Salesforce Pardot Implementation: Tips to bear In Mind As You Venture Into 2023
5 min
Two years of a catastrophic pandemic were extremely difficult to bear for businesses worldwide. You must have either experienced the pressure first-hand or heard of a friend or a family member going through a rough patch. Thanks to the corporate heavens, 2022 ended this spell. This has been the year of recovery, getting businesses back on track with their doors wide open.
However, with all businesses back in the market like birds out of cages, this increased the already tough competition across industries. From IT and finance to eCommerce and real estate, competition in all major industries is higher today than it has ever been. This makes it even more important for brands to stand out from the clutter.
This is when Pardot comes in as your savior!
The marketing automation platform streamlines your marketing campaigns, especially in the realm of B2B marketing. If you are dealing with another business as your customer, Pardot helps you personalize your marketing services according to each of your customers’ needs and preferences.
From the moment your marketing and sales reps approach a prospect, Salesforce Pardot keeps track of your interactions until they convert into loyal customers. The marketing automation platform helps you manage your sales leads and create powerful email marketing campaigns. It also offers a plethora of features that make your brand stand out from the clutter.
Tips for Implementing Salesforce Pardot In Your Organization
Simply understanding the benefits offered by Salesforce Pardot will not help you get the traction you are looking for. It is important to set it up the right way. Irrespective of the quality of your services, you will not be able to make the most of Salesforce Pardot if you don’t implement it right.
It all starts with good research. Carrying out a thorough need analysis and market research will help you extract maximum value from Pardot. This will also let you configure the platform according to your business needs, making sure you achieve the desired results. However, a lot of factors need consideration before you implement the platform.
As you set up the marketing automation platform with your implementation partner, make sure you implement it the right way to reap all its benefits.
Here are some of the most important factors to consider while implementing Salesforce Pardot:
1. Make Sure Everyone Knows Their Roles
Implementing and operating Salesforce Pardot is a collaborative task. Different professionals working in different departments come together to make your marketing dreams come true! Despite being a marketing tool, Pardot required support from multiple departments to handle your business processes.
Here are a few major roles important for seamless Salesforce Pardot implementation:
Marketing Representatives
These are bona fide Pardot users. The onus of a successful Salesforce implementation rests on your marketing reps’ shoulders. From writing email copies and creating landing pages to charting out inbound marketing campaigns, your marketing reps are instrumental to the implementation’s success.
IT Team
Your IT team needs to work in close association with your marketing reps to optimize Salesforce Pardot. Your IT professionals will help you create vanity URLs for your landing pages and add records to your domain. Being a software solution, skilled IT experts can best handle the technical aspects of Pardot implementation.
Webmaster
A webmaster helps you embed the tracking code to your website and place inline frames for your lead forms. They allow you to track your prospects’ and customers’ journeys as they engage with your business.
Sales Reps
Lead management is a highlight feature of Salesforce Pardot. The marketing automation platform helps you capture, score, and nurture leads with state-of-the-art tools. One of Pardot’s key benefits is that it aligns sales and marketing teams with achieving common goals. Once a lead is qualified by your marketing reps (MQL), it is sent to the sales reps to convert the lead and close the deal.
Administrator
Your Pardot administrator is in charge of the marketing automation platform’s implementation and operation. From setting up permissions and assigning user roles to set up custom fields to adding activities for prospects, the administrator ensures that you make the most of Salesforce Pardot.
2. Don’t Overlook The Technical Setup
Implementing Salesforce Pardot is an art and a science. While it requires your team’s creative skills to chart out an innovative and persuasive marketing campaign, at the end of the day, it is a software solution. You need tech geniuses to set it up in a way that serves your purposes and helps you attain your marketing purposes.
Living in the age of digitization, you cannot ignore the technical aspects of setting up a marketing automation platform. From tracking customer behavior to creating landing pages, you need professionals with technical acumen to get your implementation project right.
Let’s say you run an eCommerce venture to supply goods to wholesalers. A sound technical setup will notify you when prospects visit your online storefront, help you personalize your store for different prospects, provide exclusive offers to your customers, and build persuasive landing pages that close your deals right away.
Here are some of the most important elements worth considering while handling Salesforce Pardot’s technical setup:
The Tracking Code
As the name suggests, the tracking code is the piece of code put on every webpage to track the visitors’ activities. Your webmaster will help you add the tracking code to your website.
Custom Page Score
From the moment you create your website, it is vital to identify the most important pages therein. While Salesforce Pardot provides you with a built-in baseline scoring system, it is crucial to set up a custom page scoring system according to your business needs to improve analysis.
SPF and DKIM
SPF and DKIM are necessary to ensure high email deliverability. They help you seek permission for Pardot to send emails via your domain. Make sure they are set before you start sending emails to your prospects and customers.
CNAME
One of the biggest benefits of Pardot is that it helps you build landing pages into the platform. As your landing page is hosted on Pardot, you will need to create CNAME, a vanity URL, to ensure brand continuity.
IP Whitelisting
Whitelisting your IP helps you ensure that none of your test emails are caught up in your company’s SPAM folder.
3. Create Lead Forms, Landing Pages, And Email Templates
- Let’s briefly understand how each of these elements helps Salesforce Pardot implementation:
- Lead forms help you obtain valuable details (phone number, email address, preferences, etc.) about your prospects
- Landing pages help you drive conversions and persuade your leads to engage with your business
- Email templates prevent your sales and marketing reps from designing and writing emails from scratch every time they approach a prospect/customer
Being a holistic marketing automation platform, Pardot helps you host these assets within its environment. Simply put, once you set up Pardot, you do not need to switch to a different platform for any of these elements.
4. Pay Attention To Importing Your Prospects
If you are switching from a different software solution to Salesforce Pardot, it is important to be precise and careful while importing your prospects. Make sure you have segmented your audience well and know which prospects/customers you want to import to Pardot.
5. Use CRM Connector For A Holistic Experience
Software integration helps you expand your organization’s overall functionality by merging data and features between two suitable platforms. If you are a Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite, or Microsoft Dynamics user, you can use a CRM connector to integrate your Pardot account with any of these CRM solutions.
This prevents your team members from switching between different platforms to perform specific tasks. It also reduces unwanted data siloes and increases the speed of your business processes.
6. Make Sure Your Content Assets Find Their Way
Along with everything else, it is important to import your content assets to Pardot while setting it up. These assets include whitepapers, checklists, infographics, guides, and other relevant content pieces important for your customers and internal teams. Pardot allows you to track the views and downloads of these assets.
7. Score Your Leads Well
The last thing you’d want is your sales reps sending days behind a lead that is not interested in engaging with your business, especially if you are dealing with other businesses as your prospects. Scoring your Pardot leads helps you prioritize the leads to be nurtured and followed up.
Just like examiners in schools and universities, come up with an ideal grading structure and set a baseline your leads should cross to be qualified. This helps you understand which prospects are actively interested in engaging with your business and lets your teams handle the leads effectively.
The Final Word
There is a plethora of ways in which Salesforce Pardot makes your lives easier. It allows you to understand your customers and make them feel as if your marketing campaigns are designed just for them. While helping you stay in sync with the ongoing tech trends, it ensures that you build healthy and sustainable customer relations.
