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Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Welcome to the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), formerly known as Pardot. This update brings pivotal changes to MCAE, changing how you interact with prospects and optimize engagement strategies. Learn more about the latest features and enhancements for MCAE below.

Restrict Which Domains Can Display Account Engagement Assets

To help protect the security of your data, you can now restrict or limit iframing for your Account Engagement assets, such as forms and landing pages. From your Business Unit Settings, you can restrict iframing completely, allow iframing only for specific domains, or have no restrictions. Business units created after the Winter ’24 release have iframing restricted by default. Business units created before the Winter ’24 have iframing unrestricted by default.

Chart Historical Prospect Changes by Feature

Review prospect changes at a glance using the new Prospect Change Monitor histogram in the Account Engagement Optimizer. Easily focus on specific feature areas or view all changes across your business unit.

Restore a Paused Prospect by Deleting Their Visitor Records

Prospects are paused when their activity levels are high enough to impact Account Engagement’s performance. If you have a paused prospect who is important to your business, you can restore the prospect by deleting their visitor activity records. Choose a date in the past and Account Engagement removes the prospect’s activity records before that date. When you remove enough activity records, Account Engagement restores tracking for that prospect. If the prospect exceeds the activity threshold in the future, they’re paused again.

Design Engagement Programs with More Precise Wait Times

Prospects can now wait in Engagement Studio Program steps from 2 to 8 hours. Previously, wait times were limited to increments of days.

Update Email Templates with Invalid Senders

As part of the domain validation requirement from Spring ’23, Account Engagement doesn’t send email templates with a sender address that includes an unverified domain. You can now review templates with invalid senders on the Email Templates page. To continue using the template, change the sender or validate the sending domain.

Remove Unconverted Visitor Activity Records

Free up system bandwidth by removing old visitor records that didn’t convert to prospects. Use the new Stale Unconverted Visitors option in your Business Unit Settings to automatically remove unconverted records older than 365 days.

Account Engagement API: New and Changed Items

Access more of your data with new and updated objects for Account Engagement API version 5. Copy marketing assets from sandbox to production business units using Salesforce Flow.

Updated Objects in Version 5

New Dynamic Content Endpoint
Added support for Dynamic Content endpoint.

Optimized Exports
Improved large export processing speeds.

Query by ID Array
Added support for querying by ID array.

Other API Changes

Copy Marketing Assets Using API Version 5 for Flow
Now you can copy marketing assets between business units or from sandbox to production business units using Salesforce Flow.

New Account Engagement Sandbox to Production Flow
An example flow is included to help you model your own custom copy flows.

If you would like to learn more about the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, please contact us.

About Corrao Group

For two decades, Corrao Group has stood as a pillar of expertise, assisting B2B organizations across various industries and sizes in implementing and optimizing their business processes through Salesforce and integrated third-party applications. With an unwavering dedication spanning 21 years, we have cultivated a deep knowledge and understanding of Salesforce as power users ourselves. This recognition of Salesforce’s flexibility empowers us to cater to various departments’ needs, ensuring seamless alignment. Our mission is to seamlessly translate your business processes into Salesforce, promoting not only successful integration but also widespread user adoption.

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Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

WFH? Invest in Salesforce

Successfully running a company from home requires the right culture, employees, procedures, and maybe most importantly, technology. Some businesses who haven’t invested in a cloud-computing software such as Salesforce have been having a hard time adjusting to working from home. Salesforce is a cloud-based software that provides customer relationship management (CRM) and a suite of apps that go along with sales, service, marketing automation, and more. Salesforce becomes your central location to store all your important data, accounts, and deals. With a newly designed mobile app, take work on the go and be just as productive as you were on your computer. This allows businesses to run their entire company within Salesforce, supporting all departments with real-time data.

Managing Your Sales Pipeline with Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is a customer relationship platform (CRM) designed to support sales and marketing by bringing all your customer data into one central location. Leverage Sales Cloud to manage and automate day-to-day sales activities including lead assignments, quote generation, forecasting, Einstein Analytics, and more. Additionally, your sales staff will have full visibility into every deal, account, opportunity, customer, and lost deals. Sales Cloud workflows and task automation help you create tasks and a process to help speed up your sales cycle. When implemented correctly, Sales Cloud helps save you time and builds long-lasting customers.

Servicing Your Customers with Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a customer relationship service platform designed to help you manage customer support issues quicker and increase first-visit resolution. With historical data on every customer interaction, your team can personalize your service based on their problems and history. Additionally, Service Cloud offers a multitude of tools to help you meet the needs of your customers. Some extensions for Service Cloud include: Field Service Lightning (FSL), Knowledge Base, Web2Case, Email2Case, and Customer Analytics. When implemented correctly, Service Cloud can improve customer communication, enable team collaboration, and give you full visibility into the health of your customer base.

Automated Lead Nurturing with Pardot

Pardot is a marketing automation platform designed to help companies engage leads and customers, support sales with qualified leads, and grow relationships. According to Salesforce, “Customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37%” with Pardot (Pardot.com). Pardot gives you the ability to personalize your customer’s journey wit automated campaigns, targeted messaging, and predictive intelligence. Additionally, design and create email templates, content, landing pages, and more inside of Pardot. If you would like to learn more about Pardot, please visit our blog.

A Complete 360-View for Manufacturers with Manufacturing Cloud

Manufacturing Cloud gives manufacturers full visibility into their entire business operations. Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. New features such as sales agreements gives manufacturers insights into committed and actual order volumes, performance against the forecast, and other time-phased metrics. Forecasting gives manufactures the ability to take control of their business with smarter business decisions based on analytics. If you would like to learn more about Manufacturing Cloud, please read the blogs below:

Virtual Collaboration with Quip

Quip provides your team with a messaging collaboration platform that helps transform productivity and resolves issues faster. Provide your team with the ability to create, discuss, and work faster with real-time documents, spreadsheets, and data that connects inside of Salesforce. With full integration, your employees will no longer have to work together in multiple systems. Quip becomes your central location to collaborate with other employees on deals, documents, and more. Furthermore, Quip has a mobile app to view, update, and work on the road.

Maximize your Salesforce Investment

Since 2002, our Salesforce experience has benefited thousands of clients and projects. We understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is and how it supports every department in your business. The key to maximizing your Salesforce investment is to implementing the platform company-wide. If your business is struggling to work from home without a cloud-based technology, it’s time to invest in a technology like Salesforce.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

In its most fundamental structure, marketing automation software is intended to take time away from the most tedious workplace tasks, freeing up bandwidth for more strategic initiatives. With a powerful marketing automation software like Pardot, you can automate sales, marketing, project management, accounts receivable, and more. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits of optimizing your marketing automation processes, between generating leads, personalizing their journey, aligning sales and marketing, and more.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is a crucial component in any marketing strategy. Artificial Intelligence is giving you the analytics in real-time to find what content leads are engaging with on your website. Being able to track clicks, downloads, and website activity gives you more insight to understand what the visitors are interested in. Tracking customer behavior helps your sales team identify the pain points and needs of your prospects. In a study done by Invesp, “80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads, and 77% had an increase of conversion.” Having automated messaging, such as social media, emails, or lead magnets, will create more qualified leads for your company. Automating lead capture allows your marketing and sales team to further invest in strategy and business planning. Once the lead is engaging with your material, it’s time to start them on a customized journey.

Personalized Journey of the Customer

Let’s say you had an ad that someone clicked on and downloaded a lead magnet. The lead can now be put in a customized, automated drip campaign. Developing a library of diverse content to fit any and all of your prospects will serve as the foundation for your automation strategy. Your company saves time each time a prospect is automatically added to a drip campaign with content tailored to their area of interest. This personalized and relevant information to leads provides inherent value allowing you to stand out from the rest of the competitors. However, being able to track engagement with your content is a vital piece of the qualification process.

Accurate and Reliable Data – Reports and Dashboards

Choosing an appropriate marketing automation tool allows you to develop real-time reports in a matter of minutes. With big data you’ll be able to assess the effectiveness of past, present, or future campaigns. Your reports and dashboards, as with many tools at your disposal, will also come into play during the lead qualification process. Pardot’s automatic scoring system scores a prospect based on engagement with all of your marketing assets from email to landing pages to videos. Your sales and marketing teams will then have further insight on your prospect’s existing relationship with your organization paving way for better-informed decision-making in the nurturing process. However, your team may find that you have access to an overwhelming amount of data, and you’ll need a plan for identifying the most valuable among it all. At Corrao Group, we run reports every day to find the data we need to make improvements in our sales and marketing strategy.

Save Time and Resources

One of the most significant benefits of utilizing marketing automation is the increased bandwidth that comes with it. Imagine how much time you are spending on manually sending emails to leads or preparing posts on your social media accounts. Many different marketing automation tools allow you to have more time to spend on strategic planning to maximize return on investment. Free from the burden of many manual tasks, you’ll devote your resources to creating more engaging marketing content, working with your sales team, and building better relationships with customers. Improved relationships within your team and with your prospects is a win for all parties involved.

This explosion of AI technology over the past couple of years has allowed marketers to leave low-status, redundant tasks to AI while being able to focus on the more prominent creative marketing strategies with marketing automation. When leveraged for its full potential, automation software is not a tool just for sales and marketing. At Corrao Group, we created EZ-AR™, the first automated invoice generation and account receivable collection solution. What used to take hours upon hours of manual work, now gets done in minutes thanks to lessons learned in our experience with marketing automation.

Sales and Marketing Aligned

Disconnected sales and marketing teams plague organizations across industries, but marketing automation can bring the two teams together. Marketing automation provides help to the sales team by improving lead generation, lead scoring, and automated lead follow up for sales. The streamlined qualification and hand-off capabilities of a marketing automation tool connect the sales cycle from start to finish. Collaboration between both teams is vital to have, and the relationship of these teams should only grow closer as they work to maximize ROI at your company. Marketing automation delivers higher quality leads with more context based on the pain points and interests of each of these prospects, and all this before an initial phone call. It’s incredible what your company can do when you have both the marketing and sales team aligned, and working as one.

There are many more ways that marketing automation can efficiently and effectively improve your company’s time and revenue stream. Being able to have a powerful tool that can run different parts of your company with AI technology is becoming the norm. More and more companies are moving towards utilizing marketing automation; roughly 51% of companies are already marketing automation users with 58% of B2B companies planning on continuing to use the software or make the switch. Understandably, it can be a lot to handle, and if you would like to learn more, please feel free to contact us. Our marketing innovation combines technology and creativity in a unique experience that attracts, converts, closes, and delights.

4 Tactics to Improve your ABM Process

“97% of practice leaders, marketers, and executives said that ABM provided a higher ROI than other methods, with just under 40% saying it’s ‘much higher’” (Alterra Group). Account-based marketing is a strategy that can provide significant benefits to retain and expand existing client relationships. There are four main ABM tactics to utilize when implementing this process in your workplace: 1) Identify Target Accounts, 2) Target Decision Makers, 3) Engage with Personalized Content, and 4) Close Accounts, Report on Metrics and Expand Accounts.

1. Identify Target Accounts

Identifying target accounts is the first critical step in the ABM process as sales and marketing come together to highlight the accounts that are the best representations of their ideal client. There are four different ways to select your target accounts. This can either be done manually, through CRM reporting, Advanced Technology, or AI-Powered Insights. Recently, we talked about how Artificial Intelligence is transforming the ABM process, and with a product like Einstein Analytics, it becomes easier to collect and analyze current data while identifying additional, similar accounts. When determining the number of your accounts, there is no magic number as every company’s pipeline is different. However, we do suggest that you break them down into three different tiers:

Tier A: Highest value with the highest potential of closing; Hyper-personalized. Ex: 1-50 Accounts
Tier B: High value with great closing potential; very personalized. Ex: 51-200 Accounts
Tier C: Low value; not their ideal client profile, somewhat personalized. Ex: 201+ Accounts

In terms of the number of accounts you should have in your tiers, it depends on what your Average Sales Price (ASP) is. Therefore, if your ASP is low, you most likely will not have a good number of tier A accounts, and if it is high, you won’t have as many tier A accounts. Furthermore, the last step of this process involves defining what your Ideal Customer Profile is (ICP). ICP’s play an essential role in ABM because it is necessary to have an idea of what you want from a potential customer or sale.

2. Target Decision Makers

Once the list of your target accounts is made and separated by tiers, it is time to target who makes the decisions for the company. This becomes a powerful ABM tactic because by targeting the decision maker of the company, it helps speed up the sales cycle and help shape your content. Building out personas at this stage can be the difference that separates you from your competitors. While your competitors send out generic emails, you will be sending highly personalized content that will win over and resonate with your customers.

Some information you should look at to build personas are:

Role – What are their top priorities? Who do they interact with daily? Do they make the decisions?
Challenges – Find out their top problems so that you can offer the solution to those challenges.
Personal & Preferences – Find out top information about them such as their education, employment history, or what city they currently live in. It never hurts to help build report with whom you are doing business with.

It is essential to take the time in this step to build relationships with your clients. Not only will you have a higher chance of expanding their account, but you might have found a customer for life.

3. Engage with Personalized Content

To engage with contacts, you need to have relevant content using the information you gathered in the last step. Those tier A and B accounts will appreciate you taking the time to create a highly customized email just for their account and personas. It is essential to understand that not all content has to be personalized for each account as it would be too time-consuming for the company. However, for those tier A and B accounts, engaging with highly personalized content is a perfect ABM tactic that can show you did your research. Tier A accounts should receive content specifically made for them, while tier B accounts can receive content that is custom to their industry.

The next step is taking the inbound marketing roots and applying them to content you’ve created for the decision makers. Your timing of the content does not change; however, the delivery channel does. It’s important to understand that there are other ways of delivering highly personalized content than just emails. Some of these ways include executive events, direct mail, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings. Consequently, implementing these ABM tactics can help your company stand out from the rest of your competitors because these attention-grabbers and little details will not go unnoticed.

4. Close Accounts, Report on Metrics, Expand Accounts

Your team has identified your target accounts, built up personas and personalized content for each contact, and engaged them on respective channels. Now it’s time to close! The closing of the deal is only the start of your relationship. If you offer a service, your service team will now take over and keep the client happy. Once that is over, it is time to set them up on an automatic nurture email campaign that continuously checks in with the client. Having a nurturing campaign allows you to stay engaged with the client, and when they need more work done in the future, they will know who to trust with their work.

After a few months of utilizing ABM tactics, it is time to prove to your executives that ABM is here to stay. If they need more convincing about ABM, use statistics from target accounts to show engagement growth and confirm that your hyper-personalized content is resonating with the contact. If you would like to learn more about ABM tactics, please fill out the form below to grow your marketing or visit our website.

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Pardot Introducing Engagement Studio Timers and SSL for Vanity Domains

Don’t look now but Pardot is back at it with even more advancements! They’ve recently added SSL for Vanity Domains and customizable business hours for Engagement Studios. Let’s dive into these new features Pardot has released for us.

SSL for Vanity Domain
Tired of having to use go.pardot.com for your secure HTTPS connection? Now you don’t have to, SSL is now made available for your vanity domain. Giving you the ability to host your Pardot marketing assets under the HTTPs of your vanity domain.

Set up is really simple. From Pardot, go into Admin > Domain Management > Tracker Domain.

Building a Successful CRM with Salesforce Consultants

Imagine self-implementing a system as vast as Salesforce to find out 6-8 months later that you cannot prove its ROI. Meanwhile, you’ve already spent quite the investment already so that your budget is locked up for the rest of the year. For the past 10 years we’ve seen this all the time, and it is all caused by self-implementation.

Whether you have decided to pick Salesforce as your customer success platform or are strongly considering to do so, what usually follows is, “Can I self-implement? Why do I need to hire a consultant?” Yes, you can do implement Salesforce yourself, but it’s not recommended unless you have a Salesforce admin with over five years of hands-on experience. Although, we highly suggest against self-implementations as it usually does not lead to the proper transfer of business processes onto the platform. This comes from the Salesforce client not having the knowledge of what Salesforce can do as a platform when implemented company-wide.

New ’17 Pardot Summer Releases: Engagement Studio

Pardot summer releases

Summer is here! That means Pardot recently announced their new ‘17 summer updates. Just in case you missed it, they are making improvements to Engagement Studio.

For you long time users who may be familiar with Drip Programs, Engagement Studios are a new way to nurture prospects, customers, employees and more. Pardot is continuing to add new-and-improved functionality to Engagement Studio to improve how you can nurture and market to your audience.

Let’s take a look how these new 2017 Pardot summer releases can help effectively manage your nurturing programs:

4 Reasons To Go Professional with Pardot

With paid technology such as Pardot comes the need for ROI in order to continue using the tool. Pardot has three different editions: Standard, Professional, and Ultimate. Whether you’ve already purchased Pardot Standard edition, or are looking for insight into which edition to purchase, look no further. Pardot Professional edition has 4 very convincing features that your team can use to optimize your ROI.

1. Pardot Advanced Dynamic Content

By capturing important data points inside of Pardot, you can personalize your content to your prospects. According to Aberdeen, personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. Using Pardot’s advanced dynamic content, you can put the right content in front of the right prospects based on what information you’ve already collected about them. You can also use dynamic content on your website to personalize your prospects entire web experience with custom landing pages and forms.

Benefits:

Personalized content sent based on your defined prospect segments
Reduces time spent and manual errors when drafting/creating emails

Migration Guide: Making the Transition from HubSpot to Pardot

Marketing Automation Software has seen explosive growth in the past few years; showing a 451% increase in qualified leads, 14.5% increase in Sales productivity, and a 12.2% decrease in Marketing overhead (MarketingProfs). For Salesforce users, the best Marketing Automation Software is Pardot. Investing time and money in solutions that do not allow for seamless integration, smooth usability, and more holistic reporting of a customer’s experience will hinder your ability to outperform your competition, and for many, that means transitioning from Hubspot to Pardot. Pardot has the premier integration with Salesforce, the CRM leader (G2 Crowd), which allows for optimal performance, scalability, and reporting.

6 “Best of Breed” Platforms To Draw Visitors To Your Pardot Marketing Funnel

For your marketing funnel, Pardot is a powerful B2B marketing automation machine that works 24-7-365 to increase the velocity of your funnel with incredible synergy with Salesforce. The software is attractive to organizations everywhere because of its ability to engage better than anything else, but there are ways for users to really ramp up their results using supplementary marketing programs.

If you combine Pardot with these six top of the funnel (Awareness Phase) tools, you can save time and see a substantial boost to your marketing efforts!

Category: Pardot