Salesforce Pardot Tutorial: Login, Pricing, Training & Review
The goal of this tutorial is to make you a skilled Pardot professional who leads a successful marketing initiative. It does not matter if you have no prior experience in working with a marketing automation platform.
It is a tutorial meant for all, whether a novice learner, fresh out from college, a Pardot admin just starting a career or even an experienced Pardot professional, who would like to explore B2B marketing automation.
Marketing Automation in Salesforce manages both Multi-functional campaigns and Marketing processes. It automatically spans across various channels.
What Is Pardot?
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation solution that works for Salesforce. It works for a business that sells to other companies and automates marketing activities. It unites your marketing and sales departments and enables to work better together.
When you work as a marketer for any enterprise, Pardot offers a centralized location to simultaneously manage all projects by reporting on their success. It tracks the prospects, interacting with your organization across all marketing channels, and enables you to tailor your outreach.
It is possible to customize Pardot to adjust as per your company’s needs. Please refer to the official website for Pardot here.
Here is a video on Pardot:
Why Salesforce Pardot?
People prefer Pardot as smart marketing automation – built on the world’s # 1 CRM platform, Salesforce.
The Pardot Customers find that sales revenue increase by 34 % and marketing effectiveness increase by 37 % on average. Check here for more information about this.
Pardot bridges the gap between sales and marketing. You can combine Pardot with Salesforce to engage and create perfect harmony. Moreover, it enables to track and measure the effectiveness of your campaign, right from the dashboard. Finally, understand the impact that marketing has on your business.
Given below are some images on Pardot:
Engage Buyers
Close Deals
Pardot Engagement History Dashboards
You may take help from the link to Download Pardot.
Pardot Basics
Pardot is a marketing automation tool, primarily used by B2B marketers. It automates the lead generation and nurturing process. It records the behavior of visitors and prospects from the website monitor with the help of cookies in a Pardot database.
Pardot comes with a set of automation tools including that of Automation rules. It helps your visitors and prospects throughout the sales funnel. The sales funnel comprises three stages i.e. Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing & Buyer Engagement, and Customer Acquisition & Expansion.
The funnel starts when you prepare marketing materials to sell your products. It ends when the qualified prospects get assigned to a sales rep. Marketing automation transforms inefficient sales funnel into a revenue-generating machine.
Here is a video on Pardot Basics:
An organization using both Pardot and Salesforce passes marketing qualified leads from Pardot to Salesforce, with the connectors.
Let’s explore Shopping Automation Terms and the Funnel Stages.
Terms in Pardot:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Lead Generation | Creating interest in your products or services through marketing efforts. |
| Visitor | An anonymous person who is visiting your website and now tracked in Pardot. |
| Conversion | The visitor submits the contact information by submitting in landing page or form in Pardot they convert into a prospect. |
| Prospect | After the visitor gets converted and gets identified is called a prospect. It is also known as the lead. |
| Lead Nurturing | Send targeted messages at specific intervals based on the prospect’s actions and whether or not they have met certain qualifying criteria. |
| Lead Qualification | Out of hordes of people with whom your organization interacts, it is nearly impossible for the sales team to contact each of them. The marketers have the onus of sending them the best prospects. Lead Qualification is qualifying the marketing/sales lead as a customer – contacted and engaged with your sales/marketing team. But the threshold needs to be decided when the prospect is ready for assigning to the salesperson. |
| Pardot Campaigns | The first marketing-related contact your prospect has with your company. A Pardot Campaign is equivalent to a Sales Cloud Lead Source. |
Pardot uses two metrics for Lead Qualification:
- Prospect Score: It is a numerical value to indicate how interested the prospects are in your product or service, based on specific prospect actions.
- Prospect Grade: It gets represented by letters, and indicates how well the prospects fit the ideal prospect profile.
Pardot Email Marketing
Email Marketing sends mass emails, tracks replies, and reports on them. However, there is a difference between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation.
Marketing Automation markets effectively online across multiple channels such as email, website, and social media, etc., and automates repetitive tasks.
According to the 2015 Salesforce Pardot Customer Survey, Pardot customers have reported a 34% boost in revenue after implementing marketing automation. Check here for more information about this.
It automates the process of interactions with potential clients across all channels. Pardot aids lead generation and automation of your processes. It supports email marketing based on permissions.
Permission-Based Email Marketing
Pardot does not allow to send spam or unsolicited emails. Spam is the opposite of permission-based email, and a relevant, personal email form that can be requested, and anticipated.
It enables us to create and manage opt-in subscriber lists with lead generation tools. Pardot also manages the opt-in process. It appends an unsubscribe or an opt-out option for every sent email.
Pardot Lead Nurturing
Lead Nurturing is one of the popular features of any marketing automation system. It communicates with individual prospects. Thus, it becomes necessary for lead nurturing campaign’s content, with emails or digital ads to be personalized.
It solves the problems by directly answering the target audience’s questions. It offers the groundwork for solutions that increase sales and builds customer relationships. Lead nurturing is unique, repeatable, and timely. It drives higher engagement by listening before you answer.
You need to surprise the customers by attention to details and earn a loyal customer base. It never yields immediate sales. It inspires engagement to keep the brand fresh in the audience’s mind throughout the customer lifecycle.
Pardot automates lead nurturing with triggered emails based on pre-set time interval and person’s behavior. Lead nurturing offers a successful strategy, to provide the right prospects on-time and every time. It saves time and resources.
Given below is an image on Lead Nurturing:
How Does Lead Nurturing Work?
Lead nurturing takes new prospects on a personalized tour of your brand solutions. The marketers play the role of tour guides and share the brand stories with the leads. The nurturing campaigns remind the existing customers of their part of a continuing brand story.
For further details please refer to how it works.
Why Lead Nurturing?
You can use lead nurturing for the following reasons:
- Your brand
- Your audience
What Are Lead Nurturing Goals?
Lead Nurturing has the following goals:
#1) Save Time And Resources
Automated Lead Nurturing allows you not to waste but dedicate your time to respond to new queries. The program takes help from pre-determined content and triggers for listening and responding.
It takes part in regular content delivery and constant assessment. It surely moves the more engaging prospects down the sales funnel and warms up the non-engaging ones.
Engagement Studio automates the lead nurturing campaigns and removes the slow process of tracking the individual leads throughout the cycle. It includes the delivery of qualified leads to sales.
#2) Deliver The Right Messages On-time
You send relevant messages with lead nurturing as the conditions that trigger messages get determined by you. You know customers by adapting your marketing content to the new information gathered.
Moreover, lead nurturing or engagement campaigns in Pardot have dynamic content and built-in segmentation. It allows the clients to receive updated, targeted communication. The campaigns are expected to respond to what the customers are doing and saying. Clients might view your pricing page or even share the job title or the industry.
#3) Build Automatic Customer Relationships
Automated lead nurturing has its foundation on strong relationships built over time. It automatically drips messages to the leads throughout the customer journey.
First. You think out a logical sequence of engagement. Next, create relevant content to move your prospect on a defined path. You may build a welcome series for new clients or create a solution-based series for the existing ones. A successful nurturing program depends a lot on varying the content to add value.
Pardot Engagement Studio
Engagement Studio, the next-generation lead nurturing program of Pardot, is the true intelligence engine of the marketing automation platform. It enables us to build, test, and report on engagement programs to engage prospects at every step of the customer journey.
It sends targeted emails based on prospect behavior, and critical qualifying values. The programs build a personalized experience with the prospects and turn into marketing-qualified leads.
Here is an image on Create Program with Engagement Studio:
Consideration For Engagement Studio Include:
- If a prospect gets removed from a list used by a program, then it stops moving through the program.
- If a prospect gets removed from the recipient list of a program and is added later, then it starts right from where they left.
- You can add prospects to a running engagement program regardless of the prospect’s position in the programs. But, on adding a new prospect to the recipient list, the new prospect will start at the very beginning.
- If a prospect decides to opt-out of the program list, then it fails to receive program emails. If a prospect is on multiple lists meant for a program, then it needs to opt-out of all lists, feeding the program to stop the emails.
- If no new prospect is added or processed in a program for 30 days, then it becomes inactive. You can find a dormant program and use the View dropdown to filter the Engagement Program List.
- You can clean your program list tidy or plan your next marketing step, with the unused programs.
Basic Sequence Steps To Build An Engagement Program:
- Build: Create and edit the logic.
- Test: Test the logic by program simulation as a prospect.
- Report: It is about how the program has performed.
- Activity: Track when the changes occurred in the program.
If you want to know about creating, testing, editing or reporting Engagement programs, then please refer to this guide.
What Is Branching Logic In Pardot?
Branching Logic takes customer journeys within the same program. Pardot provides three logical actions i.e. Actions, Triggers, and Rules. When a prospect clicks on an email link, Pardot notifies the concerned sales rep, and if not, the program instructs to send a second email for engagement purposes.
Given below is a diagram on Branching Logic:
Moreover, the logic option creates customized paths based on interactions. The program logic for engagement program looks at the actions, triggers, and rules that occur after the prospect joins the program.
A prospect that reaches the endpoint cannot go any further but it is possible only if there is a wait buffer stage before the end-stage.
Pardot Lead Generation
For understanding lead generation, you must gain insights on visitors and prospects in Pardot.
Here we will cover:
- How Pardot Handles Prospects and Visitors?
- Pardot Campaigns
- Pardot Forms and Form handlers
Given below is an image of Pardot Lead Generation.
[image source]
How Pardot Handles Prospects And Visitors?
Who are Visitors?
The visitors are anonymous people visiting your website, through a social media post, referral link, or a Google search. While browsing the site, the visitors often take actions such as clicking on a link, etc.
The visitors convert into prospects by giving their information or email addresses. Only then they move through the Pardot Lead Generation funnel or enable you to market your products.
Pardot tracks the interactions and activities of visitors with a tracking cookie on the browser while visiting your website for the first time. It uses the cookies to track the user activities, by navigating your website along with interactions with your website. It provides a complete view of browsing behavior.
Pardot sets two types of Cookies:
- Visitor Cookie: It combines the unique identifier for the visitor (visitor_id) along with the unique account identifier derived from the sites’ tracking code. The activities of visitors and prospects get stored with the tracking values.
- Opt-in Cookie: Pardot uses an opt-in cookie to stay in compliance with the “Do not track initiative”. It allows the user to opt-out of the types of browser tracking. The cookies inform on prospect behavior, interest, and activities. The trackable visitor data gets used by Pardot and appends to its prospect record, by monitoring the activities.
What is a Prospect?
Prospect is a site visitor who has given the email address. It has a record in Pardot, syncing with the corresponding contact/lead in Salesforce. An email sent to Pardot is for the prospects.
Pardot Campaigns
Pardot campaigns act as the first touch that the prospect has with online materials. The prospects have a one-to-one relationship with the Pardot campaigns.
It means that the prospects belong only to one campaign at a time only. The prospects must get attached to Pardot campaigns. However, Pardot campaigns differ from a Salesforce campaign.
Next, we will discuss the Pardot Forms and Form handlers.
Pardot Forms And Form handlers
A Pardot form collects the visitor information for your landing page or website. It converts visitors into identified prospects. You can use the forms to learn about user preferences.
Form Handlers
You can keep all the existing forms and send the data to Pardot. If you have a set of existing forms, or need control over a form’s design or even pass the data to Pardot from the fields in the existing form, then you need a Pardot form handler to collect the information.
Finally, we will delve into Pardot landing pages.
Pardot Landing Pages
A visitor reaches a web page on clicking an advertisement or a link – on a landing page. Pardot’s landing page builder creates a landing page. You use a custom layout template to style your layout page or use a stock template with a drag-and-drop editor.
Please refer to how to optimize your website to know more about lead generation. Check this webinar on driving lead generation with Pardot.
Pardot Lead Scoring And Grading
Finding the best leads offer a huge challenge to the marketing department. You save your time and resources with automatically qualifying leads with scoring and grading. It improves sales and increases close rates as well as marketing alignment.
Given below is an image on Lead Scoring and Grading:
[image source]
Here are some interesting data:
- Reduce in the sales cycle by 25%.
- Increase in website leads by 63 %.
- Increase in marketing productivity by 40 %.
- Increase in email subscribers by 40 %.
In this section, we will cover the following important topics.
Lead Qualification
Lead Qualification builds a dream team of clients and sends them to the sales team. It is possible to draw a bigger picture of a prospect’s interest and suitability, measured by the blending of two indexes i.e. Scoring and Grading.
You can assign point values to activities with a score and assess the importance of interactions with marketing content and website. It is possible to define specific information about a prospect with a grade. It creates a Lead Qualification model with an ideal score and a perfect grade, by codifying your ideal prospect.
Pardot automates your lead qualification model with various automation tools.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring, combined with lead grading enables us to pass the most qualified leads from marketing to sales. It shows how active the prospects are and the interest level.
A score is a numerical value assigned based on the prospect’s action. The action displays an implicit interest in your product/service. Pardot assigns default values to the activities initiated by a prospect, and the values set up in the Pardot account, as a baseline scoring model.
Check this video on Pardot Lead Scoring for better understanding.
Here are some actions that influence the lead score:
- Page View
- Site Searches
- Downloads
- Email Clicks
See here for more information on lead scoring and grading.
Lead Grading
Scoring is half of the lead qualification equation. You check the prospects to find how well they match with your ideal customer profile. A Pardot grade is a rating based on how a prospect’s profile matches the customer profile. Pardot gives an initial grade D to all prospects.
Some criteria for setting a lead grading system are:
- Location
- Industry
- Job Title
- Company Size
Please refer to the following link for further details.
Pardot Pricing
Given below is a screenshot showing the price of Pardot.
Comparison Of Pardot With Other Tools
Pardot Vs HubSpot
| Pardot | HubSpot | |
|---|---|---|
| Lead Filter | Pardot can filter leads into groups. Groupsconsist of those responding to campaigns run on historical data. Sales team focuses on high-quality leads with automated filtering and not waste time on poorly qualified leads. | It has a lead filtering functionality to create auto segmented lists comprising of prospects meetingpredetermined criteria. Itsets up specific lists to create engagement with potential behaviours – not more complex than Pardot. |
| Customer Retention | Pardot automatically nurtures leads for moving through the sales pipelines notifying sales reps with real-time prospect activities. It measures the ROI with closed-loop reporting. It has direct interactions with users/leads for nurturing relationships. | HubSpot rates better than Pardot for customer retention. It offers lead nurturing that automatically triggers timed follow-up emails based on behaviour. It has a robust automated feature for convenience. |
| Lead Management | Pardot comes with lead scoring, lead nurturing, email/landing pagecreation but lacks CTA, blog or SEO tools. | HubSpot specializes in content creation tools. It creates and optimizes web content, blogs, CTAs, SEO and landing pages. |
Pardot Vs Marketing Cloud
| Pardot | Marketing Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Automation Solution | Pardot is a B2B marketing automation solution. | Marketing Cloud is for B2C companies. |
| Buying Cycle | Pardot better targets smaller databases with higher value sales. | Larger databases with smaller value sales gets targeted by Marketing Cloud. |
| Purpose | It enables greater marketing and sales alignment. | It is for 1:1 customer journey communications with mixed channels. |
Pardot Vs Marketo
| Pardot | Marketo | |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Retention | Pardot has effective drip campaigns for customer retention. It has an advanced lead nurturing functionality - adapting to different audiences. | It offers more personalized approach for email marketing. Marketo engages prospects in a personalized way with automated campaigns. |
| Lead Capturing | Pardot offers better lead capturing with auto- syncing customer data and customizable landing pages. | Marketo finds and engages the right customers. It engages prospects starting from customer journey with landing pages, search marketing, social media & behaviour tracking. |
| Collaboration | Pardot has a wider range of integration and collaboration options better than Marketo. It enables collaboration between sales and marketing team by making them work closely. | Marketo helps marketing and sales to collaborate on customer conversation at all stages of the revenue cycle. It increases ROI with a focus on high- quality leads. |
Some Commonly Asked Questions
Q #1) What is the use of Pardot?
Answer: Pardot is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing automation platform from Salesforce. It offers email automation, email campaigns for targeted audiences, B2B sales, and marketing companies.
It automates daily marketing tasks, including tracking customer behaviors, creating digital marketing campaigns, website tracking, lead generation, search engine optimization, and landing page marketing, as well as personalization of landing page content.
Q #2) Is Pardot a CRM?
Answer: Pardot initially integrated with other customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and that includes Salesforce. It offers email drip campaigns, lead management with nurturing & scoring, and campaign segmentation.
It syncs well with Salesforce’s CRM and provides a performance edge incentive for all those who are already using Salesforce.
Q #3) What is the difference between Salesforce and Pardot?
Answer: Both deal with prospects. Pardot Campaign tracks the initial touchpoint of a prospect and calculates a closed-loop ROI, with a report. Each Pardot prospects correspond to a single campaign.
But Salesforce campaigns track multiple touchpoints with a prospect. They attach to your leads/contacts during any point in the life-cycle. Salesforce campaigns directly link to the sales funnel, make campaign association easily reportable, easily track campaign membership & status, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns in terms of closed deals.
Q #4) What is a Pardot email?
Answer: Pardot acts as an email sending machine by managing your email templates, listing recipients, testing the emails, and reporting on the success of emails sent. It enables you to rewrite links and populates variable tags in emails and then send them to test lists.
It allows the users to view the prospect’s view. It comes with an Autoresponder email automatically sent in response to prospect action, which is similar to filling up a form.
Q #5) What is the cost of Pardot?
Answer: Pardot pricing depends on three types of subscriptions, that are billed annually:
- Growth: At $ 1250 per month.
- Plus: At $ 2500 per month.
- Advanced: It comes at $4000 per month.
The difference between the plans lies in the number of automation rules, lead tracking, integrations, and several domains.
Q #6) How Pardot works with Salesforce?
Answer: Although Pardot is a standalone marketing automation tool, it works best when integrated with Salesforce. When integrated, the marketers automatically create and assign qualified new leads in Salesforce. It also makes tracked prospect activities visible to the sales team.
Q #7) What is the difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot?
Answer: The main difference is that Marketing Cloud works for B2C companies, and Pardot works for B2B companies. Moreover, Pardot is a marketing automation platform, for finding out the best leads for organizations, and tracking engagement for marketing campaigns and offering faster follow-ups.
Pardot is known as a leading management platform that combines the rich features of marketing & sales and boosts the power of marketing campaigns in Salesforce. It acts majorly as an email marketing tool that quickly syncs with the customer data in Salesforce for automated, and enhanced communication.
Q #8) Is Pardot a Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Answer: No, Pardot is a part of the Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Marketing Cloud is a different Salesforce product with ExactTarget, Social Studio, Mobile Studio, etc. Pardot acts primarily as an email marketing platform.
Q #9) What is a Pardot Contact?
Answer: A prospect is a visitor with a known email address, in Pardot. A prospect gets created when a visitor submits a form or when a Salesforce lead/contact is imported or synced from Salesforce. An email in Pardot gets sent to the prospect.
Q #10) What is B2B Marketing Automation?
Answer: B2B marketing automation transforms marketers for revenue generation. It is an easy-to-use marketing platform that helps marketers to create, manage, and deploy online marketing campaigns.
Pardot and Salesforce Engage act in combination with your CRM and empower your sales rep to act in customer engagement, drive marketers to yield better results with campaigns as well as close deals at a faster rate.
Q #11) How Pardot helps your marketing teams to build Marketing Campaigns?
Answer: Pardot offers a one-stop solution for all marketing related activities i.e. driving more leads and converting pipelines. It creates and launches digital campaigns with a few clicks.
- It has an easy-to-use interface to create assets in a short time and guides with wizards & drag-and-drop builders.
- It creates a landing page, email templates, and forms with templates. It customizes with full HTML and CSS styling.
- It enables us to host your files, images, and assets in Pardot.
Q #12) What are the insights given by Pardot?
Answer: Pardot offers both micro and macro-level insights on your marketing performance. Reporting provides insights on the overall performance of your campaigns, for an individual customer. It provides an in-depth snapshot of their interactions with you.
Here is what gets done:
- Draw insights on what motivates the individual client right from the assets downloaded by them or sections of the website they spend the time on.
- Personalize both sales and marketing approach with data.
- Connect with your marketing tools and track your success across events, videos, webinars, social, and much more.
Conclusion
This tutorial offered insights on how to become a Pardot professional and leverage the features, even as a novice. It stated the reasons for marketers preferring Pardot and points out at its various related concepts.
Pardot is being used by organizations with an extended or complex sales cycle and they value customer relationships built over a while.
Happy Reading!!!
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