Insights
Tips to automate your marketing actions with Pardot Engagement Studio
Can you imagine if your marketing department could work 24 hours a day and be able to function on its own, making autonomous decisions that would allow you to generate new and much more qualified leads for your company? Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, it sounds even better if we tell you that all this is now possible thanks to marketing automation.
Marketing automation allows you to automate your company’s marketing strategies by creating the journeys, which are itineraries through which your contacts will independently advance, thus finding more personalized content tailored to their interactions with your brand and product. All you have to do is define the journeys initially and then your contacts will start moving through them automatically without you having to do anything.
Currently, there are many tools that allow us to apply marketing automation solutions to our campaigns. The most famous ones are offered by HubSpot, MailChimp and especially Pardot Engagement Studio (Salesforce), which we are going to talk about in this article.
Advantages of Using Pardot Engagement Studio
Using marketing automation through Pardot Engagement Studio basically allows you to expand the reach of your campaigns and optimize your resources, both human and time, improving your company’s results.
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As we have already said, your marketing strategy will work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without having to stick to office hours. Pardot Engagement Studio allows you to launch your campaigns even on complicated dates, such as Christmas Day.
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Although many people may think that marketing automation is less personal than traditional marketing, the truth is that tools like Pardot Engagement Studio allow for greater personalization, offering only the content that may seem most attractive to each customer based on the information we can obtain from them according to their interactions. The key is to achieve a solid journey, with attractive communications and a human and personalized touch, that empathize with our customers (despite being an automatic system…)
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Your campaigns will work better, as you can ‘recover’ users who have not responded well to your first interactions with them. For example, you can offer an incentive to those contacts who do not convert at first with some of your promotions, such as a discount coupon. Or you can encourage customers who have left a conversion halfway to complete it, such as by notifying them that they have a shopping cart pending in your online store and offering them a small discount if they purchase it within a few hours.
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Pardot Engagement Studio helps with your company’s sales funnel. Generally, all the leads you get through your marketing campaigns are not of the same quality: some are farther away from the purchase and others are ‘hotter’. The former can be sent a less intrusive contact, such as an email, while the latter can be assigned to the sales department to contact them directly. This way, only time will be invested with customers who have reached a certain level of engagement and know the product well, making their conversion easy.
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Marketing automation greatly aids nurturing, getting your less interested leads to advance in the sales funnel or your customers to become more loyal to your brand and product.
However, as we have already said on occasion, nothing works by itself. Marketing automation is no exception. Although it facilitates the work and has great potential, implementing Pardot Engagement Studio in your marketing actions does not imply an improvement in results: it is necessary for both the journey and the content that is going to be used in it to be well defined and tested. In this sense, we at OKB Interactive Studio can help you.
How does Pardot Engagement Studio work?
The journeys created with Pardot Engagement Studio work with three elements: triggers, rules, and actions.
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Triggers serve to detect an event, such as a user opening one of our emails or clicking on one of its links, visiting a page on our website, completing a form or downloading a file. Each time one of these acts occurs, the triggers notify the program to evaluate them.
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This is where the rules come into play, which are nothing more than checks that the program makes of those events that the triggers have previously notified. Depending on this evaluation, one path or another of the journey will be assigned. We can analyze multiple data, such as the level of customer loyalty or their characteristics (age, sex, position, place of residence…).
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Finally, the actions are all the tasks that we can perform automatically, such as sending an email, adding to a list or campaign, assigning the lead to a manager, or adjusting their score or grading, among others.
By combining all these elements, we build the journeys. You can use them for virtually anything and create all the steps you need. You may have seen some journeys developed with Pardot Engagement Studio before and they may have seemed very complex to you. But in reality, it doesn’t have to be that way: the length and final complexity of your journey depends exclusively on the purpose you have set for your campaign. At OKB Interactive Studio we always opt for designing effective but easy-to-maintain journeys.
Tips for an Effective Strategy with Engagement Studio
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Define your Strategy: Marketing automation can become a great tool for achieving your goals and optimizing your processes. This means that before proposing automation, the strategy must be well defined: what we want to achieve and who we want to include in our journey.
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Time Configuration: One of the drawbacks of automation is that we lose control of some things, such as when an email is sent. It is very important for your marketing actions not to send messages at ungodly hours, something that will undoubtedly bother your users and may increase your opt outs from your contact list. But also, if you are addressing an audience with a predominantly professional profile, writing to them outside of normal office hours may not be very effective. That’s why, with Pardot’s Engagement Studio, we can define the time range during which we want emails to be sent based on your potential customers’ habits. We can even decide if we want shipments to occur throughout the week or only on working days, as some of your campaigns may not work well on weekends.
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Don’t Forget to Test Your ‘Journeys’: One of the most interesting functions of Pardot Engagement Studio is the one that allows you to check how your marketing automation campaign is going to work before launching it. All this is very useful to ensure that all steps of the journey (with their different triggers, rules, and actions) are working correctly before setting it in motion.
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Change the Way You Work: Marketing automation allows you to optimize your work. But that doesn’t mean that the journeys are going to work on their own. It’s about reinvesting the time: what was previously consumed in repetitive and management tasks is now invested in creating quality content, monitoring results, and improving processes.
If you want to implement marketing automation in your company through Pardot Engagement Studio and you have doubts about its operation or need additional help to improve its results, do not hesitate to contact us. At OKB Interactive Studio, we specialize in the design and integration of journeys and in the development of content for their use, which will help you improve your customers’ engagement and the ROI of your campaigns.
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