DreamForce 2019: let’s discover the Customer 360 experience

Customer 360 experience tableau

Although preparing for the trip to San Francisco to attend Dreamforce (Salesforce’s annual event) is becoming a habit for the team, this year is particularly interesting for me. As I have commented on several occasions, Dreamforce is probably one of the biggest marketing events in the world.

This year the number of attendees will probably exceed last year’s 170,000. Former President Barak Obama and Tim Cook from apple complete the more than 2,700 sessions available to attendees. But there are 2 important developments in the world of marketing that we are looking forward to hearing about in detail:

  • The launch of Customer 360 experience as a new customer identity management platform
  • How Tableau will be integrated as an analytics platform within Salesforce

Improving the customer experience is a critical element of improvement for many companies, and for this reason, being able to know the different identities of the customers throughout the interactions they have with our company is critical. The ability to orchestrate such integration and to unify marketing, sales, analytics, and e-commerce platforms is the secret to success.

Dreamforce 2019 customer 360

Customer 360 experience makes it possible to easily relate the records of the same person in different systems. It creates and stores a customer’s profile and acts as a central office that exchanges data and events in all systems at the moment they are needed.

In fact, no other platform on the market has yet managed to achieve the challenge of unifying them. For years, companies have been trying to get a 360-degree view of their customers, but with their departments using different tools to manage the data, they tend to generate disconnected experiences for their customers.

The center of the main hall at Moscone West is dedicated to this new feature, which gives an idea of the importance Salesforce attaches to this functionality.

All of us who like analysis is very curious to know how the puzzle of analytical tools available to Salesforce fits together. Datorama, Einstein Analytics, Tableau, or the native reporting platform in salesforce itself must find their niche.

In two weeks’ time, we want to tell you from San Francisco what the most important developments are for the marketing world and what the trends are for 2020. See you!

ShowerThinking obtains the homologation as Datorama’s partner

ShowerThinking certified datorama

We are a partner of Datorama! In ShowerThinking, Intelligent Marketing agency, we have just certified the business level in Datorama, the integration tool that allows to connect all data sources and generate an integrated source that facilitates the analysis and decision making.

We add this new Partnership, which our team of specialists has achieved after a great effort and we demonstrate once again that we bet on the best Business Intelligence platforms to offer the best services to our customers.

What is Datorama?

Datorama is a platform that automatically connects marketing tools and unifies reports on investments, performance and results. In this way, it helps you to be more efficient. It is one of the best tools

Datorama’s main objective is to visualize, analyze and measure the real time impact of advertising campaigns carried out through different channels and achieve success through its cloud marketing platform based mainly on artificial intelligence.

This tool has a fairly simple, intuitive and visual interface, so that a unified view is quickly obtained and also allows you to manage it without problems.

What are the main functions of Datorama?

Managing data can be a difficult and time consuming task, something that marketing professionals do not usually have. Therefore, Datorama provides a series of functionalities to optimize the performance of your marketing strategy.

1. Connect and unify data

Through channels, tools and internal systems immediately in order to measure, report and optimize. Integrates data from social platforms, visualization, search, video, web analytics, CRM and email into the largest API library. Some key integration features are:

  • APIConnect. This is the largest marketing API library. It accesses databases, big data environments and cloud storage platforms.
  • TotalConnect. Automates data entry, compilation, cleanup, and data modeling assignments from all file-based report sources. Datorama obtains strategic information from hundreds of thousands of active data transmissions daily.
  • LiteConnetc. Simplifies data entry and analysis of individual data files. No initial data modeling considerations are required, making it perfect for ad hoc analysis and non-marketing sources such as sales data, geographic data or weather data.

2. Drives business growth

By obtaining scalable and customized solutions in record time to maximize ROI, objectives and activities from analysis and information between different channels such as email, social networks, web, etc. Optimizes potential customers, their conversion with advanced information and knowledge across all channels, sites and devices.

3. Provides complete and fast reports from data

Datorama transforms the data into visual guides and descriptions so that it is better understood and acted upon. It has statistical analysis methods and automated regression modeling to analyze in less time.

With this tool it is possible to monitor and report all marketing data on a single platform and provides all stakeholders with the appropriate KPIs, trends and breakdowns.

4. Link Revenues to Automated Reports

View performance trends, correct KPIs, campaign analysis and segment breakdowns for platforms such as Adwords, Facebook or Google Analytics It also prioritizes improving each investment and achieving campaign objectives by making smarter decisions.

5. Activates data and brings teams together to improve campaign performance

It analyzes and stops low performance campaigns and modifies everything necessary to achieve the best results. Provides automatic predictions to complete objectives and obtain recommendations. And promotes collaboration between teams.

For all these reasons, we have no doubt that Datorama is a tool with great potential.

Salesforce Pardot Email Specialist Certification

Pardot Specialist Exam

Being up to date in the world of CRM today means being on the cutting edge of Salesforce, a CRM application platform that allows us to connect with our customers in a different way.

Within Salesforce we find different applications depending on the department that will be using it. This time I’m going to talk to you about Pardot, a platform that offers powerful marketing automation to help the marketing and sales teams find and nurture our best prospects and close more deals. If you want to get started with Pardot, I recommend that you read the post Pardot, the B2B automation tool. Moreover, it is a tool that will allow us to control 100% how many users we are leaving a cookie with, how many have entered the system thanks to our marketing actions, how many are ready to buy from us and we pass them on to sales to manage them, how many have received an offer from the sales team or how many opportunities we have won and it even allows us to generate recruitment and loyalty journeys, etc. In short, it allows us to activate, measure and share with our teams all our “Inbound Marketing” from recruitment, to turning prospects into brand ambassadors, to loyalty.

Now that we know what it is and we are interested in knowing more, we will have to get certified on this platform to get the most out of it and bring value to our company. That’s why in this post I’m going to talk to you about how to take the Pardot Email Specialist exam and try to solve all your doubts, as I already told you in this post about Salesforce Certifications.

Currently there are 2 types of exams, Pardot Consultant and Pardot Email Specialist.

The Pardot Email Specialist certification focuses on gaining a broad knowledge of the tools and features within the Pardot platform and is geared towards the end users. In contrast, the Consultant certification focuses more on implementation. This time I will focus on talking to you about Email Specialist.

Who is this certification for?

The Salesforce Pardot Email Specialist credential is geared toward individuals who want to demonstrate their skills and knowledge in designing and building marketing campaigns within Pardot. 

The first thing we will have to do is know the Exam Guide to know what the content and agenda are.

Likewise, the following online resources are some recommendations that I believe will help guide you as you prepare and facilitate the study:

About the Pardot Email Specialist exam

You will wonder what the exam consists of. So that you have a general idea of ​​the structure and requirements they request:

  • Content: 60 multiple choice / multiple choice questions
  • Time allotted to complete the exam: 90 minutes
  • Passing score: 72% or what is the same 43 correct answers
  • Language: English
  • Registration fee: USD 200, plus applicable taxes as required by local law
  • Recovery fee USD 100, plus applicable taxes as required by local law
  • Delivery Options – Proctored exam delivered on-site at a test center or in an online proctored environment.
  • References: Before I started organizing my exam and the plan that I was going to take for the weeks leading up to certification, I had no prior experience using Pardot. Fortunately, all the material we need to pass the exam is available online for free.
  • Prerequisite : Not required.

Exam outline

Now that we know what they are going to ask us, where do we start?

First of all, to begin we must visit the home page of the exams . Here you will find the basic information about the exam, the registration form and, of course, the study guide. You will also have access to support modules that reflect the points of the study guide, each section includes E-Learning modules, knowledge base articles (supporting information) and videos (mini videos to support learning). The E-learning modules are definitely a prerequisite for taking the exam and cover almost everything, the videos and knowledge base articles are great for clearing up any doubts we may not have understood. I would also recommend writing notes while watching the videos to refer to later.

In addition to the large amount of material we have, Pardot offers us an environment for frequently asked questions. 

This guide is a summary of the exam with topics to be covered and the weight of each topic. The higher the weight, the more questions will generally be asked about the topic

  • Visitors and Prospects: 8%
  • Administration: 11%
  • Pardot Forms, Form Controller, and Landing Pages: 20%
  • Client Management: 24%
  • Email Marketing: 20%
  • Engagement study: 17%

Study guide

You already know what are the topics that are going to be covered in the exam, so so that you have in a more detailed way point by point what they are going to ask you, I make your life easier with this complete guide of all the content you will need.

CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT – 24%

EMAIL MARKETING – 20%

PARDOT FORMS, FORMS CONTROLLERS AND LANDING PAGE – 20%

COMMITMENT STUDY – 17%

ADMINISTRATION – 11%

VISITORS AND PROSPECTS – 8%

Question example

You may be curious to know what kind of questions they can ask you, as I already mentioned above, the exam is done in English.

What is the primary reason for using a form handler?

a) To take advantage of progressive profiling

b) To use enable Captcha on the form

c) To integrate Pardot with a pre-existing website form.

d) To include custom CSS styling

Correct answer: C

You have been asked to create a form that gathers information from prospects. This information should be available in Pardot as well as a custom build community site. How would you achieve this? [Choose one answer]

a) Create a Pardot form and via completion actions submit the details to the community site.

b) Create a website form that submits the details to the community site and integrate it with a Pardot form handler.

c) Create a Pardot form and via an automation rule submit the details to the community site.

d) Create a website form that integrates with a Pardot form handler, details are submitted to the community site using Pardot API.

Correct answer: B

Tips

If you want me to give you some tips to prepare for the big day, I will tell you that we may have doubts and we are nervous when we encounter difficulties but:

  • Don’t be put off by not knowing what or how the Pardot platform works.
  • When you take a test, a good trick is to first try to eliminate the answers that we consider incorrect to make sure that we are sure of our answer.
  • Complete all Pardot related modules while taking notes to help you memorize and learn.
  • Read their posts on the Salesforce blog to stay up-to-date.

Other credentials

Very good! You have already certified in Pardot Email Specialist, now what? I would recommend that you continue certifying in the different credentials that Salesforce offers us and that I consider are important to start with:

Marketing Cloud Specialist

Salesforce Administrator

 

 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist Certification

Exam MC email specialist

In relation to the topic I already mentioned in this post about Salesforce Certifications, I’m going to try to solve your doubts about how to take the exam for Cloud Email Marketing Specialist.

First things first: there are four exams to obtain the complete Cloud Marketing Certification:

  • Cloud Marketing Manager: Designed for administrators who can set up cloud marketing products using industry and product best practices. Candidates should generally be familiar with the data structure in subscriber data management and can navigate the Setup. Certified Cloud Marketing administrators can successfully resolve account settings and user requests.
  • Cloud Email Marketing Specialist: designed for those who can demonstrate knowledge, skills and experience in email marketing best practices. Includes message design, subscriber and data management, inbox delivery, and external integrations with the Email Marketing Cloud application.
  • Cloud Marketing Developer: Certified Cloud Marketing developers have hands-on experience developing across the platform. They create dynamic, personalized messages and landing pages, and are proficient in the Cloud Marketing scripting languages. They also have experience in advanced segmentation, reporting and analysis, and data configuration.
  • Cloud Marketing Consultant: Designed for those who can configure and deploy Salesforce Marketing Cloud application tools, providing solutions for running tactical and strategic email campaigns. Candidates must have extensive knowledge of Salesforce applications, set up and regularly manage Salesforce, and work with stakeholders to define requirements

Who it is aimed at

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist credential is geared toward individuals who want to demonstrate their expertise in email marketing best practices, message design, subscriber and data management, inbox delivery, email automation, and tracking and reporting metrics within the Marketing Cloud Email application.

About the exam

Now I’m going to explain the general idea of how the exam is.

  • Content: 60 multiple choice questions
  • Time allocated to complete the exam: 105 minutes
  • Score to pass: 68%
  • Language: English
  • Registration fee: USD 200, plus applicable taxes as required by local law
  • Recovery fee: USD 100, plus applicable taxes as required by local law
  • Delivery options: supervised exam delivered on-site at a test center or in an online supervised environment.
  • Prerequisite: There are no prerequisites for this exam, however, I recommend that you complete the recommended Trailhead path provided by Salesforce as a practice before completing this exam.

Examination Outline

First of all, to start preparing for the exam we should visit the home page of the exams. Here you will find the basic information about the exam, the registration form and of course the study guide, all completely free of charge. You will also have access to support modules that reflect the points of the study guide, each section includes E-Learning modules, knowledge base articles (support information) and videos (mini videos to support learning). The E-learning modules are definitely a prerequisite for taking the exam and cover almost everything, the videos and the knowledge base articles are excellent for clarifying any questions we may not have understood. I would also recommend that you write notes while watching the videos to refer to them later.

In this structure of the exam, we should familiarize ourselves with each point of the topics to be covered and the weight of each one. The greater the weight, the more questions will usually be asked.

  • Email Marketing Best Practices: 15%
  • Email Message Design: 13%
  • Content Creation and Delivery: 18%
  • Marketing Automation: 19%
  • Subscriber and Data Management: 28%
  • Tracking and Reporting: 7%

SUBSCRIBER AND DATA MANAGEMENT – 28%

MARKETING AUTOMATION – 19%

CONTENT CREATION AND DELIVERY – 18%

EMAIL MARKETING BEST PRACTICES – 15%

EMAIL MESSAGE DESIGN – 13%

  • Given a customer scenario, recommend email design best practices to implement.
  • Given the desired output functionality, recommend methods for creating incoming emails.
  • Given the desired output requirements, recommend strategies for testing A/B email elements.

TRACKING AND REPORTING – 6%

  • Given a customer scenario, explain the different metrics available for email campaigns and what each one means.
  • Given an email campaign, describe the steps needed to analyze performance results.
  • Given the need to run reports, configure and run Cloud Marketing ad hoc and automated reports.

Tips

  • Cloud marketing is a complex platform, do not try to cover everything at once, focus on what the test asks for
  • When you take a test, first try to eliminate incorrect answers to make sure you are confident with each answer
  • Do all the Trailhead modules related to Cloud Marketing while taking notes to help you memorize and learn.
  • Read their posts on the Salesforce blog to stay up to date

 

Other credentials

I would also recommend that you consider getting certified on these credentials which I believe are important to get started and will add value to your resume:

Pardot Specialist

Salesforce Administrador

Salesforce Certifications: A Guide to Enhancing Your Career

salesforce certifications

 

Salesforce certifications, and how to get them, are one of the most frequently asked questions by my students. I’m currently studying my eleventh certification on the platform, and after getting certified as an architect, I think it’s a good time to offer my point of view and help if you’re trying to get certified in Salesforce, or have questions about how it works.

At my students’ request, I’m including below a guide to which certifications are harder to get or which ones are aimed at sales/marketing/managers or programmers. If you have already been certified in one of these, I would love for you to share your opinion and personal experience.

salesforce architect

Despite many years of working at Salesforce, I hadn’t considered getting certified. The truth is that I couldn’t find the reason to invest so much time or the sense to obtain it: after all, I was already working on projects that require continuous training.

My opinion changed little by little, when I realized the value a certification brings, to me personally and to other professionals in my environment.

Obtaining a certification is often a source of pride for many professionals. It is difficult not to be infected by everyone’s enthusiasm and desire to improve. At an international level you can follow the hashtag #SalesforceCerts and you will see how it is celebrated every time a user achieves a new goal. It’s part of the collaborative culture and atmosphere at Salesforce, with its great family #Ohana.

Another issue that has also changed my impression over time is the experience that the certifications themselves can bring you. Some of them, I consider them as small jewels of the formation. You can see the care and detail that has been put into them. They allow you to learn from real cases and environments in which you have not yet worked. In fact over time you will see that many questions are extracted from real support cases that users make.

What demand for employment really exists?

But let’s get to the heart of the matter: Does a certification serve to improve your career? The answer can’t be other than a resounding yes. As you will see in the image below, it is estimated that up to 3.3 million jobs will be created around the platform. It is true that there are no miracles in this life and everything is done on an effort basis, but it is true that including your certification in your LinkedIn profile is one of the safest ways for a Headhunter to call you offering a change in your job. If you are already working, it is a way to demonstrate your knowledge of the platform in your company and to add value to your job.

Salesforce Economy

 

However, my recommendation is that you do not let yourself be carried away by the current peak in demand for professionals in the Salesforce environment. Think that this is a very important investment in time and decide to work in an area that you really like (Salesforce has many).

What is the most appropriate certification for my profile and where should I start?

I will leave you with my personal opinion, since you will probably have to invest a great deal of time in this training. From my point of view, if you have decided to fight for certification, some will be easier than others depending on your profile.

Many people think that the basic certification you should start with is Salesforce Certified Administrator, but Salesforce itself does not propose any of these as a starting point. In fact, from my point of view, administrator training is relatively difficult to achieve and is one of the most frustrating for new students.

For this certification, a previous experience of at least one year in the platform is recommended, but I think that the more technical profiles (IT, Computer Science) or at least if you like some programming have a very important advantage. After all, Salesforce is built on a relational database. I don’t mean that you will need to answer questions about programming in this exam, but I do think that those people with basic computer/programming knowledge have a certain advantage, since many concepts (e.g. security) will be familiar to them. In short, if you dare with technology you can start with this training which is the basis of the platform. If you have already worked with other CRMs, this is undoubtedly your starting point.

If you have a Marketing background I suggest that instead of starting with the Administrator exam, you start with the Marketing area (Pardot Specialist, Marketing Cloud Specialist or Marketing Cloud Social Specialist). They are much more akin to the day-to-day work of Marketing and there will be many elements that will ring a bell (landing pages, contact forms, etc).

If your work is related to data analysis and you already have previous experience on the Salesforce Certified Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant platform, this is a specialized certification in this field.

If you have experience as a programmer and especially if you have programmed in java, do not think about it, Platform Developer I is your goal.

In what type of company or department will I end up working with these degrees?

This is an extremely important point since there is a great difference in the type of professional profiles sought by different companies and departments.

We’re going to talk first about the companies that use Salesforce, the so-called end customers of the technology, and then about the partners.

Normally the profiles of Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, Pardot Specialist and in some cases Marketing Cloud Consultant are usually hired within the marketing departments of companies. However profiles such as Marketing Cloud Administrator or Marketing Cloud developer (with exceptions of course) are usually hired by IT departments. There is no rule written in stone, but there is a strong tendency for the more technical profiles to be hired by systems or technology departments. You must take this into account to know how you want to evolve professionally.

If we’re talking about IT consultants or marketing agencies (salesforce partners), things change a lot here. In fact, the profiles are more varied, you could work in the account department, digital creation, implementation/operations or technical support. The Marketing Cloud Consultant profile usually has a more direct relationship with the customer (depending on their years of experience) and the developer profile is usually linked to more technical departments. It will depend in many cases on the size of the agency or consultancy and its involvement as a Salesforce partner, but you can be in almost any related department.

How many years of experience do I need?

Depending on the profile, a different experience is needed. As in many jobs, my recommendation is that after getting your certification you try to get practical experience in a company. Specialist profiles should have appropriate work experience from 1 year of experience, especially if you are facing multiple campaigns with different typologies. A consultant profile needs the experience of several years and several implementations of the Marketing Cloud behind them (in the exam documentation they recommend 4 to 6 implementations before presenting themselves as a consultant). As for the developers, it will depend on the complexity of the project where you are involved, many times they work with senior profiles along with more junior profiles to complete their training.

What kind of certifications are there?

Currently there are 3 levels (from lower to higher difficulty) of certificates in the platform: (Administrators, Specialists and Programmers), Consultants and Architects.

Architect Journey

The specialist and administrator exams are an introduction to the platform, for example Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, Marketing Cloud Social Specialist or Pardot Specialist.

The developer exams are oriented to the more technical profiles and programmers in particular.

Consultant profiles are some of the most complicated to achieve. According to my own experience, besides having multiple projects on Marketing Cloud, the Marketing Cloud Certified Consultant certification is one of the most complicated on the platform. It is not uncommon to have a 6 month preparation for this exam if you already have in your backpack an experience with the installation of 4/5 projects in Marketing Cloud.

The architect profiles (I’m talking to you with the only experience of having passed one and preparing a second one) are another matter. They make sense if you’re professionally very involved and need a few hours of preparation, practice and hard work. But at the same time, you discover new areas of the platform that you may not have known existed.

At the top of the pyramid is the Technical Architect certification where you must present yourself before a committee of professionals who will evaluate you in person.

Are they really that hard to get?

I’m not going to lie to you: the level of difficulty is quite high for any of them. They are meticulously thought out so that you don’t pass them without very good preparation. Think that Salesforce trusts certified professionals and they are part of your company’s image. In short, you take care of the details and need to guarantee yourself a minimum level of knowledge.

I assure you that multiple questions, (where many times all of them are possible) need you to have prepared yourself thoroughly. To give you an idea, I check how many of my students take about 4 months (in some cases more) to prepare for a basic certification.

Here is a guide to the difficulty you can expect in each certification.

level difficult

Otherwise, to better understand the difficulty of the certifications, if we relate it to snow slopes, we would find this classification, where the exams of Pardot Specialist, Marketing Cloud Email Specialist and App Builder would be the most affordable to start getting certified:

snow track

How is the exam?

You can take the exam from home online or at an authorized center in your city. The exam is made up of 65 questions that appear on the computer with a limited time (from 95 in the basic certificates to 105 minutes or more for the architect’s ones). Many of them require multiple answers (answering which of the 2 or 3 options you are presented with are correct) but simple answers are not the easiest either, since it is usually difficult to differentiate between the correct option and you must know the subject in detail.

Be prepared to be calm, impatience is bad advice. Many of the questions are several paragraphs long and you need to read them in detail in order to answer correctly. After more than an hour it is difficult to maintain your concentration, so getting used to the idea that you must keep up and know how to keep your strength is the best strategy.

Personally I always make a quick answer to the questions I am sure of and leave for a second review all the doubtful ones. This saves me time, especially in the advanced exams where there is a lot to read.

How to prepare for certification

The suggestion I make to everyone is to open a free Salesforce account (you can do it at https://developers.salesforce.com/signup) and practice with the platform. You’ll learn in detail how to work and you’ll be able to familiarize yourself with the environment.

The Trailhead training platform, is from my point of view one of the best on the market. It is also free. Each certificate has its Trailmix (set of recommended modules) that you can complete before taking the exam.

Trailhead allows you to start from scratch and advance in your knowledge through different Routes, Modules and Projects.

salesforce trail

In ShowerThinking we have certification courses for Marketing Cloud and Pardot that we give both personally and as training for companies that have just implemented Salesforce in their CRM and do not know how to start. We also teach at ICEMD the Higher Program course in CRM and Marketing Automation.

If you want to give it a boost there are preparation courses given by Salesforce itself or by related companies. For example in ShowerThinking we teach in ESIC, the Higher Program in Marketing about Salesforce that help you in the basic certification.

How much does the exam and renewals cost?

The exams have a cost of 200 Euros (200$ in the United States) and you will have to pay them by credit card within trailhead. If you fail the exam you can take it as many times as you want but it costs 100 ? (100 ? in the United States).

Only in some events you will be able to get a discount. For example at Dreamforce (an event held annually in San Francisco) the cost is reduced by 50% for everyone who wants to take the exam ($100).

Architectural exams cost $484.

Do I take the test online or at a test center?

I recommend my students to take the first exam at a certified center in your city. Both options cost exactly the same but it is easy to get involved with the technical requirements for the exam.

You need to have an external webcam in addition to your laptop that you use that can focus on your entire environment in the room you are in (they will be watching you to make sure you don’t copy).

You will not be able to have a clock, phone, papers or devices on the table.

The exams I have done from home always end up with a reviewer calling me from India (where they have the support center) and asking me to focus the camera on different parts of the room, asking me to show her the glasses, etc.

It’s not annoying, but it takes my mind off the exam. In some cases they have heard some noise from the children at home and have called me to verify that there was no one in the room talking to me: in short, a bit of a mess for the first time.

How much does a Salesforce Certified Professional charge?

And finally the question of the century: How much does a Salesforce professional charge today? According to this information, a Salesforce professional with 2-5 years of experience charges $90,275. We have to take into account the exchange rate to Euros and the variation in salaries between your country and the United States (which will probably be less).

salesforce salaries

Depending on the size of the company that hires you, if it is an international company and the years of experience obviously correct the above figure upwards or downwards.

I hope this information has been useful to you and has motivated you to improve your training. I hope to receive your comments and questions in this post.

The 5 Essential Customer Journeys in Marketing Cloud (part 1 of 5)

the enssential
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the most comprehensive marketing platforms on the market. It has different modules that cover most of the needs of a modern marketing department, such as Social Studio for managing social networks, Advertising Studio for managing advertising campaigns, Mobile Studio for mobile communication or Email Studio for communication via email. If you still don’t know what Marketing Cloud is or you need more information about the platform, I invite you to read the following article that deals in depth with What is Marketing Cloud? Salesforce’s Digital Marketing Hub. The Contact Builder section is responsible for maintaining subscriber relationship data. If you want to see a more detailed explanation of Cloud Marketing, I recommend watching my video on youtube about the different parts that make up the platform.  

Journey Builder is the core of the platform and is where the Journeys we want to establish with subscribers/customers are configured.

What is Journey Builder?

Journey Builder is the part of the Marketing Cloud that serves to create paths of interaction with customers or Customer Journeys. The way to generate these journeys is through visual programming, for which we will use the Canvas of the application.

journey builder

The canvas is divided into a first vertical column on the left, which are the elements that you can drag and drop into your Journey (marked in the image with the number 1). You will see that there are 5 different categories of elements that you can include in a Journey: Entry Sources, Activities, Messages, Flow Control, Customer Updates and Sales & Service Cloud.

journey workflow

One of the most interesting elements that we can introduce in a Journey are the activities related to the Sales Cloud since we can Create/Update Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, Add members to a campaign or Create/Update any type of object in the Sales and Service Cloud.

The programming of each Journey is divided into 2 distinct parts: Entry Source are the elements that trigger the Journey (marked with A in the image) and cause us to introduce a user into the flow. On the other hand there are the elements of the Journey (marked as B) that program the interactions that we are going to do with the users.

journey builder workflow

In the Journeys that we will see next, you will see how you must establish a series of user input sources in a journey together with a more or less complex programming of the steps that we are going to establish with them.

The 5 Essential Journeys

There is multiple technical information in Salesforce itself that describes this part of the tool, but from a marketer’s point of view it is necessary to understand how to develop customized customer communication programs. One of the easiest ways to learn it is to know how other customers use it.

That is why we are going to review 5 cases in which I have worked in different companies within their Marketing Cloud implementation projects. It has been complicated to choose which Journeys would be chosen for this publication, given that dozens of different Journeys have been implemented over time.

Thinking about which would be the clearest and most didactic way, I present them to you starting with the simplest ones. They are ordered according to the different states of a supposed conversion funnel. Therefore, I present the 5 Journeys suitable for each stage, hoping that they can serve as inspiration for your project.

journey

1. Lead Management Journey (customer acquisition)

Establishing an orderly and precise customer acquisition process is a priority for every marketing team. The example we will see below is a simplification implemented for a technology company that offers complex IT/IT security products for its clients in Spain and Latin America.

Several types of lead capture campaigns land on the client’s website (Organic, Paid Media and Events especially) since part of the client’s products are based on an Open Source solution. There is a large niche community interested in security solutions.

The recruitment strategy is based on the early identification and qualification of companies interested in the client’s product. This is done through a product demo or a Free Trial. This modality of Journey can be extrapolated to different companies that commercialize products (like this case) or services.

lead management journey

The first point to comment is that the capture of leads is done through campaigns that direct customers to different forms on your website. Some of them allow the customer to sign up for the monthly newsletter, but the most important ones allow the customer to request a product demo (video conference) or a Free Trial.

The process coordinates the interactions between a sales team (called business development representatives or BDRs) and the Marketing Automation platform. Once the potential client requests a demo/trial or registration in a newsletter, he or she will enter a Journey where the sales team will perform a demo (and at the same time be able to qualify the sales opportunity) or obtain feedback on the trial that the client has performed and at the same time see how the product can fit into the organization.

The call to the client by the sales team after the trial period is a critical moment where the opportunity is qualified or disqualified with the client. A waiting time of 30 days is generated and the closing date of the opportunity is updated in case of not having a clear answer. Once this time has passed, the lead is transferred back to Marketing in case a sales agreement cannot be closed.

The leads enter into a Nurturing process extended by 6 months with a special follow-up, and in case this period of inactivity is exceeded it is transferred to the monthly newsletter list of the company. In case of inactivity for 365 days, the lead is discarded.

How this journey is implemented in Marketing Cloud

The first interesting point to highlight is how the leads generated in this Journey are introduced. In previous steps of the project, the client’s website and its integration with the Sales Cloud had been developed. So, using existing web to lead forms on the client’s website, new leads are generated and assigned to salesforce campaigns.

To reuse this functionality, the marketing cloud entry source is based on the entry of leads in the appropriate campaign.

salesforce campaign

define entry source

Therefore the leads enter the appropriate Journey in coordination with their entry into a specific salesforce campaign.

Let’s see below how follow-up calls can be implemented after a demo by the sales team (Nurturing Post-demo). Below is a simplified Journey in the Marketing Cloud about its implementation.

journey final

As always we are launching this Journey based on the contact’s entry into a campaign. These campaigns are coordinated with the team of sales representatives.

In point B we make a Split engagement (decision on whether the client opens the email or not) to update the client’s activity (if he opens it we increase his activity in point C or decrease it in point D).

Finally, in point E we generate a task for the assigned representative the day before the call attempt by the sales team. We finish by sending an SMS the morning of the call to confirm the appointment.

I hope this example has helped you to establish the best way to implement your Journey with clients in your projects. In the next articles we will review different techniques to implement them.

Knowing the best way to implement a marketing campaign on Marketing Cloud requires experience in multiple projects and technical support. The first steps in the platform always generate doubts. In ShowerThinking we are specialists in developing with your company programs to automate marketing campaigns. If you need help or training in Marketing Cloud we have the right team that can help you.

What the purchase of Tableau by Salesforce means to you if you work in Marketing

salesforce buy tableau

Last week we learned of the acquisition of Tableau, a leading company in the Business Intelligence (BI) market, by Salesforce. Apart from the astronomical figures being considered in the operation, it is interesting to understand the consequences of this acquisition in the world of Marketing and how the panorama changes.

Those of us who work in the Salesforce environment on a daily basis are used to receiving news of acquisitions (or acquisition attempts). Salesforce’s latest acquisition was another analytics company called Datorama and was announced in late 2018. It is no secret that Salesforce is trying to grow through acquisitions and there are numerous rumors that Salesforce itself was negotiating to take over the social network LinkenIn, a deal that was eventually taken over by its rival Microsoft.

Tableau Salesforce: Gaining Market Share

But going back to Tableau: does it make any sense for Salesforce? Especially since you’ve already made the purchase of two other analytics firms, such as Wave and Datorama. In short, Salesforce has made the purchase of three analytics companies. Wave has become the analytics cloud by changing its product name to Einstein Analytics, Datorama will become part of the Marketing Cloud, and Tableau is still not sure how it will fit into the platform.

To understand this last move, I think it makes much more sense if we think that, as with the Mulesoft acquisition, the purchase of Tableau Salesforce offers the possibility of having a greater presence in all types of business intelligence processes within companies. It seems that Salesforce is challenging Microsoft and trying to gain ground within the companies’ backoffice.

According to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, “Tableau helps people see and understand data, Salesforce helps people see and understand customers. This is another step in achieving Salesforce’s goal of a 360-degree view of the customer.

Another point to keep in mind is that Tableau is not just a cloud solution, much of its solutions are kept on premise (on the customer’s premises). This strategy diverges from Salesforce’s fundamental principle of being a cloud solution.

In short, Salesforce is clearly gaining a huge market share in the business intelligence segment, and with the acquisition of Tableau, Salesforce is positioned as a strong competitor to Microsoft PowerBI or Qlik View.

The ability to integrate joint analytics of all digital assets and marketing cloud campaigns into Tableau is a complete solution for a marketing or business department.

If you want to learn more about Salesforce’s analytics solutions, we will soon be holding a webinar/demo on Einstein Analytics. If you want to book your place, please send us an email to info@showerthinking.com with the subject ‘Demo Einstein Analytics’.

What is Marketing Cloud? The Salesforce Digital Marketing Hub

salesforce hub

Marketing Cloud is a trend, if you are reading this article it is because you have surely heard the potential of this platform developed by Salesforce. But do you really know what Marketing Cloud is? In the digital world there is a lot of confusion when it comes to cataloging different technologies, although Marketing Cloud has some similarities with marketing automation tools, it really isn’t, it is what is currently called Digital Marketing Hub.

What is the difference between Marketing Automation nd Digital Marketing Hub?

As we have seen, both technologies share many similarities, however they are different. Both start from the most basic concept of email marketing, but each has evolved differently. While in marketing automation we always talk about tools, in Digital Marketing Hub we have to talk about a platform. This difference is due to the fact that marketing automation tools are closed solutions that do not require technical development and digital marketing hub platforms are unfinished technologies that require development to start operating.

Another big difference is the business objective of each of them, while marketing automation tools are focused on B2B business models, digital marketing hub platforms are optimized for B2C models. This approach is found in Salesforce, while Pardot is the marketing automation tool, Marketing Cloud is the digital marketing hub platform. Following the examples of Salesforce, in Pardot we find lead generation, lead management and sales aligment functionalities that are not developed in a standard way in Marketing Cloud. However, in Marketing Cloud we can work with many more channels that in Pardot you don’t find like SMS, mobile or Advertising. Besides being much more powerful in the area of Social Media.

Finally, the big difference also lies in the data management and volume of data. While Pardot is a tool to work with reduced data sizes (less than one million records), Marketing Cloud is a platform to support much more customer data.

If you want to know more about Marketing Cloud continue reading this article, if you want more information about Pardot you can find it at Is Pardot the best Marketing Automation tool for B2B?

Marketing Cloud History

Although Salesforce took its first steps in developing a Social Media Marketing suite, it wasn’t until 2011-2012 that it made a strong commitment to digital marketing with the purchase of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion (U.S.) and Radian6 for $376 million. With ExactTarget, he not only acquired the leading platform for mass emailing, but also “bounced” to another set of tools that months earlier ExactTarget had purchased, these were Pardot, CoTweet, iGoDigital and Keymail Marketing. On the other hand, Radian6 positioned Salesforce as a leader in social listening, a positioning that it complemented with the purchase in 2012 of Buddy Media, providing all the social media management functionalities.

Over the last few years, Salesforce has faced the challenge of integrating all these acquisitions under a single platform, which it called the Marketing Cloud. It has also incorporated new acquisitions that have positioned it as the leading customer management platform. Here we find Krux (data management platform or DMP) and Datorama (marketing analysis platform).

The history of Marketing Cloud is key to better understand this platform, since the history of acquisitions is at the same time one of the main disadvantages and virtues of Marketing Cloud. It has all the needs of a marketing department, from advertising, email marketing, mobile the journeys or analytics, and even its own DMP but at the same time makes it complex to operate by non-specialized teams.

Marketing Cloud Features

Why use Marketing Cloud in a marketing project? The main feature is that centralizing communications with customers over multiple channels. Different studies indicate that the value of a company that offers a diversification of channels is greater than that related by traditional means.

In addition, the Marketing Cloud is a platform that allows us to develop a personalized digital experience with our customers. Up to 86% of buyers will pay more if they receive a better customer experience, but only 1% of customers think their salesperson meets their expectations. Improving the customer experience allows companies to better understand and adapt to the ever-changing expectations of their customers.

How does Marketing Cloud work?

Marketing Cloud is a platform composed of several subclouds, if we start with the most basic we find Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio and Advertising Studio that allow working multichannel communications with customers through different digital channels. But the great value of Marketing Cloud lies in combining the full potential of customer data collection with the automation of communications on any channel, for this we find other subclouds that have allowed to work this omnicanality, here we find Contact Builder, Joruney Builder, Automation Studio, Analytics Studio, Salesforce DPM or Audience Studio and Interaction Studio.

Email Studio

This is one of the most powerful email marketing platform in the market, usually marketing teams are used to working with email marketing solutions and not platforms, at this point it is worth clarifying again what the difference between the two concepts is. While a solution is a completely finished software and only requires small configurations to start operating, a platform is a set of tools that offer the ability to customize even the smallest detail of the processes of a company. There are several advantages when working on a platform like Email Studio:

  • Scalability, allows working with a high performance on databases of millions of records.
  • Control, in Marketing Cloud you work on your own IP, unlike more traditional email marketing solutions that work on shared IPs.
  • Data processing, in addition to working on conventional email marketing lists, incorporates all the power of data extensions, automation study, etc.
  • Integration, all the ETL part of Marketing Cloud allows working almost any customization of marketing or business processes, as well as incorporating on the platform all transnational processes.

If you are interested in knowing everything that offers this subcloud within the Marketing Cloud, visit the following article: Email Studio in Marketing Cloud: What is it and what it offers.

Content Builder

In addition, Email Studio incorporates very advanced tools for the layout and composition of emails, which are part of the Content Builder, the Marketing Cloud content management solution. A tool designed for large corporations that require a highly structured organization where collaboration and security of publications and content prevails.

Advertising Studio

Without a doubt the dream of many marketing teams, to connect CRM data with different digital advertising platforms. Advertising Studio is the perfect tool to generate campaigns and customer joruneys omnicanal. It enhances the possibilities of any marketing team by improving the processes of acquisition, reactivation and loyalty. Work your own databases with the most powerful digital channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and Youtube.

Mobile Studio

It allows to connect with customers through mobile messages. On a single platform you can send SMS, push notifications and chat through chat applications. It improves the customer experience and offers real-time communications, from product delivery notifications to meeting reminders or SMS marketing campaigns. It also incorporates the technology needed to perform Geofancing or Proximity Marketing actions.

Social Studio

The perfect solution for generating personalized experiences through social channels, connecting CRM, customer care and marketing data. The social listening tool allows you to know what they are saying in social networks about your brand or your competitors, analyzing their feelings and locating where the conversations are happening. In addition, it allows you to work on social contingency plans in real time, allowing you to talk to customers about social channels or activate processes for incident management and customer service. It also incorporates Social Media Management functionalities, allowing you to manage the publications of your social channels through the Marketing Cloud. And all under the content management potential of Content Builder and the possibilities it offers to improve dissemination through paid media campaigns.

If you want to discover more about Social Studio, we recommend you to visit the following article: Social Studio: More than a Social Networking Manager

Contact Builder

audience builder

Marketing Cloud is a tool that collects data from multiple sources:

  • External data, from a point of sale (physical store) to an ERP.
  • CRM or loyalty databases, such as Salesforce.
  • It is also capable of managing data from digital channels: behavior in social networks, advertising campaigns or web activity.

In short, it is a tool that can function as a data warehouse and integrates all customer data in one place. This first part of the tool is called Contact Builder and works as a database that aggregates the different data relating them to our customers.

Marketing Cloud can be a formula one of marketing but its fuel is the customer data. Having an adequate data capture and organization plan is one of the most important elements to take advantage of this tool.

Journey Builder

journey builder

The second part of the tool is the core or brain where the communication flows with the customers are programmed, using all the channels offered by the Marketing Cloud. All this is best understood with an example: a company sends an invitation to its customers by email, which contains a CTA that leads to a web or landing page that contains a form that if completed by the customer is sent a confirmation by SMS, finally the days before the event is impacted through advertising campaigns with discounts for friends and family. It is a flow that communicates with the same customer through different channels but has finds the interaction with each of them to evaluate a next action, is what we call omnicanality. In addition, all the information that we obtain during the process is stored to improve the knowledge about the preferences that our clients have.

The Journey Builder is a graphic tool that allows us to configure from the simplest communication flows to complicated customer relationship campaigns. The examples of marketing flows that we usually work from ShowerThinking are welcome packs, on boarding, off boarding, cart membership, renewals, event registration, we miss you, commercial reactivation, etc.

Automation Studio

automation studio

The Journey Builder module works in tandem with Automation Studio, which is a tool that helps us to segment our customers and choose who we communicate with.

Suppose we want to contact those customers who have not made a purchase for more than 90 days. This is precisely the function of Automation Studio, we generate lists of customers that we will introduce in a process in Journey Builder.

Let’s take a more advanced example: we want to automate the sending of an email with a discount to customers who have not made a purchase for more than 90 days, and if they don’t respond to the email, they will enter a retargeting campaign for a month, specially designed to make them consume products again. With Automation Studio we can automate the segmentation and with Journey Builder we can automate the sending of the discount by email and the retargeting campaign.

Audience Studio or DMP (Data Management Platform)

Audience Studio is Salesforce’s DPM, the Marketing Cloud tool that captures and unifies data, to activate marketing campaigns. It allows a better knowledge of the customers and generates much more personalized actions to increase customer engagement or experience through advertising campaigns, content and e-commerce. DMP not only works with your own data, it allows you to locate potential audiences through second to third party data.
 
Interaction Studio Build & Listening allows you to pick up every point of contact you make with customers, both online and offline. Whether about customers identified as anonymous users, it collects all interaction data in real time, building an engagement profile that allows to identify and deepen the knowledge of customers, such as which relationship channels are their preferences. Combined with the engagement tools, this makes the Marketing Cloud a powerful tool for generating unique customer experiences.

 

Analytics, Einstein Predictive Content and Datorama

analytic builder

We can use the own reports generated by the platform. It is one of the few tools that gives us the possibility to extract all the information in raw and download it through an excel or csv file to analyze it externally.

It also has a very interesting element, called Einstein Predictive Content to make the prediction of customer behavior with respect to content.

Recovering the acquisition history of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is the purchase of Datorama in 2018 that has meant a significant advance in the area of analytics. It is a tool focused on both agencies and marketing teams, offering a suite of integrations with the most important digital technologies, as well as a series of functionalities for the design of control panels.

What you need for Marketing Cloud implementation

Choose marketing automation or digital marketing hub

There are dozens of Marketing Automation tools. Marketing Cloud has been highlighted by Gartner as a leader in multi-channel automation tools, a new category called marketing hub and which sets it apart from the competition. There are multiple automation tools with more limited functionalities, some others oriented to a small business segment. There are other tools that are located in a different quadrant since they are open source tools where there is no license fee.

Work team

An important element in Marketing Cloud is to know what kind of human team is needed to operate this tool. He works hand in hand with the Marketing Automation specialists and the technical programmers or developers, while the specialist is in charge of all the automation and segmentation configuration, the technician gives support on the integrations and code requirements. Sometimes, on large Marketing Cloud projects it is necessary to work with Salesforce Architects, who offer security on the performance and stability of the platform.

The rest of the marketing team works together with the Marketing Automation specialist: the digital producers in charge of design and layout and content generation, the trafficker who offers optimization support for paid media campaigns, and the community manager in charge of operating Social Studio.

Marketing Cloud has the possibility of dividing the operation of the platform under different business units, called Business units. For example, if your company is divided into different business units by geographical region or by different brands. You also have the possibility of creating a business unit for a partner company can develop a marketing program coordinated with you.

Salesforce Certifications

Many of these positions we are talking about require very specialized training. Salesforce has one of the best online training platforms for its products called Trailhead. If you want to go a little further, you also have the possibility of obtaining official certification. These are exams that you can take at authorized centers or online from home if you have a webcam. Specifically, Marketing Cloud has 4 certifications, each one oriented to a different profile:

Conclusions

Marketing Cloud becomes a practically unique tool in those projects where you want to take full advantage of databases, whether for acquisition strategies, reactivation or customer loyalty. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about the tool or would like us to guide you through the implementation and operations of Salesforce’s Digital Marketing Hub.

Is Pardot the best Marketing Automation tool for B2B?

the best

Is Pardot the best tool for your project?

There’s no doubt that Salesforce has a very interesting Marketing Automation solution that stands out for its complete integration with Salesforce CRM. Now it remains to be seen if Pardot fits into your project.

As a preview and before going into the depth of the analysis, you have to know that Pardot becomes more efficient the lower you work in your conversion funnel and it’s a particularly useful tool in projects where you want to get the most out of the data (customer loyalty actions, reactivations, cross-selling,…).

What is Pardot?

Pardot is a Marketing Automation tool that is part of the Salesforce technology suite, a solution that is part of the Sales Cloud, since it is focused on digitizing B2B business processes. Sometimes it is also offered within the Marketing Cloud, both approaches are equally valid. At ShowerThinking we like to talk about Pardot as a Salesforce CRM plug-in.

Looking back on its history, Pardot was founded in 2007 in Atalanta and in its beginnings allowed integration with a variety of CRMs, including Salesforce. In 2012, Exact Target purchased Pardot, which months later was acquired for a whopping $2.5 billion by Salesforce, Marc Benioff’s company. Exact Target was renamed Marketing Cloud. Over the past few years, Salesforce has invested heavily in improving Pardot, focusing on native integration with the lightining platform.

What has Salesforce done with Pardot since then?

I will shorten the story by indicating that:

Already in 2014, Pardot became the Marketing Automation platform with the highest growth in the sector, tripling the number of clients acquired from other suppliers such as Hubspot or Marketo. All according to the figures provided by Datanyze.

Not only is it seamlessly integrated with Salesforce, but a process of remodeling and optimization is underway, but its integration with Salesforce is making Pardot even more powerful than it was. I was at the annual Pardot event at Dreamforce last November. Danielle Grau and Nathan Maphet (Pardot’s Senior Product Managers) spoke and made it very clear: They want to make Pardot the best Marketing Automation tool.

anual event

Photo by Danielle Grau at Dreamforce 2018, San Francisco

Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a technology that automates, collects data and makes marketing and sales processes more efficient. They are evolved email marketing platforms that incorporate web activity tracking technologies, digital asset creation, process automation and communications. The beginnings of Marketing Automation date back to 2005, but it was not until 2012 that it began to be incorporated in an agile way into the business world. Currently there are dozens of solutions on the market, below we show you how to select the best solution.

Main business objectives of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation tools are focused on optimizing conversion rates, expanding sales reach and improving customer knowledge.

conversion

Conversion: Data allows for personalization and customization improves conversion.

Business Expansion: Expand the reach of the sales force without increasing commercial resources.

Customer knowledge: Predict customer behavior and needs

Digital marketing strategies based on marketing automation

The marketing automation tools are focused on working on 3 major strategic areas of digital marketing: Inbound Marketing, Account Based Marketing (ABM) and CRM Marketing.

marketing

Inbound Marketing: the combination of content marketing, attraction marketing and marketing automation allows working on a methodology that focuses on attracting, converting, selling and making customers fall in love.

Account Based Marketing (ABM): working on the potential of CRM, relationship marketing and professional social networks such as LinkedIn, ABM is the strategy that best suits B2B markets and where Pardot stands out from its competitors.

CRM Marketing: data is the “gold” of the 21st century and CRM is the “data lake” of the clients. Marketing automation allows to exploit and get the maximum performance from the knowledge of the clients through cross-selling, up-selling, mgm (member get member) , commercial reactivation, renewals or relationship marketing actions.

Choosing a Marketing Automation tool

Which Marketing Automation tools can we choose for a project? Marketo, Salesforce Pardot, Marketing Cloud, Hubspot, Eloqua, IBM, Adobe, Sharpspring are some of the tools available in the market. There are multiple possibilities as we can see in the following image of ChiefMartech. As you can see, not only is there a huge range of possibilities to choose from, but the number of tools is increasing every year.

campaign lead

If in your company you are thinking of implementing a Marketing Automation tool, do you identify with any of these three scenarios?

ScenarioResponsible Department
Are there Marketing Automation tools in other business units or group companies/departments?Purchasing/Financial Department
Is there an existing agreement with the tool’s provider?Financial Department
Does it comply with data protection laws? Where is the data hosted?Marketing / Legal Department
What kind of access security do you maintain: What happens if an employee leaves the company?IT / HR Department
Are the features you offer appropriate for the campaigns we are going to carry out?Marketing Department
How will you manage the sales cycle of the captured leads/opportunities?Sales Department
Do you need to integrate with other databases, web or company systems?IT Department
Can we operate it ourselves or do you need the support of an agency/partner?Marketing Department
What costs do you have per volume of contacts/communications/features if we grow?Financial / Marketing Department
Does it replace any existing system?IT Department
What kind of connection do you maintain with the CRM?CRM/IT Department
How will I track advertising/media campaigns?Marketing / Recruitment/Media Department
What is the perspective and evolution of the provider and the tool? What do we expect to be its evolution?Marketing Department / IT

The complete customer experience from start to finish and its conversion into value by the company must be the final objective of every marketing department and no excuses, intermediate steps or shortcuts are valid. And to bet on Pardot is to bet on scalability, innovation and ROI.

You may be thinking that a lot of questions but little answers… It is not easy to answer, most of the solutions in the market cover most of the needs, think that in the end some are copied from others. What I can advise you is that if your CRM is Salesforce, your business model is b2b or you are working on an inbound marketing strategy, Pardot is one of the best options.

The complete integration of your Marketing Automation tools with your CRM is essential.

We at ShowerThinking only work with systems that truly integrate marketing, sales and analytical processes. Salesforce is one of the few alternatives where your recruitment process is integrated with your sales teams and measurable results can be obtained from start to finish. It’s true that there are more alternatives (I certainly don’t underestimate them). Everyone has to make a bet, since you can’t be a specialist in everything.

pardot conector

That’s why I’m going to tell you more about Salesforce’s Marketing Automation tool: Pardot (note: in English you’ll see that it’s pronounced with an accent, although in Spain it’s usually marked with an a). I’ll also tell you about the new changes brought by the new version of Spring 2019 (Pardot Spring 2019), including the Spanish interface (finally!).

Critical features of Pardot

Pardot has a great amount of functionalities. I am not going to tell you all of them because it is not the purpose of this article. Instead, I’m going to focus on testing:

  • The most relevant aspects.
  • The areas in improvement phase.
  • The new Engagement Studio.
  • Pardot Einstein

Lead Generation: Evolved project generation:

Creating landing pages and subscription forms has to be a fast, intuitive and customizable process. Pardot not only does not fall behind, but includes many other features such as progressive profiling, which allows you to collect new lead data in each successive interaction, simplified lead management and integration with the sales process.

progressive profiling

Lead management: automatización, scoring and nurturing

If you are familiar with lead management, you will know how important it is that the entire process of scoring, grading, tracking and nurturing can be configured with automated flows, ensuring that the right lead reaches the salesperson at the right time.

Pardot has managed to make lead management extremely simple.

scoring pardot

Social Media Marketing

Considering my knowledge of social networks, I have a certain predilection for Marketing Automation tools that integrate with them and allow a complete management from a single control panel.

Pardot is one of those few tools that allows you to manage all your Social Media channels from its own interface and does it spectacularly well.

Pardot Einstein: Artificial intelligence in lead capture

One of the features that was already known beforehand is the appearance in this new version of the artificial intelligence functionalities provided by Einstein. Salesforce is extending Einstein’s functionalities throughout its service platform. Einstein Behaviour Scoring allows us to identify leads with a higher value depending on the behaviour of the rest of the data in our instance. Do not expect that they can be customized and configured in this first version, but at least it is an interesting step to take into account.

Einstein Campaign insights offers us information that the system considers relevant about how the campaigns that are being executed on Pardot are working.

One point to take into account is that we must carry out a correct structure and planning of campaigns in order to take advantage of all these features.

Measuring results and ROI

One of the big problems in the world of digital marketing -and marketing in general- has been to measure ROI, which has been a constant cause of discussions between marketing and sales.

Thanks to Pardot’s analyses, the marketing team can finally discover the real return that is being obtained with the published campaigns and contents. A key factor to consider is using Pardot’s salesforce campaigns and performing full traceability of sales processes.

lifecycle pardot

For content marketing lovers, the Spring19 version will also feature Engagement metrics on the contents of our marketing program. By the way, Pardot also integrates seamlessly with Google Adwords to measure the ROI of SEM campaigns. This is one more in the growing list of integrations with external services.

First class email marketing

Creating email campaigns with Pardot is not only a very intuitive exercise, but its automation, customization capabilities and, above all, optimization tools make it a first class tool. Really the great potential that you have to analyze is the possibility of personalizing content based on all the data that you have in Salesforce about your clients or leads.

email marketing

Salesforce-Pardot setup assistant

What if our marketing automation tool and CRM were to be integrated automatically? It may not be far off, but it’s the direction in which Salesforce is moving. It’s getting easier and easier to set up and synchronize data.

And with Pardot’s lightning-fast interface, it’s getting easier to operate the tool within Salesforce without having to change environments.

Marketing and sales alignment

Unlike other email marketing and marketing automation tools, Pardot manages to perfectly bring together and synchronize the marketing and sales departments.

Nothing else could be expected from the market-leading CRM marketing automation platform.

Pardot takes Sales Enablement to another dimension.

Tracking of lead activity, real-time alerts or the ability for sales to send pre-designed marketing campaigns to their clients are just a few examples of its major advantages.

The areas of improvement that have been corrected

Visual Interface

For a while, Pardot’s interface received some criticism. It was not intuitive enough, considering its multiple functionalities. Salesforce has not only corrected this problem, but has probably transformed Pardot’s interface into one of the most visual and understandable panels on the market.

Limited integrations

The number of integrations with third party applications is constantly growing. But don’t forget that your integration with Salesforce is seamless-something that’s only within the reach of this CRM’s darling.

Price of entry

Pardot is not a tool for small businesses. That is indisputable.

This advanced software is designed for those SMEs and large companies that have a high turnover, especially if they work in the B2B sector.

And then came Engagement Studio

The recently launched Engagement Studio is a new dimension of lead management and nurturing. Thanks to this visual platform, the marketing team can build, test and optimize flows – called Engagement Programs – in order to ensure the highest possible accuracy in obtaining qualified leads.

The Engagement Programs allow for the sending of personalized emails, based on the behavior of the customer in real time and the scoring they have. The result, of course, is that conversion rates soar.

engagement studio

In conclusion

We are in a particularly interesting moment in which Marketing departments need to know more and more about technology. With the implementation of a Marketing Automation tool, we will optimize the customer experience as well as improve the internal efficiency of the company.

The continuous improvements, the launch of new modules and features, and the seamless integration with Salesforce CRM are clear signs of what’s to come. At the agency, we believe that Salesforce is one of the few alternatives where your recruitment process is integrated with your sales teams and where measurable results can be achieved from start to finish.

Finally, we have to answer the question with which we started the article, of which I want to give you my personal opinion: depending on the focus of your marketing project you should make your decision. If your marketing project requires sending personalized information to potential customers, almost any tool can serve that purpose.

If your project requires a good coordination with sales teams, lead management, opportunity management, in this case Pardot starts to differentiate itself positively from the competition.

In those projects where you want to take full advantage of your contact database, customer loyalty projects, reactivation, etc., Pardot and its integration with Salesforce becomes a practically unique tool.

There’s no doubt that Salesforce has made a strong commitment to making Pardot the perfect Marketing Automation tool, it remains to be seen if it’s useful in your project.