**“You Learn Pretty Quick to Put First Things First and, in the Car Business, Product Comes First” — Lee Iacocca, Chrysler Corporation, 1984.” **(And Still Applicable to Software today….)
As we continue the march towards release day, we’re back with another round of Release Highlights — this time with a focus on some highly-anticipated changes to the platform’s email marketing powerhouse Pardot!
It’s hard to believe how much Pardot has evolved since Saleforce acquired the brand as a primary B2B marketing campaign platform in 2012. Over the course of a decade, many features & options have been changed out, in favor of superior integration with Salesforce itself. Not to mention the desire for Pardot to be residing completely in Salesforce “Lightning” itself as well by later this year.
Last week we took a look at some nominal changes headed to Pardot and its further integration into Marketing Cloud — this week we’ll take a look at one of the most exciting feature updates we found in the Summer ’22 release notes — powerful new Completion Actions!
Salesforce marketers rely on Completion Actions to automate prospect experience, craft personalized journeys and campaigns, and route and manage all that valuable inbound data! For a quick recap, straight from the source:
“Completion actions allow you to automate directly from a marketing asset, such as a form, file, or email send. You can add the completion action directly to the asset, and it executes every time the prospect takes action on that asset. Because completion actions are (you guessed it!) action-based, they have a singular, binary criterion: Did the prospect do something? That “something” can be anything from submitting a form to opening an email. If yes, the completion action is triggered immediately and executes every time the action is taken. It’s important to also remember that completion actions are not retroactive. They apply only to activities that happen after the completion action is added.”
What’s New? — Conditional Completion Actions & Slack
The first big addition to the world of Completion Actions is the ability to selectively apply completion actions based on prospect criteria! Starting in Summer ’22 marketers will be able to apply completion actions to a subset of prospects who meet conditions they specify. They can also add at least one conditional action as well. Conditional actions will only execute on prospects which meet the criteria for the conditional group they’re in. Conditional completion actions are grouped based on prospect condition, and you can combine both standard and conditional actions on a single asset!
For example, assign prospects who live in Atlanta to User A and prospects who live in Miami to User B when they fill out your form. Or say there is a Prospect in Basking Ridge, New Jersey (where I grew up) who filled out a particular form for a moving vendor to move to Redondo Beach, California (where I live now) — now a marketer can add a conditional group and specify the prospect condition they want. So, in this case, maybe we’d see East Coast prospects with a West Coast moving destination routed to the appropriate team member for handling cross-country moves! They can also add at least one conditional action as well. Conditional actions will only execute on prospects which meet the criteria for the conditional group they’re in. Conditional completion actions are grouped based on prospect condition, and you can combine both standard and conditional actions on a single asset!
Another big update that’s sure to put a smile on marketers (and their managers’) faces, is the addition of Slack notifications to Completion Actions! Tired of that string of “Notify User” CAs for all the relevant stakeholders? In Summer ’22 you’ll be able to have those form fills ping the marketing channel, so everyone gets the update simultaneously (and in a centralized location that’s, let’s be honest, a bit more manageable than your inbox). This should be especially powerful when paired with the conditional Completion Actions we covered above. Imagine a scenario where highly graded and scored (read: qualified) Prospects form fills automatically ping the Sales channel on Slack, so the team can swarm they warmest opportunities, right as they come in!
Who’s Included?
Great news! These changes apply to all Pardot editions (See Below):
Recent Example from Salesforce.com (2022)
Regardless of what we’ll be calling Pardot by this time next year, it’s amazing to see useful, novel features like this still hitting the product roadmap and it’s a great sign that, while Pardot is being moved under the Marketing Cloud wing, they’re not backing off any of the functionality or power of the platform.
As always, we’ll keep these Release Highlights coming as we continue the countdown to Summer ’22 — so stay tuned for those and, if there’s anything in the release notes that caught your eye and you’d like us to do a deeper dive into, drop a note in the comments here!
And we’ll see you in the cloud.
