Salesforce and Pardot Naming Conventions: Best Practices

 

When your organization is implementing systems like Salesforce and Pardot, they are likely focused on the automation features that will soon be making their jobs much easier.

 

When thinking about strategy, it’s important to think about all the assets you’ll need to create and map out the logic and operation of those assets once they are put in place. While creating each asset such as a form, email, or Salesforce campaign, one of the smallest details that makes a huge difference down the road is naming conventions.

 

Why Naming Conventions Matter

 

Your marketing strategy is going to be built in Salesforce and Pardot. The assets created for events, webinars, emails, and website forms should be organized. While you may know the marketing strategy and what all asset names reference – remember, you might not be at the company forever. You will also be out of the office every now and then and someone else is going to cover for you while you’re gone. Will they know how to find everything quickly to execute campaigns? Probably not.

 

Naming conventions also come in handy when you’re going to build a report based on your marketing campaigns that you’ve executed on over the year. Showing ROI for the hard work the marketing team has been doing is key to showing stakeholders that marketing has value. Will you be able to report quickly and understand reports based on names such as “Email for November Event” or “Email to Prospects”?

 

Make things easy on yourself for not only reporting in the long-term but also your colleagues.

 

Naming Convention Best Practices

 

Naming conventions are highly recommended to make searching and reporting that much easier. The following suggestions are not set in stone, but they are guaranteed to help your team find marketing assets faster and make reporting more efficient.

 

What to include in your asset name?

• Dates! Always include the year in your naming convention. The month that the asset and/or campaign was created is also a good best practice as well to be able to focus your search.
• Asset Type. Is it an email you’re looking for? White paper? Webinar? Nobody will know if you don’t include it in the name right off the bat.
• Name/Topic of Asset. Okay, we know when it was created and the type of asset it is, but it might help to know the general topic or name of what you are building. Something along the lines of “Customer Newsletter” or “Quarterly Product Webinar” are more helpful than you realize!
• Target Audience. This piece of your naming convention could be optional, depending on how large your company is at the moment. If you’re smaller, then you may be strictly marketing to prospects. Even still, might be a good best practice to install early.

 

So how do we put all of this together?

 

It seems like a lot of information to have in a name, but here is where your abbreviations will come in handy, if needed. Typically, this would look something like this:

<Date> – <Asset Type> – <Asset Name/Topic> – <Target Audience>

 

Here are some examples:

• Email:
  032022 – Email – Quarterly Product Newsletter – Prospects
• Events:

032022 – Event – Dreamforce – Cust_Prosp (i.e. Customers and Prospects)

• Webinars:
  032022 – Webinar – Qrtly Product Webinar – Customers
• Forms (content and/or website):
  032022 – Form – Contact Us – Website
  or
  032022 – Form – New Product WP – Website
  (WP = White paper)

 

Build these campaigns in Salesforce and they will sift right through to Pardot with Connected Campaigns. That way, you only have to create the campaign once and you’ll instantly have consistency between the two systems. Implementing this as part of your Pardot strategy will have larger impacts on your operations than you realize.

 

Thank me later!