Ad-hoc Flyers

This is probably one of the silliest things I have ever done while on the road at a tradeshow. I created a flyer based off a Pardot landing page. Then had it printed overnight and ready for pickup at a convention center's FedEx Office. It's a tad expensive to print flyers like this, but in a pinch it will do.

Landing Page as a Booth Flyer?

Pardot: My first drip test

Probably the most bothersome of this whole affair is the waiting. Pardot's drip campaign setup requires you to put in a minimum 1 day (can't do partial days, hours, or minute settings) between when a user is sent an email and opens or clicks. For every open or click, add another day to your test cycle. For brevity, this test only uses two email templates. While I could have Pardot do more complicated actions, I don't want to have to delete or reset my test addresses in Salesforce, so these actions just trigger the Pardot side of the data.

Having four unique-by-content templates (video, case study, webinar, and general) for persona nurturing is a lot better (Thanks Kate!) than setting up 40 unique templates. Except, to start the personas, I'll have to create at least three sets of eight persona content pieces. Each set would include body content, a video placeholder image and a video link, and a unique call to action.

The drip report display is a big step up from what you could get out of Silverpop's EngageB2B product (and much cleaner too) which shows how many prospects are in each section of the drip.

Pardot - Sample Drip Progress

Automation Quirks: Pardot

Pardot's integrations with third party vendor software make it competitive among vendors that offer marketing automation solutions; but there are quite a lot of quirks (read this as lost functionality) when you go from using the soup version of an email marketing platform to a nuts version; Pardot is definitely the latter.

I was setting up an email for a rebroadcast. It is a basic flat email with a tracked link for a webinar invite to a select group of prospects in our database. That is pretty easy to put together. Heck, all I had to do was make a copy of the previously broadcasted email. Although, a lot of vendors don't require this step. Anyhow. To set up a rebroadcast, I had to pull out a list of 'opens' from the previous broadcast (which, fortunately, I didn't have to export and re-import as a list) and append it to the new broadcast as a suppression list. Weird. Normally, I would be able to just suppress any lead record who received the previous 'email' in say, Silverpop, and broadcast as usual.

It just causes me to have 'more stuff' within the user environment in Pardot. Now I have an extra list that I don't need for future broadcasts, but I need for this one. I have a stinkin' suspicion that if I delete the list, I'll lose the attributes of the send data for the affected prospects.

I have noticed, however, that if you have a distinct question in Pardot and look in their help or idea forums, and can't find it...the solution does not exist. And, if you really wanted them to implement it, you could suggest the idea to their idea forum and users can vote it up to the top of the queue for development.