Pardot Summer ‘21 Release: Top 3 Features

What do these new features mean for your daily marketing operations and how can you use them for greater insights?

Einstein Send Time Optimization

The overarching goal of marketing communication is to be able to send the right message, to the right people, at the right time. However, what is the “right time”? In B2B, is it right when people start their work day, or just before their work day, or is it when they are getting back from lunch?

Testing can be done by having emails sent to the same list at different times to see if there is a particular time that the team gets the most engagement, but then there is the factor of different time zones. Marketers can segment their prospects by time zone or region if they would like, but who is to say that two prospects in the same region are going to have the same schedules?

The point of Einstein Send Time Optimization is to alleviate all of this uncertainty of the “right time”. When enabled, marketers can send an email by entering the start date, time, and the time frame in which the email needs to be sent out. Einstein then uses an hour to analyze engagement data for each prospect to determine when that “right time” sweet spot is for each recipient. This takes B2B up another level in personalization, customizing the engagement timing of marketing communication to each individual buyer’s journey.

There are some factors to note with this Pardot summer ‘21 release feature. It is only available with Pardot’s new email send experience and is only available in Pardot Advanced and Premium editions with Salesforce Enterprise, Performance, or Unlimited edition, in Lightning experience only. The Einstein Send Time Optimization Feature is enabled under Marketing Setup in Salesforce.

Greater Insights into Prospect Mailability

Aside from removing the uncertainty of the “right time” for sending an email, this product release brings marketers greater visibility into a prospect’s mailability. Pardot users are familiar with the little red envelope that appears next to a prospect’s name in a list, but this could mean that there was a Hard Bounce (or five Soft Bounces), that the prospect was manually marked as Do Not Email, or that the prospect has Opted Out from email communications.

Prospect Mailability Upgrade

This Pardot summer ‘21 release removes the ambiguity of the red envelope on a prospect record. Prior to, Pardot users had to scroll down and look for the Opt Out and Do Not Email fields to see what had actually happened to make the prospect Unmailable, if there was not a Hard Bounce or Unsubscribe that showed up in their prospect activities. Once the upgrade is made to the mailability model, users will have a nice quick view of a prospect’s mailability towards the top of the prospect record.

This upgrade includes all Pardot editions with Salesforce Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions. Once this feature is available, a banner will appear on the Pardot Dashboard, in which case the Pardot admin can update the settings, so that users can take advantage of this feature.

Pardot Object Sync (Beta)

For organizations with Pardot Plus, Advanced, and Premium editions with Salesforce Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions and using B2B Marketing Analytics or B2BMA Plus, this feature is for you. This update is termed as Object Sync for Pardot (OSP) and the benefits are to have greater visibility into visitor activity data, have more flexibility for business units, and experience greater performance from the platform by having prospect data sync on its own from other large datasets.

Before this update, the B2BMktVisitor object only included the first and the last interactions, but what about everything in between? What was the entire journey like prior to the visitor converting as a prospect? OSP will now include all of that visitor data.

For setup, there is a step-by-step process guide under Marketing Setup, Reporting & Analytics, Pardot Object Sync (Beta). First it will prompt you to enable this feature for each desired Business Unit in your Pardot Account Settings. If you do not want to include certain business units, then you can skip this step in that Business Unit’s Pardot Settings, which is where the greater flexibility comes in.

In your Pardot Settings scroll down to just below the Google Ads Campaign menu option where you will see Pardot Object Sync (Beta) and select the checkbox that says Allow Prospect Custom Field replication in Tableau CRM and click Save.

Configure Pardot Accounts for OSP

Enable OSP in Pardot Settings

Back under Marketing Setup in Salesforce, the next step is to turn on the feature, Enhance Syncing on Custom Prospect Fields, when you toggle Enabled, a box will appear expressing the limitations and considerations prior to enablement.

Limitations for OSP

Click Enable and then the next step will be to Configure Prospect Dataset where you will click Select Custom Fields. Get with your team ahead of time and decide which custom fields you would like to sync over for reporting. What is the information that you have been collecting on your forms, enriching Lead and Contact records, that will help answer the business questions you wish to resolve with your reporting?

To streamline the selecting custom fields process, search for the name of the field in the filter and then select the field using the checkbox. Then in the bottom dropdown menu select Include. After completing this, there will be a pop up window that reminds the person after setting this up to return to the setup menu and sync the custom fields in Salesforce.

Selecting Custom Fields for OSP

Which to make it easy, is the very next step in the Marketing Setup process and all that has to be done is click “Sync Now”.

Sync Custom Fields for OSP

After the setup process is complete teams can create a B2B Marketing Analytics app that includes the Object Sync’s enhanced datasets for greater insights and platform experience.

The Pardot Summer ‘21 release brings several exciting features to Pardot users with the overall theme being greater insights for marketers, which is essential. In a fast-paced, ever changing environment, B2B marketers need data that they can rely on at their fingertips in order to drive strategic business decisions. Therefore get with your team, explore the product release notes, and discuss how you can start leveraging the different features to advance your marketing operations.

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