Pardot Summer’20 Release Notes – The Best Of!

In this article I will tell you about the top features of Pardot Summer’20 release notes, and…

Another spoiler alert: That’s not all, as a matter of fact, Salesforce has decided to merge two of this year’s release (May 2020 and Summer 2020), due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
So, as you can imagine, this release was huge in terms of new features and improvements for our beloved marketing automation platform, Pardot, and I am most excited to tell you all about them!

Go ahead and get started!

1. Finally, There’s A Pardot Sandbox!

Yes, you have read it right! Salesforce has come up with a developer sandbox for Pardot, and yes, it is generally available. This means that you can finally freely plan, build, and test configuration changes before you implement them live in your Pardot production account. How cool is that you can finally test operations in Pardot without feeling that you will destroy your entire marketing department in a single click? It feels pretty relieving to me, I must say!

To have this miracle sandbox at your possession, all you have to do is create a Developer Sandbox in Pardot by provisioning a new business unit from Pardot Account Setup within a Salesforce Full sandbox. So, as you may have figured already, it applies only to Lightning Experience, and in accounts with Pardot Advanced and Pardot Premium editions that are connected to a Salesforce account with sandboxes.

2. Say Goodbye To B2B Marketing Analytics Legacy Apps

This is more of a warning release note, but I still felt like sharing it, as it may be important to you. So, with Pardot Summer’20 release, datasets in legacy B2B Marketing Analytics apps will be no longer updated. If you are wondering what legacy apps are, I will explain it to you: these include any custom apps you made without selecting the B2B Marketing Analytics app template during setup. Sound familiar?
So, next steps and bottom line, if you’ve been using B2B Marketing Analytics for a long time and your datasets predate B2B Marketing Analytics app, then you need to migrate your apps to B2B Marketing Analytics 2.0. Don’t forget about this note!

3. Manage Pardot Users Inside Salesforce – Get Rid Of The Duplicates!

With Summer’20, Salesforce User Sync to Pardot has made it easier to manage users, as now you can assign users to Pardot and manage them directly from Salesforce Setup. This keeps Salesforce user profiles in sync with Pardot user roles. What this really means is that you will save precious time by avoiding duplicated work. As from now on, Admins will be able to manage a single user record in Salesforce, where they can assign a user to Pardot, instead of creating that user twice – one in Salesforce and other in Pardot. Useful, right? The cherry on the cake, this new feature applies to all Pardot Editions, so you have no excuse not to try it out and truly treat yourself!

4. Pardot And Salesforce Campaign Best Friends, Side-by-Side!

To simplify our lives when it comes to measuring campaigns’ efficiently, Pardot Summer’20 release has brought us a new app: Marketing Campaign Intelligence. And it basically brings two easy-to-read dashboards together in one place: the Campaign Engagement and the Campaign Performance dashboards. The first shows the prospect engagement data from Pardot, whereas the latter shows relevant campaign data from Salesforce. At the end of the day, you gain a holistic and integrated view of your campaign’s performance while simply reading data from both your CRM and your marketing automation tool. The idea is that sales and marketing users can better explore these dashboards and may even create an Einstein Discovery Story to predict methods that can optimize their plans for maximum engagement.
P.S.: Have I already told you why Pardot is key to align your Sales and Marketing teams?

Source: Salesforce

5. Empowering Reps With “Add to Prospect Lists” And “Add to Engagement Studio” From CRM Records And List Views

Still on the field of syncing Pardot (marketers) and CRM (Sales reps), Summer’20 has made “Add to Pardot Lists“ and ”Add to Engagement Studio Lists“ standard buttons to add to record and list view pages in Salesforce. This means that salespeople can now add prospects to Pardot lists right from the CRM, without even entering Pardot. So, imagine you are at an event, and you have created in Pardot a list to register prospects from that event. The Sales agent at the event, contacting with different leads may add those leads to the list, with no need to have access to Pardot. The same goes for adding prospects to Pardot Engagement Studio list, in which you allow Sales reps to send leads to related engagement programs, if applicable.
Undoubtedly this is a powerful new feature, but as the old saying goes: “with great power, comes great responsibility”, so just make sure both you (marketer) and your sales colleagues are on the same boat.

6. Get Your Attribution Data On Campaigns Smarter With AI

Einstein, Einstein, Einstein… No, I don’t ever get tired of artificial intelligence, especially when applied to marketing!

The majority of the attribution models we know, such as rule-based influence models, demand lots of heavy work from the marketers. To know the influence of our campaigns on our prospects, we must create a rule based on estimated weights, or enter individual attribution percentages for each campaign. So, I would say that most often, attribution models come down to guesswork and manual entry.
With Einstein Attribution, you can say goodbye to the heavy manual work! In fact, this artificial intelligence feature builds a model that’s specific to your customer base, and it changes and updates as new information is analyzed. Einstein Attribution Model can assign influence to several campaigns throughout the customer’s journey without any manual record creation. Thus, you can use a customized model created by Einstein learning to more accurately identify the most effective campaigns in your customer journeys. Quite useful, right? You can leverage your best behaving campaigns and boost the ones that influence your customers the least!

P.S.: This change applies to Pardot Advanced and Pardot Premium editions with Salesforce Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions.

Source: Salesforce

7. Engagement Data Is No Longer A Thing Of Campaigns and Accounts – Opportunities Have Joined the Gang

Before you could only see Engagement History Dashboards on Campaign pages, and Accounts, right? In this Summer’20 release, you can also see Engagement data on Opportunities too! Here, users can see activity counts, details about the activities’ associated campaign, a list of recent activity by related contacts. The cherry on the cake is that users will have access to interactive widgets that show tailored engagement data for their frequently viewed records.
Here’s what this feature looks like!

Source: Salesforce

I hope this article has been useful to all of the B2B marketers who took the time to read it! You can check more on Pardot Summer’20 release here! Subscribe to Stellaxius Knowledge Center to keep updated on the hottest topics of the Salesforce World! 🙂