Sending emails to your target audience at the right time is crucial for achieving a high open and click-through rate. However, finding the optimal send time for each recipient can be challenging, especially when you have a large list. This is where Pardot AI Einstein comes in to help you optimize your send times and improve the success of your email campaigns.
Pardot AI Einstein is an artificial intelligence-powered tool that uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the behavior of your audience and determine the best time to send your emails. This optimization is based on several factors such as the recipient’s location, time zone, and previous engagement with your emails.
How to use Pardot Einstein Send Time Optimization
To use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pardot AI Einstein for send time optimization, you simply need to enable the feature in your Pardot account. Once enabled, the tool will automatically analyze your email data and determine the optimal send time for each recipient. You can also set a default send time for your emails, which the tool will use if it can’t determine a specific send time for a recipient.
In addition to optimizing send times, Marketing Cloud Account EngagementPardot AI Einstein also provides insights and recommendations to help you improve your email campaigns. For example, it can suggest subject lines and email content that are most likely to engage your audience, as well as the best days and times to send your emails.
By using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pardot Einstein AI, you can save time and effort while also improving the success of your email campaigns. The tool’s advanced algorithms and machine learning capabilities ensure that your emails are delivered at the right time to each recipient, maximizing your chances of getting a high open and click-through rate.
In conclusion, Pardot AI Einstein is a valuable tool for any marketer looking to optimize their email campaigns. Whether you’re just starting out or have been using email marketing for a while, Pardot AI Einstein can help you take your email campaigns to the next level and achieve better results.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) prioritizes privacy and ethics, providing you with the marketing tools you need to stay compliant and transparent. Unlike other marketing automation software, we do not build individual profiles across unrelated internet properties and avoid intrusive tracking practices like browser fingerprinting. Additionally, Marketing Cloud offers resources like a consent framework to help you communicate with your audience in a privacy-respectful manner.
Apple is also making efforts to improve email privacy, with the introduction of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) launched last year. This new technology will impact how email marketing works, as tracking pixels used to determine email opens will no longer be effective.
The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement product and engineering teams are closely monitoring the development of MPP and its potential impact on our customers. Here are some ways to prepare for the changes:
Stay informed about MPP updates by following the latest news.
Review Marketing Cloud Account Engagement automations and scoring to see where you use email opens to inform campaign decisions. Consider using alternative engagement signals, such as link clicks and webinar registrations, instead.
Look for ways to directly gauge the sentiment of an email, such as including a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” option within the email.
Keep an eye on engagement metrics once the new Apple features launch, and monitor the difference between your current and future data to understand the impact on your audience.
Stay up-to-date with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement roadmap for privacy-friendly features and functionality, including new releases.
As privacy regulations continue to evolve, marketing will need to adapt. Account Engagement is ready to lead the way in engaging audiences in a privacy-conscious manner, using aggregate data, external activity, and direct consumer interactions to personalize marketing.
Innovative Automation Rules in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)
Automation Rules are one of the most powerful tools in the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) marketing automation platform. They allow you to automate repetitive tasks and trigger specific actions based on pre-defined conditions. Here are five creative ways you can use Pardot Automation Rules to streamline your marketing processes and enhance the customer experience.
Lead Nurturing: Automatically send targeted and personalized email campaigns to leads based on their behavior and interests. For example, you can send an email to leads who have visited a specific page on your website or opened a previous email.
Lead Scoring: Assign scores to leads based on their engagement with your brand. You can use Automation Rules to adjust lead scores based on various criteria such as email opens, form submissions, and page visits. This information can then be used to prioritize leads and determine which ones are ready for sales outreach.
Data Management: Use Automation Rules to keep your Pardot data clean and organized. For example, you can use a rule to automatically update lead information or move leads to a different list based on certain criteria.
Segmentation: Segment your database based on specific criteria such as location, job title, and engagement level. You can then use Automation Rules to trigger targeted campaigns to these segments.
Sales Alerts: Integrate Pardot with your CRM and use Automation Rules to trigger sales alerts when leads are ready for follow-up. For example, you can use a rule to notify the sales team when a lead’s score reaches a certain threshold or when a lead submits a form.
By using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Automation Rules in these creative ways, you can streamline your marketing processes, personalize the customer experience, and ultimately drive more conversions. If you’re not using Automation Rules yet, now is the time to start!
Why UTM Parameters in Pardot for Marketing Attribution
This article series is about Salesforce Pardot attribution using UTM parameters. We’ll first discuss closing the loop between the marketing to sales cycle, not in terms of customer outreach or a buying journey, but in terms of hard data, and truly understanding Return on Investment (ROI). And then we’ll talk about how UTM parameters are the link between top of funnel and the deal, and Pardot forms, landing pages and other digital assets can be configured to capture UTM parameters and align analytics tools and tagging strategies with Pardot marketing automation.
“The digital landscape is more crowded than ever, and the customer journey has become more complex“
Digital Engagement: A Complex Journey
So when we talk about Pardot, we typically think “Email”, as Pardot is functionally largely an email marketing automation tool. However, as a consumer I can’t remember the last time I ever bought a product or acquired services just because of an email. And I think this goes for every different other channel as well. I might look at email, but then I’ll read a review… Buyers might conduct a google search and end up on a vendor’s website, or maybe fill out a form on a social media profile.
As a marketer, I’ve been working with multi-channel marketing strategies, marketing infrastructure and media buying for most of my career, and the sheer number digital top of funnels channels have grown to be ever more complex as well. Most mature companies will use a mix of Google Ads, SEO driven organic traffic, and email newsletter campaigns. Traditional advertising has exploded into texting, into conversational marketing and chatbots, to more complex social media marketing, or serving dynamic or programmatic ads across any new number of sites…
And while multi-channel strategies have become easier to implement and manage with cross-platform and integration tools, there is often ton of confusion as to where leads actually came from after deals ultimately close.
“There’s still a lack of understanding exactly what a lead is, and marketing often pushes off attribution as a sort of IT task.”
Sales and Marketing work from different data sets
Marketers start at the top of the funnel, and push to establish KPIs as far down as possible, but quite often that isn’t too deep, and we often lose granularity as soon as leads are pushed into a CRM. As a marketer, throughout most of my career I’ve patched together multiple different analytics softwares, from GA for website traffic to GAds and FB Ads Manager for Ads, to Search Console + Moz for Organic analysis, to CrazyEgg and Optimizely for UX, and marketers often then try to push all of this into yet another business intelligence (BI) tool, like Google Data Studio or Tableau to make sense of this information, trying to look down the funnel.
Digital Marketers traffic in “goals”, “website conversions” and “leads”
Marketers look at the funnel from top down, using a whole slew of various analytics tools to see as far down into the funnel as possible
Tools include GA, first-party ad platforms or ad desks
Metrics include CPM, CVR, CPA, but there is rarely consensus between firms about what an actual lead isbetween different firms
Salespeople however- they look at customers from the opposite perspective. Sales managers, Rev Ops and executives typically start at a closed deal and work their way from the bottom up, attempting to establish methods or patterns by reverse-engineering successful sales cycles. They care about ROI, but the further up in the funnel they look, the murkier that picture becomes. How do we measure the impact of user experience or a facebook post on a particular sale?
Salespeople and executives deal in touchpoints with customers
Exec and sales understand the funnel from the bottom up, as it relates to a closed deal
Tools are CRMs, Accounting Platforms, BI Tools
Metrics are cost per customer, ROI
Fundamentally, the data that’s captured by digital marketers, and the KPI’s we use to measure digital marketing campaign performance all too often DOES NOT MAKE it into the CRM. The website where a prospect originated, the digital ad campaign, the channel, even the keyword gets discarded as soon as a lead is “captured” and stored in Pardot / Salesforce. Now there’s a reason for that, and we could spend another hour talking about privacy and where things are going with cookies and consent, but for the purposes of this discussion, the information gets lost.
There are a couple big issues… I see a lot of firms either rely on a manual process to to assign the source, either a salesperson filling this out- or often a “How did you hear about us” dropdown on a website… which I’m flabbergasted when I see CMO’s make marketing strategy decisions on inaccurate data (b/c imo buyers or liars).
OR, the other challenge is that attribution is done in Salesforce for one specific channel. For example, a number of event or webinar tools have great attribution tools that work with Salesforce campaigns. Similarly, there is a way to pass a variable along with destination urls for Google Adwords called the gclid or “Google click identifier”, but it only works for that specific Google Ads source. Some companies I work with use Zapier for integrations (like Facebook lead forms for example), which works great (and is an awesome Pardot tool btw).
BUT, in each of these three examples we’re kind of hacking the system to build attribution for one specific source, and there’s no way to measure the whole funnel. As soon as we try to start measure things side by side, we’re comparing apples to oranges to empty buckets where fruit should be… Ultimately the biggest problem is there is no standardization between channels.
Salesforce was not built as a Marketing tool
“There has long been a disconnect between Analytics and CRM Platforms“
Attribution has long been a manual or channel-specific exercise
Lead Source is often filled out manually by Sales, not automatically a function of a marketing initiative
Native integrations are channel specific (such as many event management platforms) or nonexistent
Instead, there is a platform-specific method of importing “gclid” parameters into Salesforce
Salesforce Campaigns membership for multichannel is marketing is challenging
If you’re an old school digital marketer, a lot of this will be old hat, but I want to introduce you to UTM codes, which create a thread from lead generation and sew the fabric of attribution all the way to the deal, closing the loop in our marketing > sales cycle.
UTMa are NOT a new technology; but in thinking of a martech stack, we have lead generation platforms, we have we CRM and our analytics stack, and it’s essential that they’re all working off of the same information.
UTM Codes
Close the loop in your customer journey lifecycle
UTM parameters connect the dots by passing marketing information, (almost like “marketing metadata”) along with a website conversion, to a prospect in Pardot, to a lead, to a contact, and a won opportunity in Salesforce, fundamentally allowing full visibility into the funnel from the top down, to the bottom up, and true alignment between marketing and sales/executive management.
Used by Markers to track the effectiveness of digital advertising campaigns
Introduced by Google Analytics predecessor “Urchin” Analytics
Parameters identify:
Referring campaign
Attributes to the website session until the window expires
Parameters may be parsed by analytics tools to populate reports
Elements of an Urchin Tracking Code Parameter
URL = The destination URL of your landing page
Source = The referring web source, typically the website or app that sent the visitor or click
Campaign = May correspond to Salesforce Campaign + Pardot folder, or be a digital advertising campaign AND Should be descriptive and sortable (Date and label at minimum)
Medium = A predefined group of channel “buckets” (i.e. Social, Organic, Paid, Email, Affiliates)
Content (optional) = Typically ad variation
Term (optional)= Keyword
So now I want to talk about what goes into a UTM code, and again, fundamentally we’re talking about creating a URL with bits of text appended to the end to pass information onto our website.
After we identify the destination url where we’re sending visitors, the first thing we want to think about is a taxonomy of naming conventions, as UTMs will be very valuable for reporting, but will also get totally out of control if we’re not organized.
We’ll want to familiarize ourselves with what available parameters there actually are, beginning with the source. This is typically the website sending traffic, but we’re writing these variables, so we can really define anything we want. If we look at large volume ad networks, we’ll see this information hashed for privacy, which is then humanized on the other end.
A campaign is typically the digital initiative we’re running, but this is going to very important if we want to align with our Pardot folder structure and Salesforce campaign *(especially if we’re using Connected Campaigns), but we’ll talk a little more about that later.
Mediums are channel groupings of major buckets of media. And content and term aren’t really used that much, unless we’re running a lot of digital media, and as Google has their own way of tracking keywords.
Campaigns Naming Conventions
I’ve had a lot of success aligning utm campaigns with Pardot folders and Salesforce Campaigns, and I typically advise that campaigns are named to be sortable, reportable and to descriptively indicate the purpose and details of a campaign.
And by descriptive, we can keep it simple, but I prefer to have as much information in a campaign, identifying first the launch date, the brand or service being marketing, the platform or ad type, the goal of the campaign, who is the target audience, all so if I see that campaign name later, I know exactly to which campaign it refers.
Reportable
Use unique search strings wherever possible
Sortable
Set standards for order, use of punctuation and case tense
Descriptive of Initiative
The date, targeting and intent should be apparent or a least decipherable from the name of a campaign
Resources for creating URLS
We can learn to code a utm link pretty easily, but there are a couple of free, widely used tools out there for coding UTMS. Google and Raven Tools (another analytics platform) use UTM Builders that we can use to just plug in values and spit out a code that we can put as our destination url, plug into bitly, or use in a custom redirect on a 3rd party link.
Now… not every company has this issue; and there are a number of platforms that sort-of solve for this disconnect, but there’s still no guarantee that any of these will 100% standardize all marketing attribution without an underlying UTM solution.
Datorama is in my opinion the coolest recent Salesforce Acquisitions, which comes with preconfigured connectors to most major marketing outlets, allowing we to pump data and elements of attribution from all sorts of marketing platforms into a single place to visualize and analyze.
Google Analytics 360 offers a native integration with Marketing Cloud (though not currently Pardot), which sounds pretty cool, though I’ve heard the data types don’t always line up. The integration is also free, but like Datorama, it’s far from cheap.
There are also some pretty cool AppExchange products out there, like this platform called gaconnector, which creates its own cookie (based on the old Urchin Script), that captures UTMs and a whole bunch of other user data, but with GDPR, CCPA and all sorts of new browser restrictions, I’d be hesitant to become reliant on a smaller platform.
And lastly, if we have significant development resources, we can invest in coding we own first party cookie to basically do the same thing. Instead of Google or Pardot dropping a cookie, we can hypothetically create we own first-party cookie..
But none of those are why we are reading this post; we’re going to talk about how to use Pardot to capture UTM values and pass them into Salesforce.
How do I leverage technology to gain a competitive advantage?
Most real estate industry professionals today don’t have the funds to be an iBuyer or investments from SoftBank. But while VC-funded brokers make the headlines, there are fundamental steps real estate firms must take to innovate, and brokers understand that those that fail to innovate will cease to be relevant and disappear. Technology will continue to push profit to the margins, either as a value player or a volume player, yet there are techniques that today’s leading brokerages are leveraging, using technology as a platform for future success.
Be Visible Online
In the midst of a digital revolution, a constant in real estate is that the industry will always be a hyperlocal business. Any brand looking toward the future must be visible and searchable online. Digital visibility begins on an optimized website, but certainly doesn’t end there.
A firm’s digital footprint is a living, breathing organism, stemming from a website but also including a strategy for directories social media, linkbuilding and conversion optimization.
Lead Generation
Real estate has always been a relationship business, but like many industries, digital transformation has shifted the focus away from the service provider and towards the customer, causing lead generation has become a vital pillar beside the referral side of a successful real estate business. Zillow, Boomtown and Realtor.com’s popularity has surged in recent years, as they move toward consumer-centric platforms (for example Zillow’s laser focus on CSAT Scores over the last few years), rather than MLS or IDX powered websites.
Arguably, the hottest front in the real estate arms race has been in customer relationship management (CRM), allowing agents to organize customer information, respond and track correspondence in real time, and automate tasks and workflows, and ultimately to scale a business.
*agents making over 100,000 are 2x more likely to leverage a CRM
A modern consumer consumes information through multiple channels, and successful brands present a unified message through whatever medium a consumer prefers, whether it be email, social media, the web, mobile or direct marketing (brochures, flyers and postcards). Similarly, a multi-channel strategy affords the broadest exposure for generating potential business while often being a multiplier to the bottom line.
Technology products are profoundly changing the real estate landscape, and how brokerages interact and communicate with clients. Digital marketing and CRM tools are allowing agents to innovate and scale, while traditional brokerages are being left behind. Digital transformation is no longer a benefit of innovative forms; modernization in today’s real estate market is mandatory.
I’m a blogger, SEO and content strategist at Forcery.
Pardot has existed as a standalone web application ever since its acquisition in 2013, integrated- but still independent of Salesforce. While the user interface has improved, until late 2018 Pardot users were forced to navigate to https://pi.pardot.com/, or access the app through Salesforce using a buggy iframe version of the app, that lacked any native integration with Salesforce Objects. In an ongoing initiative to bring Pardot onto the platform, Salesforce rolled out “Pardot Lightning,” a newly designed interface to incorporate new Pardot objects into the Salesforce platform experience, roll out Pardot-related Lightning Components and make the designed navigation more intuitive for Salesforce users. Finally, as more Pardot objects are brought into the Salesforce platform, Pardot Lightning will be the required interface for full Pardot functionality in the future.
How to Navigate Pardot Lightning:
Click on the App Switcher (nine little dots) in the top left-hand corner of the Salesforce interface, and then type in “Pardot” in the search bar. Pardot Lightning now has a completely separate Salesforce Application, instead of simply being found as a tab in the Blackstone App. Instead of the main navigation being located on the left sidebar as in the past (see left graphic), navigation has been moved to the native tab structure of the Salesforce Lightning Design Framework. Instead of (the side-nav) four categories of Marketing, Prospects, Reports and Admin- Pardot Lightning organizes the user interface into a Pardot Dashboard, Prospects, Campaigns, Automations, Pardot Email, Content, Pardot Reports, Reports and Pardot Settings tabs respectively, organizing the app into feature functionality rather than role-usage. (Custom User role permissions will still govern access to feature and prospect access.)
Features:
Better Organized Intuitive Navigation Menus
Absolute URLs in Salesforce
Access to new features
Engagement History (Lightning Components)
Support for Pardot Snippets
Future Pardot features and functionality
Improved Navigation:
Previously, menu navigation was located in a left sidebar (left), with all marketing assets nested in 2-3 layers of navigation, poorly organized in supporting any specific process, cumbersome to click through, and often confusing to end-users.
Pardot Lightning (above) exposes a newly designed top navigation menu of tabs across the native Salesforce Lightning interface, organized around fundamental focus areas of the Pardot app (Prospects, Campaigns, Automations, Email, Reports and Settings). More granular subdivisions of each tab category are exposed in a left sub-nav menu, which additionally exposes related Salesforce objects (i.e. Prospects menu Lead, Contact and Visitor Object related lists) as well, creating a much more seamless experience.
Absolute URLs:
A major drawback of the old Salesforce Pardot interface was that the app was loaded in an iframe within the Salesforce app. Refreshing the page would refresh the Salesforce page, resetting the embedded iframe to https://pi.pardot.com/. In Pardot Lightning, each Pardot element (prospects, automations, lists) has an associated absolute url (i.e. https://.lightning.force.com/lightning/page/pardot/prospect?pardot__path=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX), which can be copied, bookmarked and distributed internally without navigating to two different software platforms.
Pardot Engagement History:
Pardot offers a new Lightning Component called Engagement History to replace the old embedded VisualForce section that typically displays pageviews, email opens, link clicks etc.
Pardot Snippets
Snippets are reusable blocks of text, images, dates, or links that can be pulled into multiple emails, and managed from a single location. A common use case would be using a copyright footer date “Snippet,” which could be managed from a single location (in Salesforce) and which would cascade to all email templates, instead of the current process of updating each template ala carte. (Note: Pardot Snippets require both the use of Pardot Lightning, and upgrading to HML.)
The integration of technology into our daily lives has taken center stage in modern society. From our wrist-worn fitness trackers to the massive data centers powering the internet, computers of all shapes and sizes are now a ubiquitous presence. However, this interconnected world also poses challenges, particularly in regards to privacy and security.
To stay ahead of the competition and maintain consumer trust, companies must prioritize data privacy and security. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) is dedicated to helping our customers comply with existing and evolving privacy regulations while providing tailored solutions to fit their specific needs.
OBTAINING CONSENT
Consent is at the core of our approach to marketing automation. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) follows a strict permission-based email marketing policy, and offer our customers flexible configuration options for email consent collection and management. Additionally, we offer options for governing communication suppression, ensuring that data privacy remains a top priority.
EMPOWERING CUSTOMERS TO MANAGE THEIR DATA
Customers should have the power to manage their own data. That’s why we support the right to know, the right to be forgotten, and the right to rectification, allowing customers to search, correct, and permanently delete their personal data records. This support extends to restrictions on processing and restrictions on sale of information, and enables compliance with data portability requirements.
INCORPORATING PRIVACY-BY-DESIGN
We prioritize privacy in the design of our software interfaces and encrypt all data at rest by default. The Data Processing Addendum to the Master Subscription Agreement defines our compliance with GDPR and CCPA through Binding Corporate Rules, offering our customers the necessary certifications and security controls to comply transitively.
THE FUTURE OF PRIVACY
The future of privacy is one that is constantly evolving. From a legal and social perspective, the importance of privacy is receiving widespread recognition and support. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) keeps a close eye on these trends and will continue to support our customers in navigating a changing legal, technical, and social landscape.
Pardot Lightning (above) exposes a newly designed top navigation menu of tabs across the native Salesforce Lightning interface, organized around fundamental focus areas of the Pardot app (Prospects, Campaigns, Automations, Email, Reports and Settings). More granular subdivisions of each tab category are exposed in a left sub-nav menu, which additionally exposes related Salesforce objects (i.e. Prospects menu Lead, Contact and Visitor Object related lists) as well, creating a much more seamless experience.