Most digital marketers would agree with the fact that email marketing is at the core of their marketing programs. They find it one of the most democratic channels to engage with customers because no one ‘owns’ email. It’s second only to search in this regard.
According to Salesforce, email marketing has an average ROI of 3,800%. The average return on every dollar invested is $38.
The number clearly states the importance of email marketing for businesses. If you’re currently using Salesforce, you may have heard a lot about Pardot and Marketing Cloud which can help to take your email strategy to the next level.
What is Salesforce Pardot?
Salesforce Pardot (now renamed as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is a part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and is specifically designed to improve customer engagement and marketing approaches followed by businesses.
Pardot enables businesses to track and measure the performance of customer interaction conducted by each representative, understand user behavior, and customize the content according to their expectations and interest.
With the Pardot marketing automation tool, you can effectively schedule and send personalized emails to thousands of prospects. It allows you to use responsive templates, which can be reused. It’s a great platform to create and send emails that deliver personalized experiences to all your prospects individually.
However, Pardot has so many features that might get you thinking about where to start. Let’s look deep into the features that make Pardot a good way to get started with your emails.
1. List Segmentation
Every business maintains a database to collect information related to customers like purchase history, email addresses, conversation threads, etc. With the help of Pardot, you can gather this data more quickly, thus saving you time to focus on other revenue-generating tasks.
Pardot can also be used for segmenting this data to create customized campaigns. These campaigns can be based on purchase history, location, or any other attribute.
For example, suppose you are organizing an event in California and wish to invite your customers who are based in California; instead of scanning each and every contact you can simply segment them using Pardot and send customized emails to your customers based in California with a simple click.
2. Lead Generation and Management
The first step you need to focus on before starting with lead nurturing is to find out the email address of the potential customer.
Pardot has different features like landing pages and drag-and-drop forms, social media posting, along with analytics on acquisition like organic / paid searches. It thus provides the marketing team with all the necessary resources and tools to gather email addresses.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the major segment where Pardot comes in and revolutionizes the entire process of how you interact with potential customers through emails.
Pardot allows authorized users to create list emails using the pre-designed templates, which you can easily change according to the type of recipient or nature of the email.
The base package of Pardot allows you 10,000 email addresses. But you can also purchase blocks additionally to fit the unique marketing needs of your business.
4. A/B Testing Emails
Let’s consider a situation when you have two similar email templates but are not sure which one of the templates would be the right choice to go with for a special feature.
Pardot provides you with the A/B testing feature to gauge the performance of each of the templates. It will help with sending different types of emails to groups you selected, thus helping you to choose the template that will work best in any specific kind of scenario.
5. Tracking Email Opens
Pardot allows you to track the engagement of your emails accurately, helping you to keep a count of people who have opened the email you sent. So how does this work?
Pardot inserts a single-pixel image in HTML emails. Whenever a person opens that email, the image starts to load, and it is counted as an HTML open.
This amazing feature of Salesforce Pardot makes it easy for businesses to track how well they are engaging with the market. Simply planning the campaigns and sending emails is not enough. You have to be aware of the outcome of those emails too. Salesforce Pardot can give your business that extra push you need to pull in more leads.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps marketers of companies from different industry verticals allows to create and manage marketing campaigns and relationships with customers.
The Marketing Cloud supports integrated solutions that simplify customer journey management, mobile, email, social media, advertising, content creation and management, and data analysis.
The platform supports advanced features like predictive analytics that help marketers with decision-making. For example, it helps distinguish what channel would be preferable for a particular kind of message. It also incorporates Journey Builder to tailor campaigns to customers’ behavior and needs, communication channel preferences, and demographics.
Marketing Cloud holds great importance when it comes to running successful email campaigns. Let’s dive into some practices that marketers can follow using Marketing Cloud to boost their email marketing campaigns.
1. Segment Your Audience
With the marketing landscape becoming customer-focused, it is now irrational to believe that your target audience includes just a single identical group that you can reach out to through your generic campaigns.
You should consider using Marketing Cloud for its AI and predictive analytics to segment your audience in Audience Builder and to look for new and relevant audience segments for your business.
2. Personalization
In today’s world where customers are constantly bombarded with multiple emails from different brands, you need to work on something unique that surely catches their attraction. That’s where personalizing your emails would help you.
Marketing Cloud support Einstein AI that helps you to discover your customer interests, purchase history, and preferences, so that you can reach out to them with just the right offer.
3. Increase Customer Reach
No brand would ever want to lose its customers and this is why it is always important to connect them with something they prefer or they won’t hesitate before unsubscribing from your email list.
You can use Marketing Cloud here to access sequencing and predicting attribution to create the right message for customers using Content Builder and send them out on their preferred channels, at their preferred time.
4. Analyze Your Campaigns
Marketing Cloud allows you to access capabilities like data normalization, probabilistic attribute, and harmonization to get a complete view of your email campaign performance and cost. This will help you identify your improvement area so you can plan your future campaigns better.
Pardot vs Marketing Cloud
Let’s have a look at some key differences between Pardot and Marketing Cloud to know what works better for your business.
1. Pardot is not specific towards any industry, while Marketing Cloud focuses more on the retail sectors, like travel, entertainment, FMCG, and health.
2. Salesforce Pardot is mainly used in the context of email and social channels, whereas Marketing Cloud is used for SMS, to display ads, email, and social.
3. In Pardot, lead nurturing is possible using drip marketing campaigns for tracking your website behavior and qualifying leads based on scoring. It is something that’s not possible with Marketing Cloud.
4. Pardot is suitable for a simple database and use-case but for complex use-cases, you should always choose Marketing Cloud.
5. Pardot is majorly used in companies that have less number of customers but higher sales volume. On the other hand, Marketing Cloud is suitable for companies with huge and varied customers needing special attention but they have a lower value of sales conducted by them.
6. Pardot enables the best marketing and sales alignment for B2B teams. On the other hand, Marketing Cloud is considered great for managing 1:1 customer journey communications with multiple channels.
What’s Next?
Your customers these days are smarter and more informed than ever. That’s why you always need to run top-notch email campaigns that they expect and deserve. After all, why not make the most of your preferred marketing automation platform!
Implement Pardot and Marketing Cloud with the help of certified Salesforce experts and step ahead to send smooth emails like cream cheese on a bagel – The Salesforce Way!
