Here’s How You Can Implement Salesforce Pardot As You Plan Ahead For 2023

After two catastrophic years of the pandemic, 2022 has been the year of recovery. Businesses across industries have now become stable and are headed toward growth again. However, with intense competition across the board, it is more important to stand out from the clutter now than it has ever been.

Salesforce Pardot helps you achieve this marketing feat and keeps you ahead of the curve.

Especially if you want to create a holistic B2B marketing campaign, Pardot helps you record, store, track, and analyze valuable records of your business customers and personalize your marketing efforts. The marketing automation platform lets your marketing and sales reps stay with your prospects from the moment they are approached until they are converted into loyal customers.

Despite all the benefits Salesforce Pardot offers, a faulty implementation can make all your efforts go in vain. Always make sure you implement the marketing automation platform in a way that suits your business objectives, workflows, and the customers you cater to.

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.

Do Not Ignore These Factors While Implementing Salesforce Pardot

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:

Assign Clearly Defined Roles

Before getting started, it is important to make your team members in different departments aware of their roles. While Pardot is a marketing tool, you will need help from multiple departments to make its implementation a success.

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.

Focus On The Technical Set-up

Once you have assigned well-defined roles to the right team members, you can shift your focus to the platform’s technical setup. In the age of digitization, it is important to look after the technical build and architecture of Pardot.

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 important to identify the most important pages therein. While Salesforce Pardot provides you with a built-in baseline scoring system, it is important to set up a custom page scoring system according to your business needs to improve analysis.
• SPF and DKIM – SPF and DKIM are important 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.

Create Lead Forms, Landing Pages, And Email Templates

After completing the initial technical set-up of the marketing automation platform, you can migrate your assets to Pardot. This will involve creating email templates, lead forms, and landing pages with your IT team’s support. As Pardot helps you host these assets within its environment, it makes building complicated automation programs simpler.

While creating these assets, make sure you think from your customers’ and prospects’ perspectives as they engage with your business at every stage. This will affect how you want to use completion actions, send auto-responding emails, assign/notify users, and perform a range of different tasks.

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.

However, if you are creating new prospects, here are a few important things to keep in mind:

• Upload prospects to Pardot without assigning them to a user. Once a user is assigned to a prospect, the system will automatically believe that it is an MQL (marketing-qualified lead).
• Make the most of your scoring and grading strategy. Assign new prospects to the right users only after they satisfy pre-defined criteria.
• Make sure you use a CRM field to identify when an MQL turns into a customer, allowing the lead to the customer list.

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.

Add Your Content Assets To Pardot

Along with your prospects and customers, it is advisable to add your content assets to your Salesforce Pardot account as well. Hosting assets like whitepapers, guides, infographics, checklists, etc. on Pardot helps you track their views and downloads.

This way, the system will log a new activity every time a prospect or customer engages with your business through your content assets. Using this information, you can trigger necessary updates and notifications that are in sync with your customers’ preferences. Pardot also allows you to score these interactions to prioritize nurturing prospects that are more likely to convert.

Pardot Best Practices To Optimize The Marketing Automation Platform

Your business goals are not attained simply by implementing Salesforce Pardot within your organization. Optimizing the marketing automation platform according to your business needs and preferences is important.

Here are a few Pardot best practices that will help you optimize your business processes as you enter 2023:

Connect Salesforce And Pardot Campaigns

If you are a Salesforce and Pardot user, it is advisable to connect both platforms’ campaigns to make the most of them. This helps you leverage your marketing campaigns and make your campaign data accessible to your marketing and sales teams.

Create A Suitable Lead Scoring Model

Your lead scoring and grading model helps you set criteria and standards to score and prioritize your leads. An organized lead scoring model ensures the smooth transfer of the MQLs to your sales reps, allowing them to close the deals effectively.

Make The Most Of Email Builder

Email marketing is an important Salesforce Pardot feature. The Email Builder therein helps you create powerful and targeted email marketing campaigns. Using dynamic content and variable tags lets you personalize your content according to your prospects/customers. As you build your emails, make sure each of your contacts feels as if the message was written just for them!

The Final Word

Salesforce Pardot helps you stay in sync with the latest marketing trends and practices as you create your marketing campaigns. As long as you implement the marketing automation solution the right way, you can get the desired traction and develop healthy customer relationships.