Last Thursday I attended the Pardot Sydney User Group @ Sydney Salesforce HQ accompanied by my colleague Marylove Baliuka. Here is a brief summary what transpired in my third User Group to date:
Sitting to my right was Vince Skully from Life Sherpa to my left sat Michelle Bridger-Darling from CASF.
The group session kicked off with Samantha Pang (Client Advocate)(otherwise known as ‘Sammi’) discussing how best to access Pardot support, whilst stating “you’re not alone”. She also encouraged Pardot users to get involved in the Ideas Exchange, and the Success Community, re-iterating that “we love collaboration”, and “if you are working late, its Global – so use it”. “Office Hours is a great tool and opportunity to ask questions”.
Michael Roberts (Salesforce B2B Marketing Solutions Engineer) informed the group about future Pardot developments titled “Next Pardot Roadmap”, and postulated “all our innovation is driven by your feedback”.
He traced the ‘Pardot Promise‘ ie:
- you are backed by the power of Salesforce
- we will never compromise on ease of use
- your success is our success
Michael also demonstrated what to expect of ‘Engagement Studio’, and outlined the differences between ‘Actions’, ‘Triggers’ and ‘Rules’. What I thought was really intuitive was the ability to upload success drip templates within ‘Engagement Studio’, for example a ‘Cold List Nurture’.
The testing environment of ‘Engagement Studio’ is also an improvement on the current functionality of ‘Drip Campaigns’. What was also really exciting was the plan to make Pardot engagement history as native data in Salesforce (rather than an iframe).
Finally, Robert also highlighted the benefits and features of Salesforce Engage, and traced ‘Roadmap Themes’ for future development.
Sammi educated the user group on ‘Email Marketing Best Practices’. Key email metrics were given, ie:
> Delivery Rate: How clean your lists are
> Open Rate: How good your subject line is
> Click-Through Rate (CTR): How good is your copy
It was asserted that Open Rates should be > 20%, whilst average of CTR should measure between 2-4%. Optimal times for sending an email was presented (Source: MailChimp):
We were also provided ‘Quick Tips’, including:
- Increase Deliverability: By having a low image to text ratio, avoid excessive punctuation in the subject line, don’t use too many bit.ly links
- Open Rate: Use short, friendly subject lines, don’t come off as too ‘mark-y’ or ‘sales-y’, and use variable tags for higher engagement.
- CTR: Have your call to action near the top, rich-text emails perform better than HTML in B2B. Keep your copy short, and provide value up front.
Rheannen (Pardot Support) also provided valuable insights into the advantages of an Email Preference Center.
The 2 hour session concluded with an open question and answer session.
I am consistently impressed with the professionalism of the team at Pardot in Sydney, and look forward to the next user Group!