A Step-by-Step Guide to Master Salesforce Engage by Pardot (Pardot Engagement Studio)

The Salesforce Pardot Engagement Studio is a dynamic marketing automation tool that goes beyond the traditional email drip program. It empowers you to create personalized, logic-based nurturing campaigns that guide your prospects through their buying journey while testing and refining your approach in real time.

Don't let the complexity of the process intimidate you - Salesforce Engage from Pardot is intuitive and easy to use. You can effortlessly send emails to a list of prospects and track their engagement with each message. Based on their behavior, you can then adjust the subsequent messages in the sequence to optimize the chances of conversion.

This automated series of messages depends on your custom logic, so you can tailor your campaigns to the needs of your target audience. Doing so, you can create a powerful automated program that keeps your prospects engaged every step of the way, guiding them toward a successful conversion.

In essence, the Pardot Engagement Studio is your secret weapon for building long-lasting relationships with your prospects and driving revenue for your business. So why not give it a try and see the results for yourself?

Are you ready to build a powerful engagement program using Pardot’s Salesforce Engage Capability?

Here's how to get started and achieve success:

Step 1: Establish Clear Goals for Your Campaign 

The first step is to define the objectives of your Pardot engagement program. Next, determine what success looks like for your campaign by setting clear, measurable goals. Your goals should align with your overall marketing strategy and be specific to your target audience.

Some examples of campaign objectives include:

• Convert prospects to opportunities
• Turn cold prospects into sales-qualified leads

To track the effectiveness of your campaign, establish metric goals such as 

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Deliverability rate
• Number of conversions

For instance, if you are running a large-scale engagement program that offers a long-form piece of content to a cold database, your objective could be to increase traffic to your content and website by having recipients click the link in your email. 

Your metric goals could be an email deliverability rate of 95%, an open rate of 25%, and a click-through rate of 4%.

Develop personalized content that speaks to your audience 

The next step is to create targeted content that speaks to your audience's pain points and interests. Develop engaging and customized content that aligns with your campaign goals and the stages of the buyer's journey. Use Pardot's powerful segmentation and automation tools to tailor your messages to each prospect's behavior and preferences.

Build a logic-based nurturing campaign 

Use Engagement Studio's drag-and-drop interface to build a logic-based nurturing campaign that guides your prospects through the buying journey. Define rules and actions that trigger different messages based on each prospect's behavior. Doing so lets you keep your prospects engaged and move them closer to conversion.

Test and refine your approach 

Finally, use Pardot's reporting and analytics tools to track the effectiveness of your engagement program. Analyze your metrics, test different scenarios, and refine your approach to optimize your results. By constantly testing and refining your approach, you can build a robust engagement program that drives results and helps you achieve your marketing goals.

Step 2: Identify Recipient and Suppression Lists

To effectively target the prospects for your engagement program, you should identify the recipient and suppression lists. Here's how you can go about it:

Determine your engagement program's objective

Before you decide which prospects to target, you need to define the goal of your engagement program. For example, if your goal is to reconnect with past customers, your recipient list will be a static or dynamic list of prospects who have purchased your products/services in the past.

Use dynamic lists

Dynamic lists run continuously in the background of Pardot, constantly changing based on the criteria you set. They are ideal for a completely automated engagement campaign like a welcome series. As you add prospects to the dynamic list, you will see them added to the drip campaign.

Use static lists

Static lists require manual addition or removal of prospects. For example, if you add a static list to an engagement program, it will only email the people on the list at that time and anyone you manually add later. Use static lists for testing or one-off campaigns like promoting a limited-time sale.

Suppression lists

Use these lists, which can be static or dynamic, to remove prospects from email recipient lists. They take priority over your recipient lists. For instance, if you already sent an email to a group of prospects last week and don't want to send them another one, upload their recipient list to the suppression list of the current campaign. 

If a prospect is on both your suppression and recipient lists, they will not receive the email. Suppression lists are helpful when there are prospects on your recipient lists that you don't want to receive your email and don't want to create an entirely new list.

Step 3: Writing the Copy

Before writing the content for your email, you need to determine your email's objectives, target audience, and goals. If you already have email templates, you can clone or repurpose them for a new campaign. Some people even develop drip logic before writing their emails.

To ensure your marketing message resonates with your audience, it's best to follow email marketing tips and best practices. Visit the previous section on B2B email marketing to learn more.

Step 4: Developing Drip Logic

Once you have created your email content, developing a workflow or drip logic is next. Pardot's Engagement Studio offers an intuitive logic builder to create a visual workflow for your email campaign.

While planning your drip logic, keep your goals and objectives in mind, and think from the prospect's perspective. Consider the following questions:

• What happens if the recipient opens the email?
• What happens if the email is not opened?
• What if they click on the link inside?

It's essential to plan every step of your drip campaign from start to finish. First, consider all scenarios for when your campaign works or does not. Then, weigh all possibilities to develop the most efficient way to nurture your prospects through the customer journey.

Step 5: Building the Engagement Studio Campaign

Now that you have the information needed, you should be ready to start building your first Engagement Studio campaign. You can follow the steps below to ensure a smooth process:

1. Prepare your assets: Before building your campaign, ensure all the assets are ready to go live. This includes email templates, prospect lists, and any actions you want to trigger.
2. Choose your Pardot elements: You can add three elements to an Engagement Program: an action, a trigger, and/or a rule. You can add as many of them as you like along the drip campaign.
3. Add an Action: Engagement Studio responds to a trigger by executing a specific action, like dispatching an email immediately, enlisting them into a category, or adjusting their Pardot rating. Some examples include sending an email in X days, changing one of their default/custom field values, or assigning them to a user.
4. Add a Trigger: A trigger is a condition that you must meet before the following action occurs. For example, if a prospect clicks on a specific link in an email, it can trigger a follow-up action like sending them a personalized message.
5. Add a Rule: A rule is a condition that affects the prospect's journey through the campaign. For instance, you can set a rule to exclude prospects who have already received a specific email from receiving it again.

Engagement Studio Screenshot

By following these steps, you can create an effective Pardot Engagement Studio campaign that engages your prospects and helps drive conversions.

However, to create a successful Engagement Studio campaign, you must be able to utilize triggers and rules effectively: Here are a few tips for doing the same.

1. Trigger - Listen for Something: Use a trigger to tell Pardot Engagement Studio to listen for something the prospect interacts with. Some common triggers include:

• Email Open
• Link Click
• File Download
• Form Fill-out
• Custom Redirect Click

2. Rule - Check Something: A rule checks the prospect database for specific criteria. Some standard rules include the following:

• Pardot Score
• Assigned User
• List Membership
• Custom Field Value
• Tag Presence

3. Utilize Yes/No Pathways: Both triggers and rules will provide you with a yes or no pathway that alters the structure of your engagement program. For example, if a prospect opens an email:

• Yes: Send email #2 in 3 days
• No: Resend email #1 in 3 days with a different subject line

Tips to Consider: Keep in mind the following tips when building your Pardodt Engagement Studio program:

• You can only set triggers to wait for whole numbers, not half-days.
• Only send emails during business hours and days.
• You can only use an email template once during an engagement program (by default).
• You need not have your Engagement Studio program finalized before dispatching it.
• By default, prospects can only enter an engagement program once (but an administrator can change it).

Craft a compelling Engagement Studio campaign that fosters conversions and captivates your prospects by skillfully leveraging triggers and rules.

Here are some pointers on how to optimize your engagement program using Pardot's Engagement Studio:

Step 6: Test and Send

Explore the testing functionality to stroll through the drip campaign and gain insights into how prospects interact with it. Evaluate the duration of the engagement program and carefully examine each pathway to unearth opportunities for enhancing the overall customer journey.

Engagement Studio Screenshot

Step 7: Report

Report and leverage the report tab to glean valuable insights into the efficacy of your engagement program. Compare your metric goals with actual data and meticulously scrutinize the path distribution to fine-tune your program for optimal performance. To delve deeper into email marketing metrics, select a particular email and delve into its comprehensive analytics.

Step 8: Optimize

Optimize is critical in maximizing the potential of your engagement program. Continuously monitor the reporting to pinpoint areas for enhancement and experiment with various scenarios to identify the optimal approach. Be fearless in modifying email templates or reassessing the campaign if the outcomes do not align with your objectives. Scrutinize each email and juncture in the workflow for opportunities to enhance the program and sustain the prospects' interest.

Wrapping Up

Are you looking for ways to streamline your marketing automation and sales processes? Let our team of experienced professionals assist you in unlocking the full potential of Pardot Engagement and Salesforce. 

With our expert services, we can help you create a personalized strategy that will enable you to connect with your prospects more meaningfully and drive better results for your business.

At Growth Natives, we take a tailored approach to help you optimize your engagement program. From analyzing your metrics to testing different scenarios and improving your email templates, we can provide you with the guidance you need to stay ahead of the competition.

So, if you're ready to take your marketing automation and sales efforts to the next level, contact us today at info@growthnatives.com or visit our website. 

Author Box

Rahul Saini

Rahul Saini is a published author of three books, brand storyteller, and marketing specialist with experience across multiple industries like manufacturing, IT, and publishing. He is an intellectually curious, and creative person who loves to tell stories, read books, and write fiction.