[!!] The Three most under-used Pardot features

Dynamic content.

Largely this is due to not having meaningful and widely available data/values on all Prospects in Salesforce and Pardot. It’s extremely hard or even impossible to be able to create custom and personalize content if you don’t have meaningful data points on your Prospect (Lead and Contact) records like product interest, country, reasons for conversion or anything that helps you to segment prospects in a product/offering specific segments.

Dynamic content can do magic for you as a marketer. Being able to send personalized and tailored content for each Prospect can result in a sale or just another email your Prospect ignores or unsubscribes from.

Pardot Progressive Profiling form feature can help you to collect more data points every time Prospects submits your form.

What is Progressive Profiling?

Progressive profiling sometimes referred to as a dynamic form, is a feature that allows you to select which form fields appear based on the information you already have about a particular Prospect. This allows you to collect new information about a prospect each time they fill out a form. Please note this feature is available only for Forms, not Form Handlers.

Page actions with completion actions.

I have seen many businesses losing an opportunity to have an automatic flow that can help their sales or marketing team to get more valuable insights by seeing how key pages, buttons, CTAs on the website perform.

One of the best practices is to add a Tag for every asset Prospect has downloaded. For businesses that already have curated great white papers and gated content, this can be extremely beneficial.

Long term, by adding a specific Tag for every download or interacted asset:

• Marketers will be able to use these Tags to segment Prospects and push them into tailored journey streams to share relevant information based on their previous interactions.
• Further, this can help your sales team to seal the deal as Prospects will be warmed up and introduced to your product or offering without you picking up your phone.

But don’t rush into this without laying down the foundation and creating your strategy and long term approach. Most importantly make sure to:

• Document your approach,
• Interaction points (pages, button, CTAs, links…),
• Value of each content prospect interact (will you also uplift their Score?),
• Define trash hold when Prospect is warm enough to be assigned to a salesperson,
• And educate your team on what and why is happening,
• Make everyone aware of what is their role in the process,
• And make sure to maintain and continue evolving your solution.

Use automation rules (or establish Assignment rules in Salesforce) to create meaningful MQLs.

If you are a company that is new to Marketing automation platforms might decide to take a slow and steady process and start with just implementing Pardot using one of the quick start packages that consultancies offer. These offer most of the times do not involve the setup of any complex rules and processes.

To get things right usually requires to have a presence of strongly established marketing and sales teams that have an opinion and desired automation they will see help their daily processes.

The easiest way to enable Salesforce and Pardot data sync is to setup Pardot Connector and set up a two-way sync meaning whenever new Lead/Contact is created in Salesforce or new Prospect in Pardot it will be pushed across to one or another system automatically. This is fairly easy to set up, but what if:

• You are an international company based in multiple countries
• You have dedicated account executives for each territory
• You have dedicated agents for each Product
• You need to be able to distribute the load of leads equality across your teams
• Or MOST IMPORTANTLY you want to be able to push only WARM e.g. MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) in your Salesforce for your Sales team to see?

The best practice would be to first take all new Prospects through Welcome/Onboarding journey (you can read my other article that talks about 3 Pardot Engagement Programs every Business should have) and introduce your potential clients to your brand, company values and offering you have. By educating your customer you will be able to establish closer relationships as well as expand their horizons of the full offering you have.

Additionally, based on Prospect interactions, white paper/gated content download, email opens you will be able to learn and know more of who they are and what they want. So when Prospect gets to a salesperson, they will already be able to see the rich attribution that can help them tremendously in being relevant to your customer (based on what was their conversion point, what they already saw, where they clicked and what they downloaded). Saving both parties time.

I hope this was helpful/interesting to read.

If you have any article topic suggestions please let me know! OR?! If you have any questions - feel free to leave them in the comments section below. :)