Salesforce Spring ‘22 Release – Pardot Top New Features

December 22, 2021
New Pardot Features, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

The Salesforce Spring ’22 preview release notes have arrived! If you thought Salesforce couldn’t squeeze in more before the year comes to an end – you were wrong. We can look forward to more features and enhancements coming to Pardot in February 2022 (check your own org release dates here).

In terms of Pardot, this release focuses on closing the gaps in the Lightning email and landing page builders, account overviews to help audit your Pardot account, and bringing the Pardot API V5 to parity with V3 and V4. Here’s my run-down of what I think are the most important updates for Pardot admins and users to note…

Pardot Spring ’22 release overview page.

1. Use Lightning Emails in Automation Rules and Completion Actions

High on the Pardot marketer’s wishlist! Enhanced emails, built and managed with the Lightning email experience (drag-and-drop), were first available to use as list emails, then became available to use in Engagement Studio. Now, the gap has closed – you can now ‘push’ enhanced emails use in automation rules and completion actions.

The existing “Activate Email for Automation” button will make the template available to use across all three features (Engagement Studio, completion actions, automation rules). This is going to be a huge time-saver for marketers, getting rid of managing templates in both the Lightning email builder and legacy builder.

Bonus! You can also specify the tracker domain when activating automated Lightning emails. This means that links are rewritten with your preferred domain (read more…)

2. Pardot Lightning Landing Pages – Updates

The drag-and-drop landing page editor for Pardot was the flagship announcement from the previous release, Winter ‘22. The components-based builder, which works with blocks such as buttons, images, forms, was such a treat for Pardot marketers who struggled with the legacy builder’s user interface.

Like most Pardot innovations, the product team wants to get these capabilities into your hands as soon as possible – then add on to the foundation. In this release, we’ll find the following added to the landing page editor:

In-builder form styling: currently, Pardot forms inherit the landing page’s style – what if that makes it unreadable, or simply doesn’t look good? You can adjust label position, text color, fonts, background, button style, checkbox/radio button look and feel – all without having to tinker around with the layout template’s code. Note, you will still build forms in the old form builder, such as field labels and values.
Set a redirect for unpublished landing pages (per landing page, so you don’t have to use the default link set in Pardot Settings)
Header/footer code: the builder now supports script code, such as the JavaScript used to support Google Analytics tracking.
New prebuilt layouts are available.

3. Email Open Rule Audit Tool

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) announcement back in September sent many 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. This 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.

4. Completion Actions Audit Tool (Slack Connector)

When it comes to Pardot and Slack, there are many reasons why you would notify a channel when a prospect interacts with a Pardot marketing asset. Here’s more on what the Pardot Slack Connector does.

Aside from some connector improvements, there’s now a “Usage” tab on the connector’s settings, so you can see:

Which Pardot asset the Slack completion action is being used on.
The type of trigger (eg. form submission, email open, email click, custom redirect click).
Which channel receives the alert (and the workspace it’s part of)
When the completion action was created.

My guess is that this interface will be eventually used for all completion actions, automation rules, etc. Account auditing has always been tricky and time-consuming for these items.

5. Create Custom Components for the Pardot Email Builder

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.

Once the metadata package has been prepared, it should be deployed to a dev org to put it through robust testing. I predict we’ll see organizations create some amazing interactive components!

6. Metrics Guard Extra Layer

Metrics Guard has been enhanced. You may not know about Metrics Guard, but it’s running in the background, protecting your email engagement data every day.

Rest assured, the Pardot engineering team is constantly reviewing activity logs across all Pardot customer accounts to catch bot activity – that is, suspicious bursts of open and click activity that exceeds certain thresholds. This bot-caused engagement data is filtered out of prospect activity to avoid skewing reports.

7. Pardot API V5 – New Objects, Tracking and Consent JavaScript API

The Pardot API V5 will achieve parity with V3 and V4 in the Spring ‘22 release.
The new objects V5 will be able to tap into are listed here.
The Tracking and Consent JavaScript API aims to give you more control over visitor tracking (read more…)

8. Einstein Engagement Frequency

Available for Pardot Advanced and Premium editions.

You may already have encountered “marketing fatigue” with your prospects, where recipients get bored, desensitized, or irritated by the number of emails you’re sending. You may also be familiar with “recency and frequency” in Pardot, which helps to segment prospects so that you can suppress those who appear overloaded by emails.

Einstein Engagement Frequency automates the traditional “recency and frequency” (let’s admit that rules-based “recency and frequency” isn’t going to be very accurate/sophisticated!). The new, AI-driven feature “scans individual customer engagement behaviors to predict the optimal send frequency for marketing emails.”

As you can see below, “Einstein Engagement Frequency” is a new prospect default field that can be used in rules (eg. dynamic lists, Engagement Studio etc.), with the value “Saturated” if they are showing signs of fatigue:

9. Einstein Account Tier Field in Automations

Available for Pardot Advanced and Premium editions.

Einstein Key Account Identification “uses AI to surface the accounts with the highest likelihood to purchase” within your Salesforce org. “Einstein Account Tier” is a new score field which uses letters, similar to Pardot grading. You can now use this field in automations and segmentation.

Additional Updates

Visitor Filters apply retroactively: when you create or edit a visitor filter, it filters future activities from visitors who became associated with the IP address or hostname up to 90 days before the filter was created (read more…)
Lightning Templates for Salesforce Engage: If you’re using Salesforce Engage, this is a win that will avoid managing templates in both the Lightning email builder and legacy builder (read more…)
Activate External Activity Objects for automation: a new checkbox lets you quickly change the automation status of extensions or activity types (read more…)
Sender field in the Email Template dataset for B2B Marketing Analytics will be updated (read more…)