5 Pardot New Year’s Resolutions for 2022

January 4, 2022
Pardot Admin, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

As Pardot holds its reputation as a best-in-class solution in a market that’s heating up, we’re expecting more exciting innovations throughout the year. Your success is not only down to what Pardot delivers; as a marketer, what’s even more important is how your strategy influences what you do with your Pardot account.

How will you seize all the opportunities within your reach? Here is my list of Pardot New Year resolutions, enjoy!

1. Switch to the Lightning Builders

This time last year, the Lightning email builder for Pardot was available for list emails only, and the Lightning landing page builder was only a rumor!

In the Spring ’22 release, arriving in February, the Lightning email builder will close the gaps in its functionality. Enhanced emails, built and managed with the Lightning email experience (drag-and-drop) will be available to use for list emails, Engagement Studio, automation rules, and in Salesforce Engage. So, is there any excuse not to use the Lightning builders now?

Switching to the new email experience requires you to follow some steps to enable it, and also a mindset change with how email records relate to one another. Check out these tips for migrating your assets from the legacy builders to the Lightning builders.

2. Design/Create a Custom Email Component

The Pardot email builder comes with standard components, third party components (eg. Vidyard) – and now Pardot/email experts can add their own components, to be reused across multiple emails throughout their organization.

Challenge yourself to make your emails interactive, and stand out from the crowd! While you’ll need a developer to create and test the package, you should be involved in the design phase and measuring prospect engagement.

3. Organize your campaigns

A classic new year’s resolution that always makes the list. Once you’ve nailed down how your campaign hierarchy should be structured, ensure you then wrap your head around all the related objects. Marketing asset records can be related to campaigns (landing pages, emails, forms, snippets etc.)

I’m anticipating ‘Campaign as a Workspace’ will continue to be enhanced.

We have already seen how Salesforce Campaigns have become the hub for end-to-end campaign management, eg. setting targets, creating assets with the new integrated builders, Engagement History reporting. The overarching goal is to make campaigns repeatable to boost user productivity.

Get organized now, and reap the benefits of upcoming capabilities.

4. Audit your Email Opens

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) announcement in 2021 sent some marketers into a tailspin. Without email opens being accurately captured, how would marketing automation function as desired? The answer circulating the community – you should rely less on email opens as a behavioral indicator.

Finding where email opens are being used across your Pardot account is a tricky and time-consuming task, even in a basic setup, let alone a huge enterprise org!

Luckily, the Pardot product team thought ahead. In the Spring ’22 release, arriving in February, a new page will show you which automations rely on email open data, identifying affected:

How many Engagement Studio triggers, and over how many programs.
Dynamic lists.
Automation rules.

5. Connect External Activities

Last year, I answered why External Activities (and the Marketing App Extensions that make them possible) are a big deal.

Bring engagement data into Pardot prospect records, appearing like prospect activities (in the new “External Activities” section on the prospect record).

External Activities are applicable for:

External platforms with no native Pardot connector, or
To extend the native connectors (redefining/adding activity types that aren’t provided by the native connectors).

Get creative (examples here!) and get closer to the dream “360 degree view” of each prospect.

Now you’ve seen my resolutions, now it’s over to you – what are you going to focus on in 2022?