As a marketing automation platform, Pardot continues to adjust and refine their offering to better serve their customers around the world. The latest of these updates is titled the “Pardot Winter ‘19 Release” and brings with it some simplifications and quality-of-life improvements that users have been looking forward to for quite some time.
In this blog post we review and highlight these features to keep you informed as the updates stream in.
The Pardot Winter ‘19 Release rolled out on the 15th of October 2018. The name itself is based on their fiscal year, which is 2019 rather than 2018.
The primary focus of the update is two-fold:
- Bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams.
- Complete the Engagement Studio update to save users time and resources.
The Winter ‘19 Update introduces one new feature and a major update to how one of their current features operate - namely Pardot in Lightning and a new and improved Engagement Studio.
Let’s take a closer look at these features.
This feature is Pardot’s best attempt yet at bridging the gap between sales and marketing teams that use the marketing automation platform. It has been seen in the past that these teams often struggle to work together across disconnected platforms.
Prior to Pardot in Lightning, Salesforce and Pardot campaigns would be largely run separately, with any cooperation between the sales and marketing teams taking place outside of each respective application. The results of these meetings would then be updated in each application manually by either sales in Salesforce, or marketing in Pardot.
Pardot in Lightning combines both Sales Cloud CRM and Pardot campaigns and allows users from each team and each platform to interact with each other.
Salesforce campaigns can now be used with Pardot assets and integrated into everyone's daily workflow, and marketing performance can be tracked and evaluated in relation to sales activity. In addition to this, sales reps using Salesforce can use marketing-built content to automate a personalised experience with their leads and contacts while receiving real-time Engage Alerts when leads interact with marketing materials so they know which leads to prioritise and follow up with.
Perhaps the most well-received feature of Pardot in Lightning is the ability to leverage Salesforce's collaboration solution, Chatter, on Pardot. Chatter helps keep both teams on the same page and in the loop with their daily activities. Sales and marketing team members may use Chatter at the start of their day to review and evaluate what has been posted the day before, prioritising tasks for the day ahead.
To summarise, the core features of Lightning allow you to:
Simplify user management across Salesforce with a single login, which means no more separation of Salesforce and Pardot users.
Direct integration into the Lightning experience allows all users to work within a consistent, seamless UI.
Campaigns no longer need to be in multiple locations. Instead, you’ll see a 360° view of all marketing activities across your org.
You can find out more about Pardot in Lightning from their official announcement blog and a report back from one of their early users.
Pardot's engagement studio is receiving some updates to how it operates and what it can do for their users.
These updates will allow users to:
Leads may now enter a programme more than once to remind them of recurring events, renewals, and other activities.
Users no longer need to programme steps manually. Instead, users may copy and paste up to 10 steps right from the Engagement Studio canvas.
This will allow users to see how their programme performed during a particular period in order to optimise programs over time.
Pardot User Roles now have an Engagement Studio custom user role permission for the ability to start, pause, or resume a programme. This helps marketing teams avoid bottlenecks with seamless approval processes.
Current users of Pardot will no-doubt be the most excited for the ability to easily copy and paste program steps. This update to Engagement Studio will save users a lot of time and frustration, cutting out repetitive and monotonous processes.
To get started, users will enter the new Selection Mode when building a marketing program. This mode will allow you to select up to 10 steps that can be copied using the new "Copy to clipboard" feature. Once these steps have been copied, you will be able to click any possibile step to use the new "Copied Steps" action and insert the copied steps. These steps will retain the same state and details they comprised of when they were copied, which means that email templates, wait times defined or specific send-on dates will be passed along with the steps. If users wish to change these details or insert new ones, that is possible too within a few clicks.
In essence, this new update will allow marketing automation processes to be created within a matter of minutes.
As a premier digital marketing agency, Demodia endeavors to keep you up to date with the latest and greatest digital marketing and marketing automation developments as they happen.
Stay tuned for more digital marketing insights, or contact Demodia today to keep your marketing tactics and strategies up to date and effective.
