Pardot 101: An Absolute Beginner’s Impression of the Tool

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Pardot loves funnels

Pardot is a robust B2B marketing automation tool aimed at driving more qualified leads, nurturing relationships with prospects, empowering sales to close more deals along with managing projects, and reports constructively. It’s the weapon of choice for companies to engage with the prospects in real-time, seamless interactions over marketing channels to fit the company’s needs.

As the target customers align better with criteria, they can then move through sales funnels that intrigue users, unsuspectingly making them fall for their objects of desire. Later on, these prospects are directed to the relevant sales representatives to seal the deal.

Stages of a typical Pardot Sales Funnel 

Pardot accounts for the ‘Prospect Score’ and ‘Prospect Grade Metric’ to gauge interest to compare profiles against ideal candidature and zero-in on prospects worth pursuing. Here’s a list of stages funnels broadly fall into:

Step 1: Arouse Intrigue

We start out by leveraging the power of marketing tools to intrigue and attract visitors and onlookers, drawing them closer towards products and services.

Step 2: Onboard to Conversion 

Once the visitors are convinced enough and contact or submit the requisite information, they turn into prospects.

Step 3: Identify Quality Leads 

 Prospects are profiled, and once they exhibit behaviors or activity of a potential customer, they’re looked at as addressed as quality leads.

Step 4: Nurture Leads

As leads show promise, they’re targeted with personalized messages to build recall and lay the groundwork for a sales pitch.

Step 5: Lead Qualification

At the bottom of the funnel, the Lead Qualification is the process of winnowing for the best leads for responsible marketers to contain sales effort and find hot leads worth convincing.

Throughout the process, Pardot helps businesses track the effectiveness of communication, gain insights, and customize the content accordingly. It identifies and waits for peak times of interest and availability, preferred channels of engagement, to project profile-matched content.

A look at Pardot’s key use-cases

For MarketingOps

Lead generation 

Primarily, the emphasis is laid on developing customer’s interest in products or services. Further, digital techniques are used to sift through qualified leads.

Email Marketing  

Agents can send personalized emails to millions of users by creating customized and responsive templates based on the customers’ profiled interests.

For Analytics

Alignment with Development  

Branded emails, tags, and rich content help with contextualizing engagement. Admins can receive real-time alerts on the user’s behavior and opinions, besides tracking activity for highly engaged users.

Reporting 

You’ll have access and post-analysis on engagement rubrics like views, submissions, or conversations generated by the handler, allowing you to access and select reports in marketing tools.

The Pardot Engagement Studio

Pardot Engagement Studio can set up engagement paths for different segments of the audience, so each bifurcated segment automatically receives profile-appropriate messages that account for taste without unintentionally turning off an entire segment.

Overall, the Engagement Studio lets marketing teams:

1. Set up dynamic lists,
2. Prioritize using Pardot grades and scores,
3. Assign KPIs(Key Performance Indicator),
4. Create marketing tools or strategies, and
5. Update data to record changing preferences.

And, as Pardot’s flagship product for the marketing automation platform, it helps you to build, test, and report on engagement programs and it also allows you to send targeted emails based on customer interest and specifications. 

Using Pardot ES

Finally, we’ll leave you with a glimpse into the Engagement Studio’s inner workings. To oversimplify, operations in Pardot revolve around 3 internal elements:

Actions; Triggers: and Rules.

Actions

Actions in ES perform routine operations like additions and omissions from groups, assigning tags, tweaking Pardot scores subjectively, accessing filtered views, and pushing templatized emails. 

Triggers

Refers to actions ‘triggered’ by opened emails, link tracking in emails sent, and file downloads that expedite engagement before any explicit expression of interest.

Rules

These are a set of built-in protocols that let you assign tags, change status, and add prospects to Campaigns depending on a recipient’s response to emails.

Verdict

For all its merits, like any marketing platform, the key to its most optimal use hinges on deep, subjective introspection of inferences drawn from activities on storefronts and touchpoints.

Everything boils down to prediction accuracy and containing sales effort. Carefully chosen scoring models, penalties, and thresholds cloud mean the difference between chasing reliable lead interest or dead-ends.