Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release – Top 8 New Pardot Features

August 17, 2021
New Pardot Features, Salesforce Ben | The Drip

The Salesforce Winter ’22 preview release notes are here! New Pardot features will be arriving in September/October 2021 (check your specific dates here).

Winter ‘22 is a bumper release for Salesforce generally, and there are plenty of juicy updates for Pardot, too – ooh yes, this is a big one.

This release gives us more drag-and-drop capabilities (!), Slack connectivity, mailability insight, and more. Salesforce has grouped the new features and enhancements into categories (eg. “Marketer experience”, “Data and Content”, and “Manage and Extend Pardot”), however, I’ve gone ahead and ranked which entries appeal more to the average Pardot marketer (plus, saving you reading the 550 page document).

1. Drag-And-Drop Landing Page Editor for Pardot

The Pardot community has been teased with this for some time, finally, a no-code, modern landing page builder is here!

The Lightning email builder release gave us a taste for an easier, faster, building experience. The landing page builder will work in the same way – a components-based builder, which means blocks such as buttons, images, forms are available. Compared to the ‘Classic’ landing page builder, the new experience will make aligning blocks, and brand customization easier.

Build landing pages inside the Lightning Experience.
Users can start from saved templates/select approved images from Salesforce CMS.
Landing Page Source field: displays which LPs were built in the new experience/in Pardot Classic (image below)
If you are using the drag-and-drop email editor, you can start straight away with landing pages.

2. “Slack Notification” Completion Actions (Beta)

Yes, you read that correctly – Pardot completion actions will tap into Slack, to send notifications to sales/marketing users when a key prospect activity happens.

This comes at an interesting time. Following Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack (completed recently), the community anticipated big Slack-related announcements. Plus, email notifications are feeling a little tired, considering Slack is where most teams expect to get alerts (not their inbox). Another downside to email notifications in Pardot, is how much information appears (not customizable).

Users will receive a snapshot of key prospect data, and admins can customize the text!

A Slack app will connect to Pardot, with a Slack connector in Pardot.
Slack channels can be selected/deselected.
“Notify Slack channel” appears as a completion action option.

Note: this is in beta, which means you need to opt in first (via Pardot settings).

3. Use Lightning Experience Emails in Engagement Programs

Another big win for marketers! Now, you can “push” emails built in the Lightning (drag-and-drop) email builder for use in Engagement Studio programs. This plugs a huge gap that Pardot users were quick to grumble about when the new email builder was first released.

An “Activate for automations” quick action will appear on the email content record,
For each Engagement Studio “send email” action, you can enter the campaign, sender, and reply-to settings to use (nice! Previously, this was defined on the template level, which meant duplicating templates to tweak these settings).

Users will need the “Activate Email for Automation” system permission.

4. Create Custom Components for the Email Content Builder

Pardot’s drag-and-drop builder uses components (reusable blocks) – you’ll be familiar with the standard ones (image, button, etc) – now you’ll have the opportunity to add custom ones.

Custom components could make your email content more engaging. While there haven’t aren’t any examples currently, you can look at other interactive email examples, which is what I suspect Pardot is hinting to.

I haven’t included an image of the code (it’s not that sexy).

You may be asking how? Developers who are familiar with Javascript (a widespread, platform-agnostic coding language) will pick up Lightning Web Component skills quickly, and Salesforce Developers in your internal team/at your consulting partner will almost certainly be proficient in Lightning Web Components (LWC).

5. Prospect Mailability Insights (Generally Available)

You may have heard about the significant changes to how prospect mailability works – in other words, the fields that determine whether a prospect will receive your email, or not.

Here are the key facts:

All prospect records include a ‘mailability’ section
Update prospect mailability and opt-in status using Pardot automation (automation rules, prospect imports, and Engagement Studio programs).
Do Not Email field and the Opt Out field are decoupled. Now they operate independently, which reiterates that these fields should be used by different parties (ie. being controlled by the prospect themselves vs. an internal user).
Pardot Administrator or Marketing users can reset Bounce counts on prospect records.

6. Einstein Key Account Identification (Generally Available)

Einstein Key Account Identification “uses AI to surface the accounts with the highest likelihood to purchase” within your Salesforce org. You could say this new feature is Pardot Einstein Behavior Score at the account level (vs. the individual), and Pardot score on steroids.

The Einstein tier and insights will appear on the account record.
Add the “Tier” field to list views. Use the sort functionality in list views to rank accounts quickly.

Note: available for Pardot Advanced or Premium editions.

7. New and Updated Pardot User Permissions

With the mailability updates (point #5) you’ll be pleased to know that there are additional user permissions that will enable admins and marketers to update prospect mailability (and also restrict users who aren’t permitted to).

New user permissions: Update Do Not Email field, Reset hard bounce count, and Reset soft bounce count.
“Toggle Opt In Status” → now Update Opted Out field.
Which permissions are enabled by default, for who?Pardot Administrator and Marketing user roles include “Update Do Not Email field”, “Reset hard bounce count”, and “Reset soft bounce count” (by default)
Pardot Administrator user role also includes “Update Opted Out field” (and is available for custom user roles).
Sales user roles include the “Update Do Not Email field” permission for prospects assigned to them only.

8. Pardot API Updates (+ Trailhead Modules!)

Last month, we gushed over how great the developer.salesforce.com (the website for Salesforce Developers) looks following its big refresh. And what’s more, Pardot Developer documentation is included alongside all Salesforce (and its extended platform), no longer separate on its own site.

One standout is the “Developer Centers”, which pull together the documentation, dev tools (eg. Salesforce CLI, VS Code), code samples, Trailhead modules, and more.

New Trailhead modules to get to grips with the Pardot API:

(I will definitely be jumping into Trailhead to earn these badges!)

There are other Pardot API Version 5 changes (support for pagination, new endpoint for External Activity).

Other Updates

Customize Prospect Unsubscribe and Resubscribe Page Content
View IP Address for Prospect Activities in Pardot: hover over a prospect activity to view. Create more effective visitor activity filters, eg. you notice a lot of test clicks coming from a single IP, you can filter out that activity.
Farewell to Pardot Classic app/tab: scheduled for retirement in all Salesforce orgs by October 17, 2022 (it will no longer be available for new accounts from October 11, 2021). This is not to be confused with retiring Pardot’s legacy application of pi.pardot.com which is remaining intact and accessible to all customers
See Segmentation Prospect Lists ‘update at’ and ‘updated by’ on list views (the page you land on when you click on the tab).
Unarchived Dynamic Lists retain the prospects that were part of the list before it was archived.
Essentially, the Dynamic Lists are frozen when they are sent to the Recycle Bin.
Bring your own encryption keys to Pardot: add a layer of security to your Pardot account, and quickly destroy your data in a compliance emergency.
Plan for Pardot Drip Program retirement: remember Drip programs? There may still be some lurking in older Pardot accounts. If you want to keep them, convert them to Engagement Studio programs before the Summer ‘22 release.