Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Pardot in Spring ‘19

Now is the time to leverage artificial intelligence for your marketing efforts! The Salesforce Spring ‘19 release saw two new AI related features for Pardot. This post is aimed at helping you understand these new features, and the value they can bring to your marketing organization.

Einstein Campaign Insights

One of the newly released featured is called Einstein Campaign Insights. This feature allows you to undercover which of your marketing assets are performing well, and which aren’t. Einstein looks across all of the different marketing touch points including emails, landing pages, and forms. When you activate this feature you gain access to the Engagement Metrics component that you can embed on your campaign page layout in Salesforce. This component gives you a snapshot of how well your campaign is performing without having to leave Salesforce. Note that this component is only available in Salesforce Lightning, and requires enabling the Connected Campaigns feature in Pardot. By enabling Einstein Campaign Insights you also gain access to the new Marketing Assets related list. This list gives you the ability to drill into each marketing asset to view its individual performance.

The Einstein Campaign Insights feature set adds value in two ways. First, it creates alignment between Pardot and Salesforce. Previously, Pardot had its own source field and Salesforce had its own source tracking feature called Campaigns. With the introduction of this new feature reporting on attribution and return on investment (ROI) tracking is standardized for both platforms. Secondly, Einstein Campaign Insights allows you to connect your marketing assets (and the spend on those assets) to revenue data on Opportunities from sales. This enables you to report on marketing attribution across the entire revenue cycle entirely in Salesforce.

Einstein Behavior Scoring

The second AI feature Pardot released is called Einstein behavior scoring. The feature adds a behavior score field to Leads and Contacts in Salesforce. In addition, you also have the ability to the Behavior Scoring Lightning component to your Lead and Contact page layouts. Einstein Behavior Scoring automatically calculates a score from 1 to 100 based on the engagement level of a prospect. This engagement includes email open and click through rates, form fills, as well as, anywhere else you have a Pardot tracking pixel enabled such as your website or landing pages. The scoring algorithm weights more recent behavior more heavily than older behavior. For example, someone with a more recent set of 5 email opens will have a higher behavior score than someone who also had 5 email opens 6 months ago.

While Einstein Behavior Scoring is an exciting feature it is only one piece to producing a marketing qualified lead (MQL). The other is ensuring fit. The Profile and Grade features in Pardot should continue to be used to assess fit. A Grade ranging from A+ to F can be assigned to a prospect to indicate how well they fit your company’s target prospect. In Pardot you can setup different different Profiles (i.e. personas) if you have multiple ideal personas. By combining engagement data from Einstein Behavior Scoring and alignment data with Pardot’s Grading feature expect your MQL conversion rates to increase!