
Once a prospect gets to a certain point threshold, you can set up notifications for your Sales team. This ensures that Sales only get notified after a prospect has gone through a certain level of qualification. A simple automation rule should do this trick nicely. Pardot recommends initially setting this threshold at 100 points, if you are going by their built-in scoring rules. Take some time to think and plan for what your ideal scoring threshold is, based on your frequency of marketing content, and how you are scoring each action. And don’t be afraid to tweak your threshold over time if you aren’t getting the results you need right off the bat.
Think twice when you assign points for email opens
Learning this one the hard way can really throw off your scores. Don’t get us wrong, email opens are essential for marketing, but they aren’t the best indicator of interest or engagement. After all, some people open all of their emails just to have a clean inbox! An email opened does not necessarily equal email read.
If you are sending out a lot of emails, you should really consider not assigning a score for individual email opens, as it can give you an inflated score, that really doesn’t reflect how interested the prospect is. Better metrics to consider for emails will be click-through and content downloads.
Discuss your scoring model with the Sales Team
From the get-go, marketing and sales should get aligned on this process. Sales can help you determine which metrics have been the best indicators of a quality prospect in the past and they can help you decide at what scoring threshold they want to get notified about individual prospects.
With all of these tips on board, you should be well on your way to having a better-qualified group of leads.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz team
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Jun 19, 2018 | Salesforce Tips
Pardot Engagement Programs are one of the most powerful marketing tools out there, and now they can be repeated! If you use Pardot along with your Salesforce, you almost certainly appreciate just how easy and comprehensive your drip and engagement campaigns can be.
For anyone who isn’t familiar, the short version goes like this: Pardot Engagement programs allow you to set up a complex series of automated emails, actions, rules and triggers into what amounts to a smart marketing campaign that can engage your prospects and adjust based on their actions.
Previously, when a prospect was assigned to an engagement campaign, they could only go through the journey once, however as of May 2018, that has all changed. Currently in Beta, Pardot will now allow you to re-assign a prospect back into a single program up to 10 times. You can also adjust how many days the system will wait before re-assigning, just to make sure there is a little space in between.
Being able to repeat engagement programs will allow you to engage with your prospects over a longer period of time because let’s be honest, not everyone converts the first time around. This upgrade will keep them on the path to receive your best content, and get maximum engagement!
Click here to learn more!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
