“Notify user” in Pardot: Alert the Sales Team with Email Notifications

July 21, 2021
Pardot Alerts, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

With so many options for Pardot’s “notify user” emails, it’s up to the Pardot Admin to decide what is helpful for their sales team – and what is just noise.

I’m going to borrow Connor Ebb’s three components for aligning the sales and marketing teams: “knowledge is power” (Engagement History Dashboards), “context is key” (Pardot scoring), and “speed is critical” (Pardot notifications).

The final component, speed, closes the loop on sales & marketing alignment after we have built a solid foundation of context.

How Does Pardot Notify a User?

Pardot can send real-time notifications when an action happens (a prospect activity). These are tied into completion actions and automation rules.

“Notify user”: Pardot sends an email notification to a specific user.
“Notify assigned user”: Pardot sends an email notification to the prospect assigned user (which is the lead/contact owner in Salesforce, if the prospect is syncing to Salesforce)

Pardot can send email notifications that summarize prospect activity daily, or system notifications monthly for admins. You can find a full list of these notifications here, or on the Pardot user’s record (Pardot Settings → Users → (cog icon) → Edit Preferences)

We’ll circle back to the activity summary notifications later. Let’s start with three popular use cases for real-time notifications that fire an email to the assigned user, or a specific Pardot user.

Notify Pardot User – Link Click

Pardot Custom Redirects (Marketing Links) enable you to track link clicks on your marketing content (your website), on third-party websites, and other locations.

Pardot enables you to notify a user when a specific link is clicked using a Custom Redirect (+ completion action).

Tip: choose your links wisely, it’s easy to get carried away once you fall head over heels in love with Custom Redirects! Focus on the key links that indicate specific intent, or provide insight.

Notify Pardot User – Page Visit

Pardot Page Actions perform an automated action when a prospect visits your website* – simple, but when planned out can be impactful. Page Actions stand out from pageviews because they target a specific page.

*or a page with the Pardot tracking code inserted.

Pardot enables you to notify a user when a specific page is visited on your website using a Page Action (+ completion action).

Notify Pardot User – Form Submitted

When a prospect submits a form, it’s a sure sign of intent. They have made a deliberate action, whether that be to request a demo, get in contact, or access gated content.

Pardot enables you to notify a user when a form is submitted using either a Pardot form or form handler (+ completion action).

What Could Improve?

While incredibly easy to switch on, the contents of the notifications are not customizable. The ability to customize Pardot notifications has been a highly requested feature on the Salesforce IdeaExchange; first raised 10 years ago it’s racked up 1,047 upvotes to date.

Why the delay? With every feature request, Pardot has to weigh up two options: to make a quick fix, or wait for the foundation that will enable them to build the long term, most scalable technology, that is incorporated with the rest of the Salesforce platform (remember, Pardot was not initially built ‘on platform’). The Lightning email builder, which is shared across multiple Salesforce ‘cloud’ products, signals that Lightning email templates could be used for Pardot notifications.

While you may disagree with Pardot’s decision to delay, there is some consolation in knowing that the future is much brighter.

Create Salesforce Tasks from Pardot

One Pardot action (via automation rules, completion actions, Engagement Studio actions) is to create a Salesforce task.

Depending on how closely your sales team works with tasks, this could be a better alternative to alert them about a key moment. Unlike emails, they are harder to ignore, especially if they are measured on completed activities.

A benefit is that you will be able to customize the message (comments) the user sees. If the Salesforce admin has set email alerts for whenever a task is created, that email contents can also be customized using Lightning email templates.

Alternative Salesforce Alerts

There are specific use cases where you can tap into Salesforce automation to trigger and send alerts. Salesforce Flow and Process Builder are ideal to use if the notification will not be an isolated action, incorporated with other actions on the Salesforce side.

I did say specific use cases. At the time of writing, you cannot reference Pardot marketing asset objects in Flow/PB. You can (of course) reference leads, contacts, and accounts, so you can base your triggers on any Pardot fields on those objects.

Another is ‘Scoring Category’, which exists as a separate object in Salesforce. The example below shows a Salesforce Flow being triggered when a score of 50 is reached in a scoring category:

Note: you would need to add a condition that specifies the name of the scoring category too.

Again, another benefit is that you will be able to customize the message the user receives using email alerts and Lightning email templates.

Daily Prospect Activity Emails

From my experience, the most popular of the list is the “Daily Prospect Activity Emails”, which emails a daily digest summarizing prospect activity for prospects assigned to the user (an ‘all prospect’ version is available, only sensible for small organizations…). Note that it shows a digest from the previous day (not designed for ‘pouncing’).

These notifications can be useful for organizations with account-focus sales teams that oversee a select number of accounts; without that laser-focused account ownership, these notifications have been cumbersome to work with (ignored by the intended recipients, in my experience). The format is a list of activities, using Pardot terminology, so it falls short with users who have little Pardot context.

Visitor Activity Geographic Filters

If you are keen on pushing visitor activity summaries (anonymous website visits) to other people in your organization, you should take advantage of geographic filters to avoid information overload with irrelevant activity being included:

Summary

Notification emails can be triggered by a prospect activity, or be a daily digest summarizing prospect activity. With so many options for Pardot’s “notify user” emails, it’s up to the Pardot Admin to decide what is helpful for their sales team – and what is just noise.

Tips for using Pardot notifications to alert the sales team will enable you to speed up the sales team’s reaction time, and bring them back to Pardot and all the intel it gives.

Want to learn more about aligning Sales & Marketing with the help of Pardot?

Sales and marketing have worked apart for too long. Great technology is breaking down the walls.

Download your copy of my ebook “Align Sales & Marketing with Sales Cloud & Pardot” to discover how I successfully aligned sales and marketing teams with Sales Cloud & Pardot.