4 Tips to Make Pardot “Connected Campaigns” Even More Connected with Salesforce

Both Salesforce and Pardot have different features called Campaigns. Within the last year Pardot has aligned to the definition of Campaigns in Salesforce by releasing a feature called Connected Campaigns. Ultimately, both Campaign reporting features are about pipeline and revenue attribution, and marketing effectiveness. In this post we’ll look out how to leverage Connected Campaigns to their fullest.

Here are 4 tips to make Pardot Connected Campaigns even more connected:

Leverage Campaign Hierarchies to Organize Your Marketing Assets

In Pardot, you relate emails, landing pages, forms, Pardot-hosted content/files to Campaigns. With Connected Campaigns you can relate these marketing assets in Pardot to Salesforce Campaigns!

This begs the question, “how many Campaigns should I use?” The answer is whatever makes sense for your Campaign.

For example, let’s say your campaign is about Hubspot to Pardot migration. As part of that Campaign you might have a guide of how to migrate from Hubspot to Pardot. The Pardot assets there are the Landing Page, Form, and Content (PDF Guide). You’d likely relate all of these assets to the same Campaign.

But what if you wanted to A/B test two version of the landing page? In that case, it would make sense to have two different Hubspot to Pardot Campaigns (Variant A/Variant B), and both would be related to a higher level Hubspot to Pardot Parent Campaign. Creating this Campaign Hierarchy enables marketing metrics to roll up so you can conduct reporting across the entire campaign, as well as, at a granular level.

When deciding how many Campaigns to build it’s all about balancing reporting needs with marketing asset sprawl. For example, you don’t necessarily want to have duplicate forms, just related to different a/b campaigns. Continuing with our example you’d want to relate the Form to the Parent Campaign, while relating the variant Landing Pages to their respective Child Campaigns.

My favorite post on Campaign Hierarchies can be accessed here.

Every Prospect You Send an Email To Should Exist in Salesforce

This is an obvious but important point. Even if your Prospects aren’t ready to be handed to sales they still need to be in Salesforce. That means they need to be assigned in Pardot. This may mean assigning them to a marketing user or Lead Queue in Salesforce too. The Add to Salesforce Campaign action won’t work (see #4 below) if that Prospect doesn’t exist in Salesforce as a Lead or Contact.

To this point, if you have a public facing campaign that could be picked up by organic search, social, etc. make sure that any new Prospect that comes in via the campaign has a path to be assigned, and exist in Salesforce.

Keep Your Pardot Lists and Campaigns in Sync

There are a few ways to do this depending on where you are starting to build your list.

In Salesforce: You can leverage Lead and Contact reports, and utilize the “Add to Campaign” button on reports to add people into a Campaign. You can also import Campaign Members into a Campaign using a CSV, and also a search. From here you can go ahead and click the “Add to List” button on the Campaign and create a List in Pardot.

In Pardot: There’s multiple of ways to build lists in Pardot. You can add a Prospect on a one-off basis, use automation rules to add Prospects to a list, or build a dynamic list based on a set of criteria. Ultimately, you’ll want to add these people in your Pardot List as a member of the Salesforce Campaign. You can do this with an Automation Rule where the criteria is the Prospect is a member of your list, and the action is “Add to Salesforce Campaign”. As mentioned in tip 2, definitely make sure all of your Prospects are assigned first, or assigning them to a Salesforce Campaign won’t do anything.

We’ll also cover how to handle what happens if someone is removed from your list or unsubscribes in tip 4.

Use Completion Actions, Automation Rules, and Engagement Studio Actions in Pardot to Keep Campaign Member Statuses In Sync with Salesforce

Each Campaign Member in a Salesforce Campaign has a status. By default these values are “sent” and “responded”. You can customize these values to represent where the Prospect is in your Campaign.

You have the option to use a Completion Action on the Email, Landing Page, Automation Rule or an Action in Engagement Studio to update the Prospect’s Campaign Member Status. The values for these statuses are really up to you. If you’re sending emails you might opt to update the Campaign Member status to sent upon send, and then open or clicked when the email is opened or clicked.

If you’re not manually sending a List Email, you can also update the Campaign Member’s status via Automation Rule or in Engagement Studio. After using a Send Email action you can use a trigger to listen for an email open or click. From there you can use an Add to Salesforce Campaign action to update the Campaign Member’s status.

The one item I don’t like about the Add to Salesforce Campaign action is that it must come after a definite wait period. You can immediately set the Campaign Member status to sent after sending an email, but have to choose a number of days to wait to check if the Prospect has opened or clicked the email. This is not a huge deal, as most people interact with the email within the first 2 weeks, but it seems like an unnecessary limitation if you’re trying to keep Campaigns as connected as possible.

I really like tracking Unsubscribes at the Campaign Member status field so I can see unsubscribe rates at a single email level, as well as, at an overall Campaign level. When a Prospects unsubscribes in Pardot they are removed from the Pardot list. However, I really like keeping the Contact as a Campaign Member so I can continue to get the full picture of the Campaign including prospects who may drop off.

A question I commonly receive is regarding the Campaign Member’s Status. If I set the Campaign Member Status to opened, sent, clicked, or unsubscribed I can’t tell from the Campaign Member status which email they unsubscribed from, clicked, or opened. In addition, these actions are not mutually exclusive–you may have someone click a link in an email, but then also unsubscribe. What should we show on the Campaign Member Status then?

I recommend to order/rank these so that Opened supersedes Sent, Click supersedes Opened, and Unsubscribed supersedes all others. In addition, if you want to separate Campaign Member statuses out by each email you may opt to align each email to a child Campaign in Salesforce.