What is Marketing Automation?
A platform or tool that helps you to automate and better manage your marketing process, which in turn helps in effective sales engagement and generate more leads, convert more of those leads to deals, and gives you a clear picture of the success or failure of a marketing campaign is basically known as Marketing Automation Tools.
We also recently organized a webinar titled “Get 50% more repeat visitors in eCommerce through Marketing Automation” in collaboration with Beatout.
When we think or talk about such Marketing Automation tools the first name that comes to almost everyone’s mind is Salesforce Pardot. It offers you to option to effectively reach out to your potential clients through various means planned and well thought out processes, like email campaigns, social media marketing, paid marketing, etc to name a few.
Some of the major benefits of Pardot are:
- Email templates which are Mobile responsive
- Engagement studio for custom drip campaigns
- Robust email analytics reporting
- Score changing abilities tied to leads in Salesforce
- 360-degree view of your prospect activity by linking their data from CRM to your Marketing campaigns
On top of this Pardot also sends notifications to users when email links are clicked or specific forms are submitted.
Major Features that can Automate your Marketing with Salesforce Pardot:
1. Tracking your Websites Visitors:
Anyone who is visiting your website gets tracked, along with the time they have spent on which page. The contents on your websites along with various marketing collaterals which are attracting the greatest number of visitors. In short, you get end to end tracking capability of your web site’s visitor’s activity with the help of tracking URL’s.
2. Real-Time Alerts:
In Sales & Marketing, a very common problem that we often face is tracking our prospects every move and activity in order to judge their sales-readiness. This often becomes a pain and time-consuming work. However, now with marketing automation tools like Pardot, a sales rep get the ability to set various kinds of parameters, on which he will receive an alert on the prospect’s activity.
3. Identifying Best Leads through Scoring and Grading:
The effectiveness of a marketing campaign is often judged by the quality of leads that are being received by the sales team. In this regard, it is often observed that the marketing team and the Sales team are in disagreement over the quality of a lead that is being delivered by the Marketing team. Pardot, have a feature of its own, known as “Blended lead scoring and grading”. This feature does the job of lead scoring and grading based on various prospect profiling, to find out if it is a perfect match for the sales team to follow up with. The lead score that is provided is based on your prospects various activities, while the grade is based on the fitment of the prospect for your product or services.
4. Automatic Lead Assignment:
Based on a criterion that you set, once a lead reaches a specific Grade and Point, this feature activates and automatically assigns the lead to the Sales Team for further follow-up.
5. Nurturing a Lead:
In the absence of a Marketing Automation tool like Pardot, often Sales team ends up wasting a lot of time following up and talking to prospects who are not ready to become your customers. With Pardot, this can be eliminated to a great extent by “dripping” various targeted marketing contents and well thought of messages from time to time, so that you can stay at the top of the mind of the prospect whenever he decides to proceed. This feature helps the Marketing and Sales team to focus on other important and hot leads.
6. Build your own Custom Forms and Landing Pages:
How many and what quality of leads you are going to receive often depends on the structure and content of your landing page and the forms that a prospect has to fill up. If you are using long forms and ill-structured crowded landing pages, then there is a very high probability that it will discourage good prospects from filling out the form. Instead, if you choose to use “Progressive Profiling” feature of Pardot, then you can customize your forms to narrow down to just a few necessary fields. Once the prospect fills it up and submits, he is presented with another set of questions depending on his input to the previous form. Thus, helping you to create an entire prospect profile without making the prospect feel lost or disengaged in the entire process.
7. Targeted and Personalized Content:
All of us have observed that when we visit ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, we always get personalized targeted products being highlighted to us even before we make a search. This is done by analyzing our search pattern for various products in that particular platform. Similarly, Pardot can also be used to target the audience with such Dynamic contents which are of the visitors’ interest.
8. Plan and Execute your Email Marketing Campaign:
Effective Email Marketing Campaigns are often the trickiest part of any Marketing work. Because during the planning of such Campaign answers to some of the most complex questions needs to be found. Such as: Does your email content and template match up with your offerings and brand guidelines? Will it reach the targeted users, or will it get filtered by the intelligent Spam Filters? The answers to these questions can easily be found with the help of Pardot, which provides you the capability to save various templates based on your Brands offering, and also helps you to test the content against various Spam Filters.
9. Reporting and ROI Calculation:
The success and failure of any Marketing campaign solely depend on the number of customers it got registered with the brand. Pardot helps in calculating this with its various forms of smart reporting tools which monitors several campaigns that are being executed by the Marketing team, and the entry of incoming leads to the CRM and their consecutive conversions as a Potential.
In today’s business environment and cut-throat competition, it is almost impossible for a business to taste success till the point in time it has a complete 360-degree view of its Marketing campaigns from its planning to execution to ROI. Pardot helps you exactly in that area and is thus the most important component of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Now, you can easily sync your Salesforce CRM with the back-end ERP system to automate the business process!
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