Pardot Integration Mini-Series #3: Logging Pardot Emails in Salesforce

Which Pardot Emails Should you Log in Salesforce as Activities?

Logging emails sent from Pardot with Salesforce, your CRM, is a critical integration point to ensure marketing and sales are on the same wave length. Below are the top 3 considerations when deciding what emails you should sync from Pardot to Salesforce.

1. Visibility

The first item to consider is what emails your sales team need to see in Salesforce. For example, if marketing sends an email to a prospect that sales has not engaged with do they need to see the email history on the prospect at that point? Probably not. In fact, this prospect shouldn't even be in Salesforce (check out my a previous post in the mini-series on how to control this). However, what if a sales rep goes to a conference, imports a Lead record in Salesforce and then marketing sends an email coming from the sales rep's email address? Then visibility becomes critical (so that the rep doesn't accidentally send a duplicate email) and is looped in as to what emails marketing is sending under their name.

Emails sent from Pardot can be made visible in Salesforce in two ways. First, Pardot provides a Pardot Activities section on the Lead and Contact pages which surfaces any emails sent, opens, clicks, page visits, and a number of other actions. This gives the sales rep a window into the actions the prospect takes. Secondly, Pardot emails can be logged as Salesforce Activity records and appear in the Activity History section on a Lead or Contact's detail page. The benefit of the section option is that you can run reports and dashboards in Salesforce on this activity.

2. Reporting

This leads nicely into our next consideration: what emails you need to report on in Salesforce. If it's visibility for sales reps you are after, the Pardot Activities section will be fine and you do not need to log the email formally in Salesforce. For one my clients, Teleperformance, it was critical that sales reps receive credit in Salesforce on their monthly Activity report for emails that Pardot sent out under their name. Therefore, it was necessary to log the emails as Activities in Salesforce. Another client, only wanted to report and give credit to sales reps that sent emails through Salesforce Engage. For the latter use case we ensured the default setting in the Salesforce connect was intact. This setting only logs one-to-one emails as Activities in Salesforce (which include those sent with Salesforce Engage). This struck a nice balance between logging all emails from Pardot versus only emails that the sales reps sent out themselves through Salesforce Engage. Learn more from VALiNTRYcrm how your company can get more from your Salesforce CRM.

If sales reps are not using Engage (although I recommend they do so), and are instead using their email client, Pardot has various email clients plugins. These plugins will log the email in Pardot (and also create a prospect in Pardot). From Pardot, the email can be subsequently synced to Salesforce as an Activity if the one-to-one email logging setting is checked in the connector.

3. Database Storage in Salesforce

The final item to consider is database storage. If you opt for the method described in the first use case (Teleperformance), you may quickly eat up your database storage limit in Salesforce; especially if you are sending tens of thousands of emails each month. If you opt for this method you need to decide if you will be buying more database storage from Salesforce, or whether you will implement a data cleanup and archiving process. At Teleperformance we implemented a quarterly cleanup of Pardot Activities, and set up settings in such a manner that these Activities were not re-created in Salesforce again. We would run the salesforce report, export the report, then run the cleanup. If you are only syncing one-to-one Engage emails then you do not have to worry about salesforce database storage as much.

Integration Limitations & Future Product Roadmap

At this point the email logging integration between salesforce and Pardot is straightforward, but not very customizable. In 95% of the cases it gets the job done, compared to 50% of the time for Pardot's competitors. Pardot truly has the best sync with Salesforce on the market today. As mentioned above you have the option to choose to sync all automated and one-off email sends, one-to-one email sends, and email client sends.

A few of the items that I hope to see on the Pardot roadmap is that ability to turn on/off the email logging by user. For instance, we may not want to log all email sends send out as a general user as a salesforce Activity, but may want to log an automated email send that marketing completes on behalf of a sales rep. We will be sure to post any updates here as Pardot continues to evolve! Happy marketing!