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The Expert’s Guide to Great Pardot Email Marketing

To make life just that little bit easier for marketers using Pardot, we’ve put together an entire ebook that outlines the process to follow for great Pardot email marketing.

Expert’s Guide to Great Pardot Email Marketing marcloudconsulting.com

marcloudconsulting.com 2 Introduction Transactional vs. marketing emails & GDPR Single send vs. Engagement Studios Introduction Where to begin • Have an email marketing strategy ՙ Automate lead nurture ՙ Segmentation When it comes to Pardot email marketing, there’s more to it than • Understanding reputation and deliverability just drafting an email and hitting send. Getting set up For starters, making sure you’re up to speed with how to use Pardot • Components of an email send email marketing features is vital to implementing and maintaining a • Original vs. drag and drop builder successful email marketing strategy. There are plenty of features • Why have email templates? and automation tricks that will help make your email marketing • An overview of HML activity a breeze. • Email design best practices In this eBook, we’ll run you through a complete guide to planning, • Dynamic content and personalisation creating, sending, and analysing emails with Pardot, including the • Custom redirects dos and don’ts of email marketing, and helpful tips to keep you on • A/B testing track. We’ve even included examples and case studies to highlight • Why you need a preferences page different scenarios and put things into context. • Email testing • MarCloud tips and tricks Let’s get started, shall we? Managing email • Bounces vs opting out • Opting prospects back in • Analysing and reporting Email inspiration: use cases Free Pardot Email Marketing Checklist

marcloudconsulting.com 3 Transactional vs. marketing emails & GDPR Transactional There are two types of The nature of transactional emails is usually an exchange of information. For example, emails you might send password resets or order confirmations are transactional emails. A user will receive a as part of your email transactional email when their behaviour on a website or app triggers an action, such as marketing activity: making a website purchase or requesting an account password reset. Pardot refers to this ‘transactional’ (known in type of email as ‘operational’. Pardot as ‘operational’) Marketing emails and ‘marketing’ emails. So, what’s the difference? Marketing emails usually contain marketing or promotional content, with the goal of encouraging or enticing a user to complete an action. For example, newsletters, sales campaigns, or retail promotions are types of marketing emails. But regardless of whether you’re sending transactional or marketing emails, the most important thing to remember at all times is GDPR. GDPR GDPR - or General Data Protection Regulation - is a European framework that came into effect in 2019, designed to ensure companies remain transparent about the customer information they collect.

marcloudconsulting.com 4 Essentially, the GDPR framework is about digital privacy legislation in relation to how you collect, store and process customer data, and regardless of whether you operate in the EU or not the same rules apply to everyone (also known as Extra-Territorial Scope) - and there are big fines if you don’t stick to them. Some of the most important aspects to GDPR compliance include: • Enabling your Cookie Policy • Linking to your Privacy Policy • Properly managing opt ins and opt outs • Having an outline for data retention • Strategies for managing data breaches • Prospect right to access • Ensuring data by design You can read more about all of these important considerations and use our handy GDPR compliance checklist here.

marcloudconsulting.com 5 Single send vs. Engagement Studios Single send email, or Engagement Studio? That is the question. Well, to know the answer, it depends on what your email marketing strategy is (you can jump down to the next section if you’d like to delve more into email marketing strategies first). Once you’re confident with your email marketing strategy, you’ll then know what will work best for your subscribers. The goal is to get customers engaging positively with our emails, by way of high open rates and smooth customer journeys that leave them feeling engaged with the content. There are a myriad of things that can negatively affect your customer’s engagement, including sending too many emails - and not enough! It’s a fine balance, but the golden rule is to know your subscriber base well, and develop an email marketing strategy that aligns with their interests and needs, as well as gently build their loyalty to your content, and ultimately, convert. For example, you should consider: • What stage of the customer journey are they at? • What are their pain points and ambitions? • What does their typical day look like? • Which types of information or content do they seek most? So, with all of that in mind, which should you choose - single send emails, or Engagement Studio?

marcloudconsulting.com 6 Single send emails Single send emails are once-off emails that don’t form part of a specific customer journey or sequence of communications. Single send emails can be used for things like newsletters, announcements, policy update notices, or promotional offers. Single send emails are suitable for both transactional and promotional marketing content and they are usually sent according to the schedule of the business i.e. we have an upcoming event and we want to let our subscribers know about it. Many Pardot users rely on single-send emails because they are simple to use, with less risk of accidentally emailing a prospect too often. Engagement Studios When it comes to implementing and executing email campaigns with multiple email sends, the Pardot Engagement Studio is your tool of choice here - and the beauty of using Engagement Studio for this purpose is that it automates the nurture process. It’s a flexible and versatile Pardot feature you can use to build a tailored journey for your subscribers by mapping out a chain of predetermined emails that are triggered by certain events or actions completed by the customer, as opposed to the business’ schedule. The goal in using Engagement Studio for campaigns is to gradually move your customers along a journey to a conversion point, rather than optimistically expecting them to convert at the very beginning. The journey should work to provide some sort of value to your customers, build brand awareness, and ultimately nurture the recipient with previously unknown information. We’ve developed a 9-point best practice guide to follow when building and managing activity within the Engagement Studio, which you can read on our blog.

marcloudconsulting.com 7 Where to begin Have an email marketing strategy Jumping into Pardot email marketing without an email strategy is like taking the boat out for a spin in the middle of winter without safety navigation or a liferaft - it’s risky and we wouldn’t encourage it! An email marketing strategy is the map to guide you through to your objective or end goal i.e. marketing-qualified leads. And if you work with a large team, it is particularly useful to have as a single source of truth that any team member can refer to at any time. A well-thought out strategy also gives you a formulated approach to how to use Pardot email marketing to reach and engage your customers, and measure against whatever successes and failures you may experience along the way, to give you points of reference on where to make adjustments in the future. It also helps ensure your Pardot account doesn’t become unruly. Especially if you are sending lots of emails, you can quickly lose track of which are going to who and why. A documented strategy keeps you on top of the overall approach and what should be happening in the account. There are two particular aspects as part of your email marketing strategy that we want you to consider: automating your lead nurture activity, and segmentation. Let’s dive in a bit more. If you want to learn more about end-to-end Pardot strategy, you can watch the webinar MarCloud Founders Tom and Jake gave, right here.

marcloudconsulting.com 8 Automating lead nurture Here’s what an email marketing plan for Pardot may look like: We all know that lead nurture is crucial to developing and building relationships with prospects. Mapping out and implementing your lead nurture strategy can be comprehensive and time-consuming - but for good reason! Automation is only valuable if it’s used to manage a well-considered strategy, the tool doesn’t replace the marketer. Once you’ve spent the necessary time mapping out what your lead nurture strategy with all of your touchpoints will look like, you can then set up an automated process to automatically lead your prospects along the journey each time they engage at a certain touchpoint. When set up correctly, and aligned with your email marketing strategy, your automated lead nurture journey will save you valuable time, while still engaging prospects with personalised and relevant content. Segmentation Segmentation means we can be more targeted in the way we approach our email marketing, and is crucial to reaching the right people in the right way and delivering high quality leads. When we segment our prospects, we are dividing them into groups, which are classified to ensure we are sending content to each group based on their particular needs. This will help to nurture them along the sales funnel faster. So, how should you segment your prospects in Pardot?

marcloudconsulting.com 9 There are four potential ways you can segment your prospects: Lists, Automation Rules, Tags, and Profiles (Scoring and Grading). 1 Lists For this method of segmentation, you can use either static lists, which are updated manually and generally only used once or twice, or dynamic lists, which are rule-based lists that will update automatically. 2 Automation Rules Automation Rules are based on predetermined criteria used to create static lists. However, it’s important to remember that these are different to Segmentation Rules, you can add or remove prospects from an existing list at the one time. 3 Tags Besides being useful for organising campaigns and assets, you can apply Tags to prospects once they have completed particular actions, creating a more targeted list of prospects based on different actions. 4 Profiles Last but not least, is Profiles. Profiles are created by Scoring and Grading your prospect, and each prospect can be scored and graded to determine their quality as a lead. For more information on segmentation, check out our Complete Guide to Pardot Segmentation blog.

marcloudconsulting.com 10 Understanding reputation and deliverability Just because you’ve hit send on an email, doesn’t mean it will be delivered. This is mainly because there is a whole process the email will go through after you’ve sent it and before it arrives in the recipient’s email inbox. The likelihood of your email reaching the recipient is called deliverability. To help us ensure deliverability, we need to understand what’s called sender reputation. Reputation in this context refers to how respected your IP address is by a receiving email server. To maintain a good sender reputation intact, it’s important to monitor things such as: • Setting up email authentication • Following Pardot’s permission-based marketing policy • Avoiding spam complaints and keeping off blocklists • Keeping Lists up-to-date • Monitoring open rates and managing bounce rates Other factors that impact deliverability are: • Unclear or spam-flagging subject lines. This isn’t limited to the words that we choose, unnecessary punctuation such as !!! or even the addition of an ellipsis can flag spam filters. • HTML optimisation - copying templates from other ESPs can land us in the spam folder. • Size also matters, Gmail clips messages that weigh over 102kb so generally, keeping emails under 80KB where possible will reduce the risk of deliverability problems. • Image to text ratio - we should be aiming for 60% text / 40% images. • Suddenly sending to a larger than normal list size. • Using link shorteners, as spammers commonly use them to mask malicious websites.

marcloudconsulting.com 11 Getting set up Components of an email send For any email send, you’ll need to consider the following: Subject line This is one of the first things your recipient will see and is the ‘hook’ to enticing your recipient to open the email - so it’s important to give adequate consideration here! We recommend being explicit and descriptive with your subject line. Keep it short because studies show that subject lines with as few as 16 characters have higher open rates than those that are longer! Preheader The preheader is a summary line that usually appears below the subject line in a recipient’s email inbox view. The preheader is typically kept to the length of one sentence long and our recommendation is to simply use the first line of your email body, to appear the most authentic. Sender address The email address you are sending your email from. Should this be from the brand or an individual at your organisation? The answer will vary depending on the type of email you’re sending and your strategy.

marcloudconsulting.com 12 Generally, newsletters and the like are sent from the brand, whereas lead generation or outreach email(s) are sent from an individual, so as to appear as a more one-to-one communication. Tip: It’s best to avoid using ‘noreply’ email addresses as this can tarnish recipients’ trust in the messages you send, as well as closing the door to two-way conversations. Plus, some email clients auto-filter noreply emails as SPAM. Recipient address The email address of the person receiving your email. Email body information This is where you include the main message of your email using copy, links and/or images. The message of your email should be relevant to the recipients and offer some sort of value. Don’t forget to include a call to action to encourage your prospect to engage in a relevant action associated with the message of the email. Original vs. drag and drop builder One of the most exciting new updates to Pardot email marketing is the drag-and-drop builder, designed to improve your experience with email building, testing and sending. In essence, drag-and-drop means more simplified content creation, a new send experience, and contextual reporting at every level. For example, with the original version, we’d have to clone previously sent emails to resend content to different recipients and segments. But with the drag-and-drop feature, this is no longer the case. Simplified content creation gives you the option to create emails from scratch, or by using a template that will automatically generate responsive designs for assets that are created in the builder, the ability to add buttons that can be styled to suit your

marcloudconsulting.com 13 brand, a faster and easier way to undo errors made when using the editor, and the option to view a mobile preview in-platform. The contextual reporting means we can access metrics at email template level. This allows us to view the performance of a specific asset - at a glance! The availability to see more granular data at this level gives us a better understanding of the overall success of the email. You can read more about how to enable the Drag-and-Drop Pardot Email Builder in our blog. Why have email templates? We’re always looking for ways to save valuable time and simplify processes - and Pardot email templates do exactly that! Email templates are email designs you can import or create and reuse. Each time you use an email template, the content can be modified. Not only will email templates ensure consistent alignment with your brand, it will save you precious time when creating emails across multiple campaigns, and help you be much more efficient. You can use the same template for different campaigns, and swap out the content. You can create email templates for things like newsletters, events, or follow-ups. We recommend testing a few out and getting to know what works best for you. Once you’re confident with the template, you can just edit the content and send when you need. At MarCloud, we have a library of readymade email templates available for you to buy -and we handle the customisation and import to Pardot for you! You can browse and enquire here.

marcloudconsulting.com 14 An overview of HML HML has been around with Pardot for some time now, and is used to personalise things like emails, dynamic content, landing pages, and more. It stands for Handlebars Merge Language, and was introduced to create a more cohesive relationship between Pardot and Salesforce, using Salesforce variable tags as opposed to Pardot variable tags. By switching to HML, it means we no longer need to change the language structure when copying an email from Pardot into the Sales Cloud email template builder. And with a standardised language, there’s less translation between the Pardot and Salesforce systems which is great for alignment between our Marketing and Sales teams! In terms of what the difference between the two languages look like visually, %%percentage_tags%% become {{curly.brackets}}. Overall, however, using HML is going to make things much easier between your Pardot and Salesforce platforms, with improved features and functionality. If you have yet to switch to using HML, it’s something we recommend you do sooner rather than later. See our guide to doing this correctly on our blog. T A G

marcloudconsulting.com 15 Email design best practices Your email design can be just as important and effective as the message of the email itself. If the format and function of your email doesn’t work, then it’s likely going to be off-putting to your recipient, and potentially decrease their interest. Here are a few standard things to keep in mind for your email design. Concise, personalised, and relevant messaging If you have prospect information including first names, then use this to personalise the email. Furthermore, if you can personalise in a more sophisticated way, even better. For example, using a prospect’s postal address to personalise their nearest office or store. Keep the messaging relevant and give your recipient a reason to open the email and read it - you want them to feel there is value in what they are consuming. Recent studies have shown that the more conversational an email is, particularly if it includes humour, the more likely you are to receive engagement with that email. Lastly, keep in mind that your prospects are busy people and don’t have time to read long emails in-depth. Being concise means getting to the point quickly, using short sentences and paragraphs, and limiting the length of your email. Always consider how long an email will appear on mobile devices. Visually appealing layout When in doubt, simple is always best. Another important factor of layout is accessibility - does your email layout abide by accessibility guidelines to ensure it is inclusive of all recipients? On-brand Strengthen your brand awareness by ensuring your email template aligns with your brand guidelines.

marcloudconsulting.com 16 Responsive design Responsive design will improve the user experience no matter what device they are accessing your email from and these days, it’s a necessity, not a luxury. A/B tested Taking the time to A/B test your email designs will give you greater insight into what works and what could be improved. You can A/B test subject lines to see which achieves the highest open rate, or A/B test email body content, such as a call to action button, to see which drives the most clicks. GDPR compliant By now this should be ingrained in all email marketing activity you do. Make sure there are clear options for your prospect to opt-out if they wish, or change their email preferences - a great preference page is a must - and links to your privacy policy.

marcloudconsulting.com 17 Dynamic content and personalisation Not only is dynamic content a huge time-saver, but it’s a time-saver that gets positive outcomes for our email marketing activity because we can apply personalisation to the content we are using to reach our prospects. You can use dynamic content to display custom HTML based on prospect criteria, and when a prospect matches the criteria for your dynamic content, a variation of the content displays. For example, here’s how a Pardot form on the MarCloud website looks for those who don’t already exist in our Pardot account:

marcloudconsulting.com 18 Versus the same form as it’s displayed for known prospects in our Pardot account: The same concept applies to email content. You might use dynamic content to display different blog posts in your email based on the job function of the prospect. Or, you could show a different call to action based on their lead score. The sky’s the limit! Even better, we can actually include personalisation and dynamic content within our email subject lines, by using the ‘Advanced Subject Composer. ’ When you consider that getting a recipient to open an email is the first crucial step to success, and that personalised subject lines improve click through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%, according to Aberdeen Group, it’s a no-brainer to insert ‘Variable Tags’ into subject lines.

marcloudconsulting.com 19 Use this same feature to insert Dynamic Content in your subject line and really tailor this to your prospect for higher open rates. Like any Pardot email marketing feature, it’s vital to take the time and learn how dynamic content and personalisation can be used to its full potential. This is where giving focus to the setup is crucial. Putting in the hard yards from the beginning means a much smoother ongoing process for you and your team, and helps to minimise avoidable inaccuracies. There are two things you need to know for great personalisation: • The ins and outs of your customer journey • Which buyer personas each prospect best fits If you don’t have that type of data, then we strongly suggest investing time into finding it. You’ll thank us later. Custom redirects Using custom redirects means content on your website links, third-party sites, or other web pages that is clicked by a user can be tracked. Custom redirects allow us to record and report on content that a prospect is engaging with the most, and therefore the effectiveness of our content and what is resonating most with each prospect. See our blog for a guide on how to create a custom redirect. A/B testing A/B testing allows us to test variable aspects to define winning criteria and inform us on what encourages more engagement from our prospects. You can test all kinds of things such as images, body copy, or names. For example, you might choose to use a different subject heading for the same email. You can send one version to different users from the same list, and discover which subject heading appears more successful with your prospects. Regular and constant testing is a good habit to have, particularly if you’re looking to improve your strategies and activity based on data and what you know works. And remember - to ensure a fair test you should only have one variable.

marcloudconsulting.com 20 Why you need a preferences page One of the most important and efficient ways to remain GDPR compliant is to have a preferences page. A preference page lists all the Public Lists available in your account that a subscriber can opt in and out of. All Pardot accounts have a default preference center. This preference center allows each subscriber to select the types of communication and content they’d like to receive from you. For example, if you have two Public Lists for ‘Promotions’ and ‘Updates’, a subscriber can choose to select one or both of the Lists, to indicate their preference to receive some or all communications available from you. Having a preferences page means your subscribers can manage their own subscription whenever they wish, and indicates their explicit consent in receiving different communications from you, or their preference to opt out. To ensure complete GDPR compliance with your preferences page, remember to include a link to your privacy policy on the page. Also, when creating Lists be sure to enter a label and description within the List settings. These are public facing and ensure that subscribers fully understand the value of the List they are subscribed to but also, what they will receive when opting in to additional Lists. One other thing to note is that within Pardot you have the ability to customise your preferences page. It’s a great opportunity to help reduce your unsubscriber rate and create a better user experience for your subscribers - so it’s worth considering.

marcloudconsulting.com 21 By the way, you can actually use dynamic lists on your Pardot preference page to allow prospects to opt out of emails related to these too. This means they will be suppressed from future emails but will not be removed from the List. Prospects cannot opt in to dynamic lists. Email testing An important part of managing a successful email campaign is email testing. We recommend testing all emails before they are sent - every time. Unlike A/B testing, this is an internal exercise used before sending a final version to prospects. The benefit to this is that you ensure your formatting and messaging is correct (this includes checking any links in your messaging) and the components of your email render properly. Pardot has a specific email testing tool that shows you renders of your email across all email clients and devices. You’ll find this included as a step when creating new Email Templates but you can also access all of the Tests you’ve previously conducted by navigating to Marketing > Emails > Tests.

marcloudconsulting.com 22 We recommend that you set up an internal testing List for all emails and have a few people in your organisation receiving and checking emails tests before sending them. MarCloud tips and tricks Now that we’ve run through a fair few of the basics, we’ve put together a list of a few of our favourite tips and tricks to help you even more when it comes to your Pardot email marketing activity. Let’s dive in! 1 Associate all email sends with the correct Campaign No matter the type of email - be it a weekly promotion, monthly newsletter, or lead generation email - always associate it with the most relevant Pardot Campaign. When it comes time to report on performance, if your emails are associated with the right Campaign, you can track and measure more accurately. 2 Test, test, test The best way to learn about what engages your users most about your email marketing activity is to conduct regular A/B testing. As we mentioned earlier, you can test a whole range of things in your emails, but remember to only have one variable aspect. 3 Embrace dynamic content Use dynamic content to personalise your emails and increase engagement with your prospects, which will in turn build greater interest and loyalty in your email marketing content.

marcloudconsulting.com 23 4 Use custom redirects We always want to build the most accurate prospect profiles we can, right? And using custom redirects on clicks and banners will help us do this. With a more complete prospect profile, our Sales team can use this information to build a better rapport with the prospect, or see areas in their scoring and grading that need more information. It’s a great idea to use custom redirects within emails to ask prospects questions that they can answer in one click but which will give you another data point to use in your segmentation or content tailoring. We also recommend using custom redirects on any website or third party links to attribute ROI from email conversions. 5 Use Scoring Categories The benefit of using scoring categories means you can analyse the effectiveness of prospect engagements with your email campaigns, allowing you to build better prospect profiles. This can then help you funnel prospects and leads along the sales journey faster. Make sure to take the time to assign scoring categories - it will be worth it! 6 Include a 2-click unsubscribe Making your unsubscribe link a 2-click process stops SPAM filters automatically opting people out.

marcloudconsulting.com 24 Managing email Bounces vs opting out In short, opt-outs are controlled by the prospect, whereas bounces are not. Let’s dig in a little more here. A hard bounce is recorded when an email is classified as ‘invalid’. This can be for several reasons, including: • An unknown email recipient • A non-existent domain • The email is suspected as spam by the email server If an email is classed as invalid, then it will continuously bounce back. This will automatically tick the ‘Do Not Email’ box, and suppress the prospect from all future marketing communications. The ‘Hard Bounced’ field will also be checked in Pardot and this will sync over in the corresponding Salesforce record. Note: The Hard Bounce field can not be manually unselected on a prospect record in Pardot, but the Do Not Email checkbox can be. When it comes to opt-outs, the most defining characteristic here is that the prospect has complete control - and there are a few ways it can be done, including: • Clicking an unsubscribe button or link displayed on the preference page or in an email. • Reporting an email as spam. • Being manually imported as ‘Opted Out.’ • A user has manually opted out the prospect in Pardot.

marcloudconsulting.com 25 Ever wondered why there are both ‘Do Not Email’ and ‘Opted Out’ fields in Pardot? The best way to differentiate these two fields: • ‘Do Not Email’ is more of an operational field which does not sync to Salesforce by default. It is often triggered by 1 hard bounce, 5 soft bounces or if they’re opted out within Salesforce. The prospect will not receive autoresponders or operational emails! • ‘Opted Out’ is controlled by the user, so the main way this triggers is when a prospect clicks an unsubscribe link or reports your email as spam. This field syncs with Salesforce by default. The prospect can still receive autoresponders and operational emails. Good news, as of 2021, Pardot released the new ‘Mailability Settings’ feature, which means we can now see the full mailability of a single prospect within their profile. You can find out more about the Mailability Settings in our blog. Opting prospects back in Pardot has a feature called ‘Automated Resubscribe’. If a user has previously opted-out from communications and you would like to prompt them to opt back in, you can use this feature, which gives a user the option to send themself a resubscribe autoresponder email after filling in a form on the website. Something important to remember about the opt-out/do not email relationship in Pardot and Salesforce is that the suppression will always win. For example, if you try to clear the opt-out or do not email in Pardot and the value is still in Salesforce, then the prospect will re-sync and revert to being opted out/do not email. It’s the same vice versa. For a step-by-step guide on how to opt a prospect back in, head to our blog here. Analysing and reporting Most people are familiar with planning and implementation, but it’s the analysing and reporting that really give us the gold. This is where we measure the success of our campaigns, looking into what worked and what didn’t.

marcloudconsulting.com 26 The main difference between analysing and reporting is that reporting gives us the ‘what, and t’ he analysing gives us the ‘why.’ Reporting Reporting sorts and summarises the information and data we collect. When reporting on our email marketing activity, we look into specific measurements of email performance. In terms of metrics, this includes things such as deliverability and reputation, open rates, bounces, opt-outs, clicks and engagement. Analysing Analysing explores the connection between your marketing efforts and sales outcomes. This process involves a bit of detective work to ask questions and interpret the information and provide recommendations for future plans and activity. The interpretations and exploration we conduct with the data is used to inform our planning, so it’s certainly a worthwhile and valuable exercise to be embracing on a regular basis.

marcloudconsulting.com 27 Email inspiration: use cases At MarCloud we work with clients on all sorts of email campaigns. For some, we simply provide readymade or custom-built templates while for others, we plan, manage and report on the end-to-end campaign. To give you a bit of inspiration and insight into what’s possible with Pardot email marketing, here are a selection of our favourite use cases: 1 Nurture program for Bruntwood Bruntwood provides meeting rooms, offices, retail and lab space around the United Kingdom. With a typical B2B sales cycle, the business needs to build trust, increase brand awareness, and maintain connection with prospects until they are ready to make a purchase. To help them achieve this goal, we devised a Pardot email marketing nurture program to run in Engagement Studio. For the target recipients, we focused on existing leads in Salesforce and Pardot prospects who don’t yet exist in Salesforce. We optimised content by resending some templates with a different subject line if the first send hadn’t been opened and we drilled down to track specific links within each template to identify buying intent. These link clicks resulted in an increase in score and when the threshold was met, the lead was converted into an MQL. Within one month of the lead nurture program going live we had 18 influenced Opportunities, including one valuing at £500k.

marcloudconsulting.com 28 2 Cross-campaign engagement for Kirkpatrick Price Licensed CPA firm, Kirkpatrick Price, requested nurture emails be sent out to both leads and contacts who are associated with a previous campaign in Pardot but had not yet converted. The objective was to increase engagement and drive new sales. Our recommended approach was to utilise multiple call to actions in the email templates that allowed prospects to schedule the best time for them to receive an audit report from Kirkpatrick Price; one of their core services. If they requested to receive an audit report in Q1 2022 by clicking that CTA in the email, they would then be entered into a scheduled Engagement Studio program. This would ensure they receive the content automatically at their chosen time - with limited effort from the marketing team. When do you need your next audit report?

marcloudconsulting.com 29 3 Dynamic content for Wartsila When Wartsila wanted to nurture leads who had completed a file download, we created a series of email templates that included dynamic content for the type of vessel (water or oil) a prospect had. This would help content to resonate with the recipient and increase engagement. However, taking it one step further, we decided against just showing default content when the type of vessel a prospect had was not known (not collected at the time of download). Instead, we also asked the recipient to update their email preferences using call to actions to separate landing pages; water, oil or both. We used Custom Redirects in the emails with completion actions to update the relevant fields with the prospect’s preference. This allowed us to personalise future emails and ensure we could show relevant content depending on their vessel. It also allowed the client to gather more information on existing prospects for their ongoing marketing comms and for the sales team to make use of.

marcloudconsulting.com 30 Download the Essential Pardot Email Marketing Checklist Need an easy way to stay on top of Pardot email requirements? The Essential Pardot Email Marketing Checklist As digital marketers, we have to be on top of a lot when creating and sending communications to our prospects. All at once, we need to consider the audience, segmentation, message, design, responsiveness, compliance, data management, reporting… the list goes on. This checklist is designed to make life easier the next time you plan, create and send an email using Pardot. Use it to guide you and your fellow team members, to ensure all of the factors that result in a successful email are taken into account. You can complete it digitally for each email, or print it out and display it for all to see! Enjoy, The MarCloud Consulting team marcloudconsulting.com Download Checklist