Next-Level Email Marketing Strategy with Pardot’s New Features

With the cold weather months in full effect and many people staying indoors to keep warm, it can feel like there’s nothing exciting to look forward to until spring returns. But if you’re anything like us, the Pardot Winter ‘20 release is still keeping you on your toes! On January 6th, Pardot released its first of six platform updates with new functionalities and feature enhancements to be rolled-out incrementally throughout the year. Each release aims to help B2B marketers reach new heights and earn more wins through improved personalization capabilities and advanced analytics powering Engagement Studio paths. And after having a little over a month to familiarize ourselves with this latest release, we can confirm it doesn’t disappoint. There are several noteworthy functionalities and features in this latest release that help uphold Pardot’s reputation as an ideal marketing automation platform to empower B2B sales and marketing. So whether you’re a keen prospect hoping to implement a new marketing automation tool or a current user unsure of how to boost your marketing efficiency, let’s take a look back at the latest Pardot release and the 5 key capabilities that we think will help you earn high-quality results.   

1. Re-Engage Your Audience with Customizable Resubscribe Messaging on Pardot Forms 

In the latest Pardot release, you can now enjoy more control over prospect resubscribe messaging on forms. What does this mean exactly? Well, when prospects who’ve opted out of your email subscriptions want to resubscribe, a message appears on the form they fill out. Pardot admins can now customize that messaging when it appears on the Pardot form under the resubscribe tab in the form editor. You can also amend the wording or translate the messaging on a per-form basis or across multiple forms. It’s not difficult to do either. It all just depends on the number of forms you wish to update. However, you’ll first need to have Prospect Resubscribe enabled which takes about an hour to setup. You will also need to have Handlebars Merge Language (HML) enabled – which we’ll talk about more in just a second.  

2. Create Better Customer Experiences and Advanced Personalized Messaging

If you’re like our team, you probably cringe when you receive a personalized email or arrive on a landing page with obvious blank fields or junk data such as “Hi First Name” or “We’ve got great news for you, !”. Well, what if there was a tool that could adjust the messaging on marketing assets to ensure personalization mistakes like this were avoided? Look no further. With Handlebars Merge Language, which is used to deliver personalized content, you can be certain recipients are receiving the right message every time. 

If you’re an experienced Pardot user, you may already be familiar with Handlebars Merge Language (HML). If you’re not, that’s okay too. Nonetheless, it’s a significantly useful tool for personalizing the tailored content you send out to prospects. Previously, this personalization capability was only available for emails, but it can now be used on Pardot landing pages and forms. HML offers marketing users a more cohesive workflow with their data in Salesforce. HML’s key benefit is its use of #if statements. The great thing about this new feature is that it checks whether fields have data in them or not, which means no more cringe-worthy marketing mistakes. So, say you launch an email campaign with a form attached and the messaging will say “{{first name}}, we want you to sign up!”. If you don’t have the right data on that recipient, the #if statement can solve impersonal messaging on the form by effectively creating a new version saying “We want you to sign up!”.  

B2B buyers are increasingly expecting more customer-centric buying experiences and personalizing the content on your Pardot marketing assets is the first step towards building tailored customer experiences. By leveraging HML, you can ensure you’re always delivering the right personalized and targeted content to the right prospects. This will increase your opportunities to obtain high-quality leads and convert them into customers.  

3. Remove the Manual Processes From Your Day By Utilizing Snippets for Reusable Content 

You’re probably far too familiar with this scenario – Your company hosts a recurring event meaning every month or so you have to mindlessly copy emails and sift through the content for all the small details on the event making sure everything is crossed off your mental checklist – Event date, time, speaker name, location, registration link, etc. And of course, you have to do this to the initial invitation email, the reminder, and the follow-up. Even more, if you’re cross-promoting with other content. But with the new snippets update, this is a thing of the past. 

Snippets give you the power to reuse content across connected campaigns. They allow you to create robust blocks of text, images, and links that automatically update the emails using that content. We promise this isn’t too good to be true either. Imagine the next time you need to promote a seminar or webinar event. All you’ll need to do is update the snippet content and that will fix the event name, description, date, time, and links to all of the emails in your connected campaign.  

B2B marketing teams should use snippets to save time on tedious tasks and spend more time focusing on messaging and strategies that drive results.  

4. Leverage Einstein Behavior Scoring to Identify Strong Prospect Buying Signals 

Pardot Advanced Edition users can now take advantage of Einstein Behavior Scoring as a rule step in Engagement Studio or as criteria in automation rules to target the right audiences more effectively. By leveraging Einstein Behavior Scoring, you can pinpoint which prospects exhibit the strongest buying signals so you can deliver messages to them promptly and close deals sooner.  

Why is pinpointing buy signals important? Brands no longer have to rely on old practices such as generic sends days and times to identify qualified leads. Rather they can use true, meaningful indicators that prove if a prospect is ready to have a conversation.   

5. Gain Broader Visibility Into How Prospects Engage With You Through the Visitor Activity Export API   

Pardot Plus and Advanced Editions users can now retrieve large volumes of data from Pardot with the Visitor Activity Export API. This will allow you to export all of the data on the visitors you’ve been engaging with. Visitor data refers to any interactions prospects have had with your marketing assets such as page visits, form views, etc. According to Pardot, this tool can retrieve large sets of data “when you don’t need synchronous completion responses or when query limitations are too restrictive”. The Visitor Activity Export API will be a huge time saver when trying to export data into your business intelligence or analytics tools as well as your databases so you can do SQL queries for ad-hoc reporting.  

Brands can significantly benefit from using the Visitor Activity Export API. It provides them a powerful resource for advanced reporting on every touchpoint in the buying experiences of prospects they engage with. For instance, with the export API, teams can track the visitor activity of won opportunities to understand how those prospects engaged throughout the buying journey and optimize strategies for future campaigns.  

Final Thoughts

As you hit the ground running with new marketing activities, make sure you’re on the lookout for the rest of the Pardot updates to be released later this year. These new capabilities being rolled-out enable teams to save time on repetitive tasks and become more efficient as a whole. With Pardot marketing automation, you can spend more time on the important tasks that boost the bottom line and remove the manual processes from your day. 

Looking to start using or better leverage Pardot to gain new revenue, but not sure where to start? Schedule a conversation with one of our marketing experts today.