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.

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Pardot’s Engagement Studio – Triggers Overview

Pardot’s Engagement Studio enables marketers to further customize their nurturing programs for their prospects, customers, and even partners. Engagement Studio has three main features that let you build your campaign around: Actions, Triggers, and Rules. Actions “do something”, Triggers “Listen for something”, and Rules “Check something.” Here we will be discussing Engagement Studio Triggers.

Drip Programs offer users 2 triggers: “has prospect opened email” and “has prospect clicked link”. (Note: Engagement Studio allows users to choose which link click to look for when using the “has prospect clicked link” trigger!). Let’s dive deeper into the new available triggers Engagement Studio provides us.


The following are new Engagement Studio triggers that can listen from the prospect’s activity record.

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Pardot’s Engagement Studio – Actions Overview

Pardot’s Engagement Studio enables marketers to further customize their nurturing programs for their prospects, customers, and even partners. Engagement Studio has three main features that let you build your campaign around: Actions, Triggers, and Rules. Actions “do something”, Triggers “Listen for something”, and Rules “Check something.”

Let’s dive deeper into the new available actions Engagement Studio provides us.

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How Do Lead Nurturing Programs Work?

Lead nurturing programs have a variety of benefits, most of which you may have read through already from multiple pieces of content. For this reason I am not going to show you the list of benefits that have been copied and pasted around the web but instead I am going to show you how you can actually achieve those benefits. Some programs have the end goal of guiding their prospects through the sales cycle while another program can have the goal of simply educating their prospects. The goal of these lead nurturing programs can differ but the approach to these programs should be similar, if not identical, each time. The process should be standardized and start with choosing the type of nurture campaign, choosing the audience, selecting the nurture’s flow and content, followed by reporting on the overall nurture campaign. We are going to walk through the process of building a successful lead nurturing program. 

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10 Reasons to Use Marketing Automation

marketing automation

1. Enhanced Accountability of Marketing and Sales: Accountability is a word that carries heavy meaning and without concrete proof, it can be easy to point the finger at someone else when you are the one that should be held accountable. With marketing automation, you know exactly what processes are being executed and all reports are easy to access. If certain marketing campaigns aren’t working because leads aren’t being nurtured, the marketing team will receive feedback, without the blame being put on sales (and vice-versa). This reduces stress in the office and allows sales and marketing to open up wider forms of communication.

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Overcoming the 3 Common Barriers to Successful Marketing Automation

1. LACK OF EFFECTIVE MARKETING AUTOMATION STRATEGY

Without an effective strategy, automating your marketing is almost impossible. 58% of the survey respondents from the Marketing Automation Trends for Success report, find this as their toughest barrier.

Whether you are already using marketing automation or not, rethinking your strategies is never a bad idea. Pardot created a Marketing Automation Success Plan Template that you can download and personalize to help map out your plan for success. If you need help setting this up, please visit our Salesforce Marketing Cloud page to learn more.

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4 Lead Nurturing Campaigns You Should Try Today

In our previous blog post we discussed the benefits of Lead Nurturing. In this article I will dive into 4 Lead Nurturing campaigns that you can try today. These 4 campaigns are allocated to specific stages in a customer’s lifecycle, from the welcome campaign to the customer retention campaign. 

Connecting

connecting campaign

The Welcome Campaign

They say the first impression upon meeting someone is critical and this applies to marketing content as well. When someone fills out a form they usually are expecting something in return, more information on a product, email updates, or specific type of content. By converting these autoresponder emails into a lead nurturing campaign, the prospect will begin their journey through your sales cycle. Your initial autoresponder should inform the recipient of the conversion point, speak about the nurture campaign they are on, and confirm their subscription to your marketing material. After some time, start to supply them with high-level information regarding the information they signed up to receive. Keep your educational and interesting and always provide them with targeted content based upon the information they requested to receive.

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The Benefits of Lead Nurturing

lead nurturing

Why Should I Nurture My Leads?

Lead nurturing requires thoughtful communications, not the copying and pasting of generic sales emails in attempt to receive a reply back. When a lead nurturing program is functional, your prospects are receiving targeted content based upon their actual activities and interests, which ultimately provides them with what they want to see. If a prospect has visited a specific product page of yours for about 5-10 minutes, why shouldn’t an email automatically be sent to that prospect with further information and a notification go out to a sales rep? 

The statistics

26% of today’s marketers receive a 10% – 20% greater response from their lead nurturing campaigns than those who use standardized email campaigns. On top of that, more than a quarter of marketers receive a 20% – 30% greater increase in responses using automatic lead nurturing campaigns in comparison to marketers who do not use a nurturing campaign. (Demand Gen Report, 2015)

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Goals: Marketing Automation | SMART Framework

marketing goals

Before you finish reading about how to set your Marketing Automation goals for the year, block out some time on your Calendar because it’s time to set goals. Really, you should block out time.  Are you busy this weekend?

It happens all the time. You set time aside for your team to set goals for the week, month, year, etc. but when that time comes around, there’s always something that is a higher priority and the goals meeting gets pushed back. Although there’s nothing wrong with that, it means business is going great! It does becomes a problem when it’s mid February and you don’t have your yearly goals set. 

Once your goal setting meeting begins, where do you start? Do you have a personal goal-setting model? Have you been using a proven model that the organization has been using for decades? Are you just “winging it?” (If it’s the last option, you should probably block out your whole next week). 

One of the more popular, proven models that work for a wide range of companies is the SMART Goal Setting Framework Model. We’d like you to hear about this framework from our favorite Marketing Automation System, Pardot: Setting Marketing Automation Goals. If you would like to learn more about marketing automation, please visit our Salesforce page.

Use Pardot Dynamic Content to Boost ROI

Using Pardot Dynamic Content is one of the easiest ways to customize and personalize your prospect’s experience. Using what you know about your prospects,you can display to them relevant content based on their specific needs and criteria.

Say you want to send out a mass email but you want it to speak to all the recipients on a personal level. Easy. You have the ability to create different variations of the email’s content that will only be seen by prospects that fit within specified categories. For example, you can send one email to a list of 5,000 prospects and the content will be different based upon their Job title. Job title is only 1 of many criteria examples that you can use.

Now your prospect thinks you took the time to send them personal content when in reality all you did was click a few buttons. Just about 74% of people get flustered when content sent to them is irrelevant to their interests. Make it easy on your prospects by giving them exactly what they want thus making it easier for you to turn that prospect into a customer. If you need help setting this up, please visit our Salesforce page to learn more.

Paying customers = ROI

pardot dynamic content

^ Your prospect when they open their custom email ^

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