What is Pardot?

With Pardot, you get:

• Lead Generation: Marketing tools to help fill your pipeline with a steady flow of high-quality leads.

• Lead management: Discover who your most engaged leads are, and get in touch with them first.

• Email marketing: Create beautiful automated email campaigns that engage and deliver.

• Sales and marketing alignment: Sync with Salesforce CRM to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

• Artificial Intelligence: Exploit the power of AI to transform your marketing and sales efforts.

Lead generation

Landing pages are the perfect way to collect new names for your database of people who are interested in your organisation and your products and services.

Pardot makes creating a landing page a breeze. Create your templates and you can start building beautiful, engaging landing pages with forms to capture visitor data in no time. Templates and a visual editor make it easy for beginners, and you can customise landing page layouts by locking content areas for advanced customisation when you’ve got the hang of things.

It allows you to either use the existing forms on your website and pull data from them directly into Pardot, or create a new Pardot Form.

Pardot Forms allow progressive profiling. This is when you collect further data each time a person returns and fill out another form. For example, the first time someone fills in a form, you only ask for their name and email address. The next time they return, Pardot remembers them (via a cookie), and asks their company and job title.

There’s no need for the person to spend time filling in a long form with the same information each time, and you slowly build up more information about each individual in your database, allowing you to decide whether they’re a hot or cold lead.

Lead management

A known lead or contact in Pardot is called a ‘prospect’ – a much better word for who they are!

Every time a prospect (or lead) takes some kind of action, Pardot gives them a score. For example, someone who visits a landing page and fills in a form scores 50 points. If the same person then opens the email that was automatically sent the moment they filled in the form, and they download your latest whitepaper then they might score another 10 points. If they sign up for your newsletter afterwards, they score 20 points.

By scoring prospect interactions in this way, you can identify which leads – the ones with the higher scores – might be more interested in your products or services, and your sales team can take the appropriate action.

If your prospects are not quite ready to take the plunge, or they’re still learning about you and discovering what you have to offer, Pardot allows you to nurture them as little or as much as you want.

In Pardot’s Engagement Studio, you can automatically send emails based on triggers, such as downloads, time gaps, actions taken on a landing page, and other customer parameters. You can set up a re-engagement programme to deal with dormant B2B leads. Or you can set up a welcome programme for people who sign up for a newsletter.

Email marketing

Pardot’s email marketing tool lets you build emails quickly with the easy-to-use visual editor. With responsive, out-of-the-box templates, custom design capabilities, and with Pardot Engagement Studio, you’ll be able to send great-looking emails with the right message, at the right time.

You can build auto-responder emails for your landing pages and forms, ensuring that your prospects get the information they’ve requested directly into their inbox.

You can also personalise your emails, from having the recipient’s name within the email, and customising the 'from' address and signature to fit with a specific person in your organisation, to content within the email itself that automatically changes based on prospect criteria, such as industry.

And with advanced email reporting, you can see how prospects are engaging with your emails at every stage in your campaign. You can see open rates, and click-through rates, as well as exactly which prospects took action from your emails, allowing you to improve on each email time and again.

One of the great features of Pardot email marketing, for those that have Salesforce CRM, is that you can set up beautiful email templates that your Sales team can use to send a personalised one-to-one email directly to their hottest lead, ensuring warmth and human connection as prospects get close to becoming customers.

Sales and marketing alignment

Pardot connects seamlessly with Salesforce CRM, and makes Marketing and Sales come together like never before.

Your sales team can see detailed prospect activity history against your leads and contacts with Salesforce. They can see if someone’s received an email, opened it, and clicked on the call-to-action (or not). They can see if someone has downloaded a whitepaper and which one. All of this data helps them to have a better, more personal engagement with the prospect.

You can set up alerts so that your sales team receive an email. For example, when a prospect has completed a certain action, such as filling in a form, or reached 100 points in their Pardot score, provides Sales access to important customer insights without interrupting their daily schedule.

With this complete Pardot-Salesforce integration, your marketing team can measure and track campaign performance, draw insights based on the data, tie individual leads back to marketing efforts, see which sales opportunities have been driven by marketing activities, and how much revenue you are generating for the business.

Artificial Intelligence

Pardot Einstein is Salesforce’s AI technology. You can use it to examine data from Pardot and Salesforce, and use it to prioritise work for your sales and marketing teams. Pardot Einstein needs quite a bit of data to get started and get working, but with enough data in your system,

Pardot Einstein can automatically show you what type of prospect most often engages with your marketing in the form of scores and insights.

Lead Scoring finds prospects that are most likely to become customers based on their persona data, such as industry and seniority, for example. You use Einstein to score your leads based on how well they fit with your organisation’s successful conversion and win patterns. Predictive lead scoring provides a simpler, faster, and more accurate solution than traditional rules-based lead-scoring approaches.

Einstein Behaviour Scoring informs your Sales team when prospects are ready to purchase, based on their behaviour. You can add this score to your Salesforce records so your Sales team can immediately know to prioritise and focus on the people who have the increased likelihood of buying, saving time and energy.

Working with Codehouse

As the world of marketing becomes more content-heavy, and the demand from organisations to their marketing teams is to deliver faster, the need for marketing automation technology to streamline and shorten complex marketing tasks is vital in any business.

As a Salesforce Partner, with many years of experience working with marketing automation and CRM, we have a team of Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultants and Specialists who are ready to help when you make the decision to implement and work with Pardot.

If you’d like to know more about Pardot and how we can help your business take advantage, drive more leads, engage existing prospects, and join sales and marketing together, then just get in touch.

Images sourced from Salesforce.