Introducing Engagement Studio for Pardot
This week Pardot released engagement studio! Engagement studio is the command center for the modern b2b marketer, and replaces and extends the drip program functionality. Engagement studio is available at no additional cost to Pardot customers! However, the feature must be activated by a user with administrative rights.
The user interface of Engagement Studio is much easier to use than its predecessor. The design is in-line with the Salesforce Lightning Design System. As you would expect you have the ability to set the lists to send to, sending business hours, and suppression in the user interface.
With Engagement Studio three new concepts are introduced: Rules, Triggers, and Actions. Two of these concepts were present in Drip Programs previously.
Actions
Actions are items that do something such as sending an email. They can operate independently, or also after certain behavior occurs. Actions in Engagement Studio include:
Send Email, Add/Remove to/from List, Add to Salesforce Campaign, Adjust Score Apply/Remove Tags, Assign to Group/User, Assign via Salesforce Active Assignment Rule, Change Prospect Field Value, Create Salesforce Task, Notify User
The ability to adjust a lead score at any sequence step is a new action that you can perform in Engagement Studio that you could not previously perform with Drip Programs.
Triggers
Triggers listen for certain actions for the prospect to take. Triggers interact with actions functionality described above.
Generally, you can listen for certain prospect behavior, take action, listen, take action, etc. In addition to being able to use these behaviors in Engagement Studio, the prospect's behavior is logged under the Pardot Activities section on the Prospect record (and salesforce, if integrated). With Salesforce Engage (an add-on available at additional cost) a sales rep can be notified of certain behaviors through desktop and mobile alerts.
New triggers that in Engagement Studio that were not available previously in Drip Programs are the ability to listen for file downloads, and form/form handler/landing page completions. In addition, link clicks are now broken out by custom redirects and email link clicks.
Rules
For example, in an Engagement you could take an action (perhaps send an initial email), listen for certain behavior using a trigger (perhaps if the prospect clicked the link in the email after 3 days, then use an action to add to the prospects lead score if so), then use a rule to check if the lead score is greater than 50 then branch and send a series of mid/low funnel product emails, and have another branch where lead score is less than 50 put in a industry news/thought leadership email sequence.
Rules are newly available in Engagement Studio and were not previously available in Drip Programs. Prior to Engagement Studio you had to create a new segmented dynamic list according to your criteria and then setup a separate drip campaign. These interact really nicely with actions, and allow you to continually take action, check, take action, etc. That action may be even be a manual action by your sales rep in Salesforce! The end result is the ability to build very personalized prospect journeys.
As you can tell with Engagement Studio the possibilities are endless for building high performing marketing automation campaigns for prospects. Truly, the only limits are your marketing spunk and creativity! Happy marketing!
