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Segmenting Prospects From Customers in Pardot | THE DRIP

Segmenting Prospects From Customers in Pardot | THE DRIP

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.salesforceben.com

Very helpful insights! Keeping customers distinct from prospects helps in so many ways

Pardot Snippets – Coming Soon to Save Marketers Time

Pardot Snippets – Coming Soon to Save Marketers Time

When writing marketing emails, it can be pretty common to re-use certain details and bits of content not only throughout the email, but across various emails within a certain campaign. The more emails you are creating, the more you will use these pieces of content, and the more time you will spend on it. This can be a drain on your time, and pose a risk of error as tedious content needs to be created over and over.

To help avoid these issues, Pardot is introducing Snippets. Pardot Snippets are basically merge tags that are specific to a certain campaign, rather than the prospect account.

For example, say you have a campaign letting customers know about a new software product you are offering, you can create Snippets of relevant content, such as, “Release Date” “Product Name” “Product Details” and “Call to Action”. This way, you only have to type these bits of info once, and then use the Snippet tag in each email campaign to insert the exact same content, every time!

Even more powerful, is that the Snippets are saved, and can be modified at a later date. Using the same example as above, say a new product is being released a few months later. The email templates have already been created, using the Snippets. Now all you need to do is go in and update the snippet content to reflect the new product details, and just like that, you have a whole new set of marketing emails ready to go!

Click here to learn more!

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


 

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Better Marketing with Handlebars Merge Language for Pardot

Better Marketing with Handlebars Merge Language for Pardot

It’s every email marketer’s nightmare. An email campaign goes out and the merge tags don’t carry over as intended. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is because of poor data quality and bad data entry habits on the part of the team. This can certainly be frustrating, especially as the solution is a time consuming data cleanse. Alternatively, the cause may just be insufficient complexity in the merge language.  

Well, if you are using Pardot for your marketing efforts, you will now be able to upgrade your merge language to “Handlebars Merge Language” and make better and more personalized emails. 

 

 

How exactly does HML improve your ability to write emails? In a nutshell, it provides the ability to write “IF” statements. IF statements allow you to specify specific conditions to display content a certain way if the relevant field has dat, and then for that string of content to display completely different if that field has no data. 

Previously, Pardot merge tags would simply give you the option to have the data fields populate from Salesforce, and if that field is empty, you would have to write a generic entry to fill that gap. The most common example is “Hey %%first name%%”, with a backup value of “there” for the field. So you would either get the result of “Hey John”, or “Hey there”. It works, but it certainly isn’t very personal or flexible.

With the new HML tags though, you can set up so that the first result would be the same, “Hey John”, but if the first name isn’t known, you can make the whole string completely different, such as, “To whom it may concern” or if you want to have some fun “Hello you beautiful person”.

Click here for more details and examples of how HML tags will work in Pardot.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


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Optimizing Salesforce Autoresponse Emails

Optimizing Salesforce Autoresponse Emails

Automation is the name of the game when it comes to getting the most out of Salesforce. Capturing lead information with the handy web-to-lead functionality is one of the core elements for enabling Sales teams. Not only is the information the lead entered from the web form stored directly onto a lead page in Salesforce, but you can set up the system to auto assign a Sales rep, and have that user notified regarding the new inquiry.

But what if your Sales team isn’t going to be able to follow up right away? You don’t want to lose that momentum. Or maybe you just want to buy your team a bit of time to ensure they can do their research before reaching out? You guessed it, automation is the answer.

The best option here is the web-to-lead autoresponse emails. Once the template and sending filters are setup, an email will be automatically sent out to the new lead, as soon as their info registers in the system. As this feature comes standard on the CRM, we have a few tips below for setting up and optimizing your Salesforce autoresponse emails.

Setup your template (letterhead)

To make life easy on yourself, start by setting up a template, also known in Salesforce as a letterhead. This way, every successive, similar email you want to build will already have the same basic components, such as a header logo, and ensure they all look the same.  Click here for steps on creating a letterhead

(This can also be done in Pardot if you want nicer looking emails. By default, Salesforce offers limited formatting options for your emails)

Create the different variations dependant upon the use case

For this, you need to define the when and the why of each email you are going to be using. Did you capture the lead from a demo video, whitepaper download, or simply someone clicking a “contact us” button?

Best practice for both Sales and Marketing is to send different emails in each of these use cases. But now that you have your letterhead, the basic formatting is already taken care of. From there, create your first email, and you can always use the clone option when making more to quickly build variants that feature small tweaks.

Content is king

Of course, you need to make sure that the content of the email is relevant and specific to the use case. Don’t get off to a bad start by thanking someone for watching a video if they haven’t seen any video. A few other tips for these autoresponse emails.

  • Use merge tags – marketing researchers have proven time and again that adding in a merge tag and personalizing, like the lead’s first name, can have a big impact on improving how an email is received.
  • Give added value – another handy marketing trick is to follow up with added value to further engage. Whether it be a blog post, success story or any other content you have created, just be sure that it can add some real value for your lead.

 

Define your web to lead autoresponse rules

Once you have all of your emails built, it’s time to make sure they send to the right lead. For this, Salesforce allows you to build your sending rules on a large number of fields in either the lead, campaign or current user.

For example, a common use here is the “Lead Source” default field. Simply that you will send a different email to each lead, based on where they came into the system. Whichever fields you choose, do make sure to pick reliable fields that won’t be changing frequently, or can have data error problems. Click here for steps on setting up the autoresponse rules.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team


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Pardot Dynamic Lists vs. Automation Rules

Pardot Dynamic Lists vs. Automation Rules

Pardot B2B Marketing for Salesforce is an extremely powerful tool. You can link thousands of prospects and leads to your CRM and engage with them in all sorts of ways. However, with great power comes great… confusion? Specifically, how do you know which automation tool to use for each situation?

Pardot features a couple of primary tools to use for your segmentation and automation: completion actions, segmentation rules, dynamic lists, and automation rules. In this article, we are going to be looking at two of these, dynamic lists and automation rules. When combined, these two tools form the backbone of your automated marketing efforts.

What is the difference between dynamic lists and automation rules?

Are you saying, well duh, one is a list and the other is a rule? You aren’t wrong, but the thing is, dynamic lists are defined by rules, and automation rules can be used to create lists. So the lines aren’t as clear as they may seem.

In short, a dynamic list is a list of prospects that automatically updates itself, both adding and removing members, based upon the rules you specify. Automation rules can certainly be used to add prospects to a static list, but they can also be used for many other options, such as assigning prospects to a particular sales rep/team.

Both dynamic lists and automation rules run continuously, matching and working with any prospect who matches their criteria.

The short answer is, you should use a dynamic list when you are creating a list that will likely be changing regularly. Such as members who have yet to watch a video, or who have an upcoming renewal date. By using a dynamic list, not only will your prospects be added the moment they qualify, but they will be removed when they no longer are needed.

With automation rules, the best practice is when you have a rule, that will run continuously and be based on multiple criteria.

Use Cases

Dynamic List

ABC Coolers is looking to send a reminder email to each of their customers who have a subscription renewal coming up. This could be done via either a dynamic list or automation rule, however, the dynamic lists are the best practice, since we will be looking to create a list that is continuously changing. While the automation could be written to give similar results, the dynamic lists will yield better transparency, tracking and reporting options. As well as being cleaner in the system.

To do this, we would create a program in the Engagement Studio, specifying the email to be sent, a start and end point. Then we simply specify our new dynamic list as the recipient. Thus, whenever someone is added to that list, the engagement program fires, sending of the email. What’s more, the program to be set so that members can enter an unlimited amount of times so that every time a renewal is pending, your list will update and send those critical emails.

Automation Rules

For automation rules, better uses will be when a list is not needed. ABC Coolers is again looking to automate their process. This time, they want to achieve a couple of results:

  • When prospects view a landing page but don’t take completely the form, they want a follow-up email to be sent.
    • To do this, they would use a completion action attached to that landing page to designate if the form was completed. Then, the automation rule is simply “send an email if the page was viewed AND the tag does not equal completed”.
  • When prospects haven’t been active in a while, ABC wants to slowly reduce their Pardot Score, so that only active leads will be pushed toward sales
    • This automation rule would be based on any field that tracks how many X days since the prospect has been active, and then reduces the score.
    • For every greater power, multiple rules could be built, with incremental dates, such as 15 days with no action, 30 days with no action, 60 days with no action, and at each of these markers, the score is reduced. Oh, and just to make sure the score doesn’t go too low, you can also specify that it only applies to prospects with a score above zero!

So, hopefully, this quick dive into the use cases for Automation Rules and Dynamic Lists has given you a couple more ideas into how you can use Pardot to better manage your B2B marketing efforts.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


 

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