How To Leverage Salesforce Customer Records To Build a Retargeting Campaign in Pardot
7 min
Many Salesforce users have been searching for new ways to leverage Pardot, the marketing automation solution that was recently renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. This suite of tools primarily allows marketers to identify prospective customers that have high conversion potential. When equipped with this unique product that has several amazing features, marketers are better prepared to identify, organize, and nurture all types of leads.
Within Pardot, there are endless opportunities to create segmentation within your marketing campaign. You can automate marketing processes and retarget existing campaigns to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts. If you haven’t been using Pardot to carry out retargeting campaigns, understand that doing so can allow you to make the most of every visitor. Rather than discarding leads that did not convert but have potential, you can retarget them with alternative campaigns, and take another shot at getting them on board.
Rather than discarding leads that did not convert but have potential, you can retarget them with alternative campaigns, and take another shot at getting them on board.
Pardot offers several possibilities when it comes to retargeting marketing campaigns. Continue reading to learn what steps you can take to get the best results in this effort.
1. Customer Records: Assess, Segment, Optimize, Repeat
Pardot helps marketers acquire, qualify, and convert prospects into paying customers. To achieve your desired results from a Pardot retargeting campaign, there are a few steps you must follow. These steps are:
Assess What Customer Data is Currently Available
Pardot offers users the opportunity to generate leads through landing pages, forms, and form handlers. Through them, you can collect visitor information and identify prospects. If your primary goal is to collect information, forms work best. Landing pages, on the other hand, are more suited for providing visitors with relevant, actionable content that has the potential to convert.
Each person that engages with your forms or landing pages is assigned a unique visitor ID that is connected to your account. This ensures that the visitor’s behaviour is tracked on the correct account, allowing you to collect data associated with each visitor.
Though, visitors have the option to opt-out of tracking, meaning you may not be able to collect data from everyone.
Here are some more detailed examples of information you can acquire through forms, form handlers, and landing pages:
Gather Traffic Information through Pardot Landing Pages
Pardot’s landing page feature is designed to give users the opportunity to present key information to prospects. Through them, you can encourage visitors to take the next steps toward making purchases. In many cases, landing pages are used to point visitors towards a form that they can fill out to provide more detail about what they need from your company.
If you have access to prospect data, it always helps to incorporate said data into your landing pages. By evaluating what has worked to attract specific sets of visitors in the past, you can make informed decisions about the layout, structure, and content featured on your landing pages. A tested landing page backed by informed design can be a valuable asset that leads plenty of visitors to click through to your Pardot forms!
Capture Specific Data with Pardot Forms
Pardot accounts feature a set of default prospect fields that can be applied in forms in order to gather information. These fields can also be customized to capture specific information that is tailored to your exact needs. Form fields can be configured globally or on a per-form basis.
How you structure your form will determine what information you can collect from visitors. Therefore, it is important to consider what information you need from prospects, then use a mixture of default and custom fields to gather that information. The types of information you collect at this stage will determine how effectively you retarget your marketing campaign, so it is best to be deliberate in how you structure your forms.
Use Form Handlers to Centralize Customer Records
Form handlers are similar to forms, but instead of being designed and managed completely in Pardot, form handlers connect Pardot to your external forms. This allows you to funnel external prospect information directly into Pardot. Though, because form handlers rely on external forms, you won’t have as much direct control over how information is managed.
For example, form handlers do not offer innate protection against bots nor do they provide progressive profiling features. You also will not be able to directly integrate form handlers with Pardot landing pages, which could lower form accessibility. While there are some benefits to using form handlers, companies that are not worried about maintaining current lead flow benefit more from using Pardot forms instead.
Segment Your Prospect Lists
Pardot segmentation lists allow users to group prospects together based on specific criteria that you select, such as product interest, website behavior, or job title. Using segmentation lists, you can get more specific with which groups of people receive what emails.
- There are two types of segmentation lists, they are:
- Static lists - These lists contain prospects that have been added manually or via a one-time automated process. No new prospects will be added to a static list unless you manually add them.
- Dynamic lists - These lists are populated based on automation rules. New prospects will be added to a dynamic list continuously when they meet the criteria of the automated process.
These list types have different use cases that apply in different scenarios. For example, a static list can be used to create suppression lists that keep certain prospect from receiving certain emails. By contrast, dynamic lists are often used to automatically enroll prospects who perform specific actions on your landing page or within your forms.
Understanding how to effectively segment your prospect lists gives you a greater capacity to perform specific retargeting campaigns. That is why it is always important to be as detailed as possible when using Pardot’s unique suite of tools.
Optimize Your Content Stream
If your marketing content stream is not optimized to balance push and pull strategies, you will notice less satisfying results in your retargeting campaigns. To overcome this, make an effort to evaluate if your brand benefits more from push marketing, pull marketing, or both equally. Knowing this will allow you to attract the optimal visitors to your landing pages, increasing your odds of converting those visitors into paying customers.
Of course, the key to optimizing is testing. Even if your content stream has a solid success rate, you always need to be on the lookout for ways you can optimize your emails, social media posts, and ads.
If you do this, once the time to retarget your campaign comes, you will be in a better position to identify what types of content are most likely to garner a response from visitors who engaged but did not convert.
2. Design Campaign for New Target Segments
Alright, now that you have implemented a marketing campaign, let’s talk about how you can retarget prospects that did not convert with a more suitable campaign, to potentially lead them into conversion. If you have taken the steps listed above, you should have a significant amount of useful data available to help you structure an effective Pardot retargeting campaign.
To get started with the design of your retargeting campaigns, first you need to identify the prospects that clicked through to your landing page or form, but didn’t convert. These prospects should be segmented from the prospects that did convert so you have the option to reach out to them using alternative methods. If you instead choose to bunch them in with the prospects that did convert, you won’t be taking into account the fact that these prospects are at a different stage of the sales process and thereby need to be met with unique messaging that gets them to take the next steps.
With the information prospects provided in a previous touch, you can adapt the content of the campaign and preemptively answer things these non-converting visitors may be curious about. In doing so, you increase the chances of them eventually converting into customers.
Once you have your list of prospects that engaged but didn’t convert, there are a few ways you can structure a retargeting campaign around them. For example, it may make sense to send these non-converters an email featuring a highly-effective call-to-action that leads to a different, more personalized version of the first landing page they engaged with.
If you want to get more specific with your retargeting campaign, you can also use lists and tags to identify prospects who were engaged based on how thoroughly they were engaged with your landing page, form, or emails. This is an ideal method of tracking engagement and separating prospects into cold, warm, and hot leads. With the audience even further segmented, you can specifically target them with content that is designed to keep them engaged and eventually convert.
3. Create a Pardot Campaign in Salesforce
Now that you’ve built a new campaign strategy, you can go ahead and create your Pardot Campaign either using Pardot or Salesforce, except for Connected Campaigns, that need to be managed from Salesforce. In order to create, track and report on Pardot campaigns, you need to have Pardot Admin or Marketing user permissions.
Pardot-Salesforce connected campaigns can be tracked and measured thoroughly and help Sales and Marketing teams understand where ROI potential is. While Pardot campaigns track customers’ first touch, Salesforce campaigns integrate into the sales funnel, can track any of the touches in the customer lifecycle and track their status. Though Salesforce campaigns don’t automatically associate a lead to a specific campaign, Pardot can do that by relating the prospect’s first touch with a Pardot tracking code or tracked link. It also houses all marketing assets. In summary, Connected campaigns bring the best of both worlds together.
4. Use This Information In Your Next Pardot Retargeting Campaign
If you intended to make increasingly smarter campaign design decisions through Salesforce and Pardot, you should focus on using key pieces of information to build out your lists. For example, many companies benefit from tracking and understanding user trends through number of customer visits received within a specific time frame, the customer’s lifetime value, customer visit location, and common customer purchase behavior.
By using all of these values in your retargeting campaign, you can make sure that the campaign is designed specifically to convert based on the precise individuals you are targeting. As a rule of thumb, try your best to segment audiences as thoroughly as possible. In doing so, you open the door to more targeted marketing opportunities in Pardot that otherwise may have been too difficult to implement.
Takeaways
Without very specific visitor data on hand, it can be difficult to create retargeting campaigns using Pardot. Therefore, you should put as much effort as possible into ensuring that your landing pages, forms, and form handlers are designed to capture the most detailed information possible from prospects. Even if these prospects don’t immediately convert, the information you will have collected can be used to plan future retargeting campaigns that are built specifically to suit different segments of non-converting prospects.
Make sure you follow the instructions featured in this article to provide relevant, timely, and valuable content that allows you to make the most out of your salesforce customer records.
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