Pardot or “to sell,” in Latvian, is, appropriately, the name of a marketing platform that ultimately serves to lead you closer to the sale. However, nurturing your prospects from initial touch to that sale is a delicate and often lengthy process. Pardot provides a number of tools that allow you to automate the marketing process from start to finish, but the open-ended nature of the platform can also lead to the confusion surrounding best practices. Below, we’ve put together a basic structure for you to follow while automating your processes in Pardot.
Tracking
Before your prospects are prospects, they could just be visitors on your website. A variety of tools in Pardot allow you to track visitor activity on your website and begin associating data with these future prospects right from the start. You’ll then be able to view all of their Pardot tracked activities once they convert from visitors to prospects.
Converting
Forms on your web pages and landing pages act as the primary instrument for conversion from visitor to prospect status. Using Pardot forms or form handlers allows you to automatically update prospect records for use in sorting and customization as you start to develop your marketing campaigns.
Grading
The prospect grading process should really begin before you dive into the many features of Pardot. Automating a grading process for your prospects allows your team to capture information surrounding the suitability of each of the prospects in your system. You can significantly improve your conversion rates by marketing to prospects who will see the relevance of your products and services. The platform provides you with a default grading model that may serve as the foundation for your prospect grading strategy, but it also presents the opportunity to customize grading profiles for an approach that will more directly apply to your unique offerings.
