Hello! Welcome to one more article about Pardot, the Salesforce B2B marketing automation tool by Salesforce! In this post, I will go through some of the features I found most interesting from the Pardot August 2019 release notes. All the features I will cover are now available for Pardot users to try out and start using to improve their marketing initiatives and metrics.
I chose to cover more in-depth the ones that I have already tested and found most useful. I will explain how those work and give you tips on how to best use them. Let’s go through them!
1. Pardot Handlebars Merge Language
Pardot is upgrading from Pardot Merge Language to Handlebars Merge Language (to which I will be referring to HML from now on). This feature brings Pardot and Salesforce unification one step further, as HML is already used in Salesforce email templates.
HML is available for Pardot email templates, list emails, 1:1 emails, dynamic content and user signatures. To use it you will have to upgrade your account. But don’t worry, Pardot will show you in the main dashboard the option to upgrade immediately. However, keep in mind that HML doesn’t work yet for landing pages and Pardot forms, so make sure you don’t have dynamic content with HML being used in your landing pages or forms.
Now that you know how to upgrade, let’s see what has changed:
Thanks to this Pardot August 2019 release, you can now add merge fields to personalize your assets directly from a list of all fields you can use, instead of having to search for the fields as you had to do with PML. So, just choose directly the field you want to insert as merge value from the table you see below.
You can also create logic directly in your asset to avoid strange things happening when the prospect doesn’t have a value for the field you chose to insert. As you may know, now you can choose in the field a default value to show up in case the prospect doesn’t have a value for that field. However, this could cause trouble, as you couldn’t adjust the text in your email for the case in which a value existed and the case in which it didn’t. Well… now you can! Let’s see how:
The only logic you can create is for Pardot to recognize what should happen when there’s a value for the merge field and what should happen when there’s not. For that, you should add an #if inside the merge value tag to signal that what comes next is what should happen when there’s a value and an else to signal what should happen when there’s not. Let’s see an example and how you should do it:
{{#if Recipient.FirstName}} // here you are telling Pardot that if the field First Name has a value
Hi, {{Recipient.FirstName}}! // This is the text that should be shown
{{else}} // now you are saying that if the field First Name doesn’t have a value
Hi, Knowledge Hunter! // This is the text that should be shown
{{/if}} // use this to signal that you are finished with the condition
The result will be:
Hi, Maria! – if the prospect has a value Maria in the First Name field
Hi, Knowledge Hunter! – if the prospect has no value in the First Name field
This is just a basic example. But, you can expand this by adding more merge fields and more conditions to your sentences. Just take into account the following limitations:
- The only evaluation Pardot can do is to see if there is or there is not a value for a field.
- If you have set a default merge value for the field in the field configurations and then set a condition statement for when there’s no value for the field, the default merge value will populate instead of the condition you have set up.
- You can’t use custom fields that record and display multiple responses as HML merge fields.
2. Get more insight from Engagement History
Engagement History is now a widely available feature to everyone using the Pardot Lightning App. It allows marketers to get engagement metrics on how leads and contacts engage with their marketing assets in Salesforce layouts, related lists dashboards, and Lightning components.
For those of you who are not familiar with the feature, let’s see some key points about it:
- To use Engagement History you need to have a verified Salesforce-Pardot connector.
- You need to have connected campaigns enabled for most of Engagement History features.
- This feature allows you to have Engagement History metrics for list emails, landing pages, marketing links, marketing forms, and campaigns as well.
- You can use these metrics as fields on a Salesforce campaign record for your Pardot connected campaigns by adding the fields and engagement metrics component to the campaign layout. Or, you can use these metrics to build custom reports, for instance.
- You can understand the recent engagement of a lead with your marketing assets, for example, by adding the custom Engagement History Lightning component to your lead, contact or person account record layouts.
For more information about the possibilities of the Engagement History feature, you can read this article.
But, what did Pardot August 2019 release brought to Engagement History?
With Engagement History you were only able to see information and metrics about your list emails, campaigns, marketing links, marketing forms, and landing pages. Now, you can also have data about the engagement with automated email types, such as emails sent from the engagement studio, completion actions and automation rules.
3. Define Engagement Studio Rules with multiple conditions
If you are using Engagement Studio, you surely know how annoying it can be to add several conditions for an action to happen, as prior to this new functionality, you would need to create an extra step for each condition. Now, you can add all the conditions in only one step, really useful right?
So, I’ll give you an example. Let’s imagine that you would send an email based on:
- Prospect score greater than 50
- AND Prospect Grade is greater or equal than B
- AND Pardot campaign equals Company Event 2019.
With the engagement studio we now know, we would need to create a step for each rule, whilst now you can choose to create a complex rule in which you would do the following:
You can also choose between the options: All conditions are met OR Any conditions are met.
4. Identify Steps Quickly on Engagement Studio Canvas
Engagement Studio gives the names to the steps you add based on the action or rule you decided to use. So, if you were to rely only on the 2nd new feature we talked about in this article, it could be confusing to understand to which “send email” the automated email metrics in Engagement History were referring to. This would happen because they all would have the same name in the engagement program steps (the name: “send email”).
Source: Salesforce Help – Pardot Release Notes – Pardot August’19 Release
Thus, with this Pardot August 2019 release, when you add an action, trigger or rule to your engagement program with the same type as the ones you have already added, Pardot will give them labels like “Send Email (1)”, “Send Email (2)” to help you analyze the information you get in engagement history.
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