At Salesforce, innovation is key, and in the 2018 Summer Release, Pardot is finally getting some much deserved love and improvements.
Salesforce recently made some updates in their 554 page Summer ’18 Release Notes, and there are 15 updates/new features related to Pardot in this release. You can view all of the Pardot specific release features here.
Before I go into all the new Pardot features that I am excited about, I want to cover two things things that I am disappointed to learn about from the Summer ’18 release notes.
Twitter Changes Posting Policy
Of course, you can still post marketing content from Pardot to your social networks! But due to some changes in Twitter’s policies, similar content can’t be posted to multiple accounts simultaneously. When you make a social post, you’re now limited to using one Twitter account at a time.
In a previous role as the Pardot and Salesforce Administrator for a franchise with over 150 locations I loved to use the Pardot Social Connector to streamline the task of sending out a tweet on behalf of multiple people at the same time. In fact, I would do this for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It was great because it only took me a couple minutes to post to over 400 social media accounts on behalf of my franchise owners.
But back in early 2017 I began to notice some problems with Twitter. Sometimes my post would only go out to 30 or 40 accounts. Sometimes, the post would not go out at all. I reached out to Pardot/Salesforce support, but they didn’t really have an answer and simply told me to try again later. Fast forward to Summer 2018 and I finally have an answer: Twitter is trying to limit spam, hence the new limitations in Pardot of only being able to Tweet from one account per post. In this day of fake news and digital noise, I completely understand the reason behind Twitters decision to do this, I just wish they would have made up their mind and announced it earlier.
Use Responsive Layouts for Landing Pages
Pardot now (finally) offers 5 responsive prebuilt layouts that you can import, customize it, and then use to style your landing pages. You can also preview templates, so you can be confident about your design before publishing your template.
I was very excited when I first read about this. As a marketing automation consulting company offering training to new Pardot customers I interact with a lot of customers during the implementation phase, helping them to get up and running with Pardot and training them on how to use the different features in Pardot. Every time we talk about landing pages, the customer seems disappointed, confused and frustrated. They expect the out of the box functionality and access to landing page templates similar to the one’s they see on the Pardot and Salesforce websites that they frequented prior to purchasing Pardot.
Even though this is a new feature I am very underwhelmed. These new templates are okay, but implementing them and making them match the theme and brand of the rest of your company can be tricky without a through knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But it can be done. If you need help making your landing pages or emails responsive or just want them to look good, contact us for help.
That’s it for the complaints, now lets get into the fun stuff…
Below is a rundown of what the top Pardot features we are excited about and how they can help you streamline your use of Pardot and enable you to do more with Salesforce.
New GDPR Compliance and Security Features in Pardot
Permanently Delete Prospects
Honor your customers’ requests to permanently remove their personal data from Pardot. Before, when you deleted prospects, Pardot archived them in the recycle bin without the option to permanently delete them.
Changes to How Pardot Treats Prospects in the Recycle Bin
Pardot changed how the recycle bin works to help you with your efforts around data protection and privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Pardot no longer tracks prospects that are archived in the recycle bin, and prospects are only automatically restored if they submit a form.
Check out the in-depth article our very own Lara Black wrote on both the Recycle Bin and Permanently Delete functionality in Pardot.
Encryption at Rest – Pardot is Certified with Financial Services Cloud
Pardot is now certified with Financial Services Cloud! With Salesforce Engage, users can send one-to-one emails from their chosen interface while automatically logging all interactions in Pardot and Financial Services Cloud.
New Pardot Engagement Studio and Email Features
Engagement Studio Offers Pointers
Editing engagement programs in a hurry? If Pardot notices certain issues, it will pop up a quick note to say “Hey, you might want to review that change.” These include scheduling on a date in the past or outside of business hours. Engagement Studio will also let you know if you’re reusing an email template and the account settings don’t allow it. If all is well, just ignore the message. Or review the step to ensure that prospects get the info they need.
Let Prospects Repeat Engagement Programs (Beta)
Sometimes a prospect doesn’t bite the first time around, or you need to resend recurring marketing content, such as renewals or seasonal offers. Now you can set up engagement programs that allow prospects to flow through the program as many times as you want.
Preview Emails as a Specific Prospect
It can be nerve-wracking to send highly personalized emails because they use dynamic merge tags instead of plain language. And personalization can get complex quickly. If you ever wondered exactly how an email looks after the dynamic information is rendered, try the Preview As tool. Each time you build an email, head over to the Preview tab and click Preview As to see how your content looks to specific people on your list.
Have Some Fun with Emoji in Emails
Sometimes you want to have a little fun in your email marketing content. A friendly smile or a shining star might be just the thing you need! Try the emoji picker for email subject lines and body copy to spice things up. Here are instructions from Pardot on how to use Emoji in your email subject lines and social postings.
If you are B2B marketer you might ask: Why should you care?
The good news is emojis aren’t just fun – research shows they actually work.
Research from Mailjet revealed that Americans are 43% more likely to open an email if there is an emoji in the subject line. Another survey from Return Path showed that including emojis in email marketing can not only improve email open rates, but also inbox placement. The company found that emails with the sunglasses-face emoji in the subject line improved open rates from 21% to 23%, and inbox placement jumped from 88% to 93%.
But marketers should use emojis cautiously and sparingly. Choosing the wrong emoji or oversaturating content with emojis has been shown to negatively impact engagement.
Improvements to how Salesforce and Pardot Function Together
Match Leads to Accounts Without a Website Value
If you use the Matched Leads component and your accounts have low coverage on the Website field, you now get better match rates. When an account has no value for Website, the standard matching rule for leads on accounts scans the account’s top contacts. The rule aggregates the email suffixes on those contacts to match the email suffix on the lead.
See Fewer False Positives for Leads Matched to Accounts
When you use the Matched Leads component, you no longer get matches based on personal email addresses. The standard matching rule for leads on accounts now ignores email addresses ending in widely used domains such as gmail.com and yahoo.com.
Align Sales and Marketing on a Single Platform with Pardot for Lightning (Beta)
This is probably the most exciting thing I read about in the new release notes. Although the improvements are merely UX focused, these features provide greater functionality to Salesforce customers that have already made the switch to Lightning Experience.
The Pardot for Lightning app helps your Pardot users be more productive by keeping them in Salesforce. The app is no longer a single tab, so gone are the days of using iFrames on page layouts or viewing Pardot in a separate window and duplicated menus with confusing navigation. The app has all-new navigation and layout tailored for Lightning Experience.
This feature is available to Salesforce users with the Allow access to all Pardot features permission who are mapped to a Pardot user. Salesforce admins must enable this feature. From Setup, enter Pardot in search, then click Get Started. Enable the app. Then, add the Allow access to all Pardot features app permission to a permission set that’s assigned to all users who need access to the app. After the app is enabled, it appears in the App Launcher for all users who have the app permission assigned.
For more info you can view these Salesforce Help Docs for Pardot for Lightning (Beta).
A note to remind your Salesforce Admin: Once you enable the new native Pardot lightning components be sure to add the new components to your Lead, Account and Contact page layouts, then remove the old iFrame sections, since they are old and no longer needed.
If you are curious to see some of the new features in action be sure to register for the upcoming webinar: Pardot Product Runway: Summer ’18 Release.
