Have you ever planned your Engagement Program and found yourself with the need to have emails send on specific dates? Did you count back on a calendar, on your fingers or some combination of the two to have a general idea of when the program emails would be sent? With scheduled email steps in Engagement Studio, you can ditch counting and define a send date on the email action itself.
With scheduled email steps in Engagement Programs, you’re able to better anticipate the dates emails will send in your programs – but what about understanding dates relative to your entire program? With the enhancements to email testing, you’re able to understand the dates actions, triggers and rules will be processed in relation to a selected start date upon beginning a test.
Marteq's insight:
Introducing Scheduled Email Steps & Enhancements to Engagement Studio Testing | Salesforce Pardot
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In the end, you can't go wrong with either of these tools. They're both excellent and capable of helping you accomplish even the most complex marketing automation processes. However, because of HubSpot's tiered pricing, which lets users begin accessing the tool at the early stages of their email marketing journey, it's the more prudent buy. Additionally, HubSpot's unique features, its email editor, its ability to log VoIP calls through CRM, and its comprehensive list of templates, gives it a slight advantage over Pardot's own impressive set of unique features. This is why I recommend HubSpot over Pardot.
However, if a tool's UI is the most important aspect of your software-buying decision or if you're a heavy Salesforce user who wants to stay locked into that data ecosystem, then there's no reason not to test Pardot. It's a powerful and attractive tool that will help you get the job done. Winner: HubSpot.
Marteq's insight:
Here's the deal: It all depends on your requirements. And that includes Marketo, Act-on, etc.
RYZZ is coming. It’s a new approach to MarTech for B2B Marketers.
When comparing Pardot vs. Marketo, you’ll need to know the pricing and features breakdown for each tool. You could pay less for Marketo per month, but add-ons may nickel-and-dime you pretty quickly. You’ll also need to know how much manpower you have, as both of these options require a significant time investment for learning and configuring the product. Steep learning curves ahead.
Marteq's insight:
Two top tier vendors with complex offerings. CT for the comparison.
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Pardot users will be able to build apps that allow them to:
Analyze prospect engagement history: Prospect engagement (a whitepaper download, website visit, email open, etc.) will be available as a Lightning component. This component can be added to any app users build on the Salesforce Lightning platform to surface valuable insights into what prospects care about, so sales reps can personalize every interaction. This component will be available later this year.
View prospect lead scores across multiple products: Multiple-product lead scoring makes it easy for companies that have more than one business unit or product to manage multiple sales cycles with a single prospect. Multiple-product scoring helps companies anticipate what the prospect needs next, deliver relevant offers to every prospect and understand which upsell and cross-sell opportunities will convert. Multiple product lead scoring is available today as a component, and can be embedded directly into Sales Cloud Lightning so that sales reps have insight into what products and services prospects are interested in, and how engaged they are with each.
Empower reps to nurture their own pipeline: Prospect engagement alerts automatically notify a salesperson when one of their prospects is showing interest, allowing them to nurture their own pipeline with fresh marketing approved content, and to report on the impact directly within Salesforce or their email client. We’re extending this capability to be available as a Lightning component, which will be available later this year.
With Pardot, you’ve always had the ability to track prospect engagement with your brand by assigning points to every action a prospect might take and tracking overall engagement as a prospect score. But companies with multiple products or business units need the ability to track not just engagement with their brand, but engagement with each of their products or business units. With the introduction of Multiple Scoring Categories, marketers now have deep insights into what prospects are interested in so they can nurture them more effectively, pass them to the right rep at the right time, and identify the cross-sell and upsell opportunities that are most likely to convert.
Pardot’s new Multiple Scoring Categories feature allows you to track prospect engagement at the aggregate and individual product or business unit levels. Take for example Acme, a company that sells both Hammers and Mallets. When a prospect comes to the Acme website and downloads a white paper outlining the features of Acme’s new line of Hammers, an activity that is valued at 10 points in Acme’s scoring model, two things will happen. First, that prospect’s overall score will be raised by 10 points. Second, that prospect’s score for Hammers will go up by 10 points.
We know that one of the best ways to understand your customers and cater to their preferences is simply to ask them questions, then take action based on their responses. That’s why we’re excited to announce that SurveyMonkey for Salesforce now integrates with Pardot, allowing you to better understand your customers and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Now, Pardot customers with Custom Objects (included with Ultimate or as an add-on for Pro) using SurveyMonkey for Salesforce can segment their prospects based on survey responses.
The notion that SM for SFDC is now integrated with Pardot goes to show how dis-integrated Pardot is with SFDC. I just don't know why customers are not clamoring for a unified approach.
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Marteq's insight:
This is damn good, especially when you start to adopt video as your go-to means of communication.
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Marteq's insight:
At some point, there needs to be clarity with ET and Pardot mailing capabilities, i.e., I'd love to have ET's mailing capabilities with Pardot MA functionality.
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Salesforce makes the case that the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) plays/will play a critical, central role in helping organizations become “customer companies” in the age of the connected customer. Saleforce brings much needed substance to its Marketing Cloud, which previously was comprised primarily of the Radian6 social media intelligence platform. This allows Salesforce to tell a much more complete story when it comes to delivering on the vision of empowering customer-centric organizations.
Salesforce’s exultation of the CMO is a good thing for Marketing, which has at times been maligned as the logo, hats, pens, and PowerPoint template folks. I hope this focus can serve as a catalyst for marketing having better conversations within the organization, perhaps reducing the need to explain why this customer stuff is so important.
Pardot, the B2B marketing automation engine that Salesforce acquired as part of ExactTarget, doesn’t “live” in the Marketing Cloud (though former Pardot CEO Adam Blitzer discussed it in the Marketing Cloud Keynote), but is rather part of the Sales Cloud. This could point to stronger integration between marketing and sales processes (i.e. lead handoff, closed loop reporting, etc.). That may well be the case, but Salesforce’s introduction of this functionality during the main keynote was discordant in which the Pardot functionality was described as the “marketing assistant” to sales. This positioning doesn’t just subtly undermine the marketing-sales relationship but truly misses the point about the vital role marketing now plays in shaping the buyer’s vision and developing sales-ready opportunities. I believe strongly that Marketing must be sales- and revenue-focused, but in the best-performing firms, the relationship is one of partnership. As Salesforce pivots towards the CMO, they’ll need to follow their own advice and become more customer centric, at least as far as the marketer is concerned.
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Marteq's insight:
The key sentence: "As Salesforce pivots towards the CMO, they’ll need to follow their own advice and become more customer centric, at least as far as the marketer is concerned."
Pardot should be a part of the Marketing Cloud, but I think this has more to do with the current Pardot/SFDC integration than anything else (especially the DB sharing). Regardless, MA is the domain of Marketing for many, many reasons, and to Aberdeen's point, it's a partnership between Marketing and Sales.
Salesforce sees B2B marketing automation as just an appendage of sales automation. This is pretty much the same constricted view of marketing automation that Salesforce management has held all along. The logical consequence is to make lead scoring and nurture campaigns standard features within the Sales offering and discard Pardot as a separate product.
Salesforce will continue to let independent B2B marketing automation apps synch with Sales.
The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud does now include Salesforce’s previously-purchased social marketing components, Radian6 social monitoring and Social.com social advertising. It also includes the iGoDigital predictive personalization technology that came along with the ExactTarget acquisition.
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Marteq's insight:
The aformentioned are David Raab's observations, and I think he may have the first one wrong. Although I agree that it is inevitable that Pardot becomes a part of the mothership (sharing the DB), Pardot has changed its marketing communication to target the MA newbies, and it will continue to build out its feature set to maintain a high level of competitiveness.
Radian6, BuddyMedia and social.com will integrate with the ExactTarget platform; what does this mean for marketers?
Condensed...
What stood out for me was the news that ExactTarget is becoming the heart of salesforce.com's marketing cloud. This is clearly happening not just in name, but in two key concrete ways.
The first is that Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget's CEO, is leading the marketing cloud organization within salesforce.com. I think this is important because it increases the likelihood that ExactTarget will maintain its culture while growing in line with the larger salesforce.com organization.
The second is that Radian6, BuddyMedia and social.com are being moved under the marketing cloud and integrated into ExactTarget's next generation platform IMH. It became clear a year or so ago that IMH is far more than a pretty dashboard for an aging platform, but a ground-up implementation of a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution designed to enable rapid development of new features and integration of disparate tools. It appears salesforce.com likes this architecture and will be utilizing it as the heart of its marketing cloud offering. That ExactTarget has made such strides in integrating these platforms in just sixty days is testament to the power and flexibility of the underlying platform architecture.
That's all well and good for ExactTarget, salesforce.com and their partners, but what about everyone else? This integration, the combining of Radian6, BuddyMedia and social.com into the ExactTarget platform and the new features/capabilities announced at Connections shows how seriously salesforce.com takes data-driven digital marketing.
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This may be the best merge in our space. The assimilation of these disparate pieces into the comprehensive Marketing Cloud (both architecture and marketing) will deliver significant benefits to the SFDC user and future users. It's turning out to be a no brainer. So if you're in the market for marketing automation, Pardot is your first stop (and probably your last).
Key capabilities of ExactTarget Journey Builder will include the following:
Drag and Drop 1-to-1 Automation: Plan, power, and measure the performance of lifecycle campaigns across email, mobile, social, and the Web based on customer data with a drag-and-drop interface.
Real-time Optimization: Establish thresholds of timing, cadence, frequency, and sequence to define which message or offer is delivered based on any change in customer data or interaction.
Advanced Analytics and Performance Tracking: Plan business outcomes for each phase of the lifecycle campaign and track performance against goals.
Marketing Cloud integration: Integrates seamlessly with the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud's contact model, calendar, and messaging and data management applications.
Advanced Third-Party Data Integrations: Leverage ExactTarget's advanced data integration capabilities to further optimize data-driven marketing and extend campaigns with partner applications to integrate Web conferencing, direct mail, event registrations, QR code activation, Facebook ad retargeting, and more to extend lifecycle marketing campaigns.
Marteq's insight:
I've been curious as to how ET would be integrated into SFDC, and we starting to see some daylight.
Marketing Strategy - Whether you're completely new to marketing automation or already approaching pro status, there are several things you can and should be doing. Here are a few ways to integrate and ...
Digest...
Automated, yet Personalized, Email Marketing
Advanced: Use segmentation to send highly targeted emails to specific groups based on interests, geography, and stage of the sales cycle.
Integrated CRM and Web Analytics
Advanced: Automate regular reports and consolidate all of your important metrics into one system, including common metrics, such as click-through rates, and more-detailed metrics, such as cost per lead and conversion rates. Use those key performance indicators to track and measure your success.
Improved Lead Generation Tactics
Advanced: Use more-sophisticated drip campaigns to move prospects through the sales cycle, upsell current clients on another product, or create campaigns targeted toward specific geographies.
Responsive, Automated Social Media
Advanced: Alternate between scheduled posts and real-time communications to ensure that your social media efforts don't become overly automated. Your followers and fans want to see the human behind your brand, not the machine!
Marteq's insight:
The article includes "beginner" and "intermediate" descriptions as well, but I scooped the "advanced" as that is pertinent to your quest.
The article is written by the co-founder of Pardot. I'm considering dropped any future Pardot scoops, as they are aimed at the pre-MA newbie, and readers of the Alert are too advanced for this content.
[The] release our newest white paper, Marketing Automation and Your CRM: The Dynamic Duo, covers the similarities and differences between CRMs and marketing automation, the benefits for sales and marketing teams, and what the integration process might look like. Take a look at our all-inclusive guide to get a deeper look at the following:
The different business goals, departmental focuses, and key features of marketing automation and CRMs
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: "We want to create the future.
Pertinent excerpt...
Q: You’ve said you’re confident that your most recent acquisition, the $2.5 billion purchase of ExactTarget, a cloud marketing platform provider, is going to be a success. Why?
Somebody needs to be the platform that connects all these customers to these companies. I call it a one to one customer platform….I look at companies that have these connected products. It could be a toothbrush. It could be an ExactTarget customer already like Microsoft that has the Xbox 360 connected to…The reality is we’re moving into a multi-customer touch-point environment. That is the customer touch-point is prolific and changing and evolving. And you the company – Toyota, BofA, News Corp, whoever — you need to be able to have this consistent relationship with the customer wherever they you are…
When I saw ExactTarget transforming consumers into customers, that’s when I said that’s very aligned with our vision. They’re doing it from a pure marketing perspective and we’re doing it from a sales and service perspective…This is what we need for the next generation of Salesforce.com.
In that case, we’re buying for growth because we want to grow into marketing…In 24 months, our marketing product line will do $ 1 billion in revenue because we’ll be able to put these marketing assets together in a very unique, very compelling way. Our goal as a company is to be that customer company. We want to be the company that you turn to connect your customers with you, and that means you have to do it in sales, you have to do it in service, and you have to do it in marketing.
Curious how other B2B companies are approaching their lead generation strategy? What about their technology usage, or their approach to lead nurturing?
Digest...
Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (DemandGen Report)
Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate. (CSO Insights)
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (The Annuitas Group)
Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. (Gartner Research)
90% of business buyers say when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you. (DemandGen Report)
Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (InsideSales.com)
70% of the buying process is now complete by the time a prospect is ready to engage with sales. (SiriusDecisions)
61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (MarketingSherpa)
The adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase 50% by 2015. (SiriusDecisions)
The marketing automation market is predicted to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015. (International Data Corporation)
A quarter of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using marketing automation, along with 76% of the world’s largest SaaS companies. (Pardot)
84% of top performing companies are using or plan to start using marketing automation between 2012 to 2015. (Gleanster)
Marketing automation platform users have a 53% higher conversion rate from marketing response to marketing-qualified lead than non-users. (Aberdeen Group)
63% of survey respondents indicate that the ability to set measurable objectives for each of their campaigns is the biggest value driver of marketing automation. (Gleanster)
77% of CMOs at top performing companies indicate that their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to increase revenue. (Gleanster)
Marteq's insight:
Many changes going on over at Pardot as they are quickly engulfed by Salesforce. Besides the Pardot sales effort being brought in by the SFDC account team, their marketing has changed: from branding to content. Specifically, the topical content recently has been dramatically simplified to meet the needs of the MA 101 crowd.
Few features of marketing automation capture the platform's simplicity and power as well as automated lead nurturing. With minimal input and maximum results, drip nurturing is one of the most powerful weapons in your automation arsenal.
Marteq's insight:
This is great stuff. Even if you're not a Pardot user, you'll want to dive in to see hands-on lead nurturing. And as a Pardot proponent, I love it.
Fascinated by the rapid assimilation of Pardot into the SFDC branding. A very basic infographic, and I guess it's aimed at the SFDC base (and internals) who are not familiar with MA.
But I don’t believe the ExactTarget acquisition is the MAP market’s death knell. Yes, if Salesforce.com succeeds with its post-acquisition integrations (unlike what happened with some of the company’s recent social investments), eventually Pardot will become a native MAP inside Salesforce.com, most likely as an add-on module. However, that transition will take time, and Pardot’s capabilities are not as strong as those of other MAPs, although they are well positioned for the majority of SFDC’s client base.
Eloqua will continue to support Salesforce.com, as dropping support would have a significant impact on revenue. Salesforce.com will also continue to support Eloqua, as many of its enterprise customers would be up in arms if support were dropped. But we expect both companies to move away from pursuing any deeper integration and instead focus on enhancing their core platforms individually.
Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget sets the stage for Salesforce.com to become more of a centralized marketing platform. In addition to its current lead management and social capabilities, Salesforce.com will gain email marketing pay-per-click and marketing automation capabilities, although it will need basic content management capabilities in order to move forward and assume such a centralized platform approach.
So, what does this all mean? The MAP industry will remain a fast-growing and highly innovative market. Although Salesforce.com’s acquisition alters marketplace dynamics, it doesn’t signal a cataclysmic event. I expect several MAP vendors will modify their market positioning or focus more heavily on specific areas of product or partnership development, but I don’t envision any major (previously unplanned) shifts.
Marteq's insight:
As if this is the be all and end all, and that innovation goes no further than MA. Wrong. Innovation is a constant, and marketing will continue to evolve and require technologies. We do, however, strongly agree that Pardot fits quite well with the SFDC user base.
It was a big week for marketing technology. Salesforce agreed to acquire ExactTarget (which had acquired marketing automation vendor Pardot less than a year ago) for a whopping $2.5 billion.
Key excerpt...
I still believe that the ultimate future of the marketing technology space is a true platform play: a common backbone for coordinating data and processes within marketing operations. Such a platform would thrive primarily on its ecosystem, enabling hundreds of different vendors and custom applications to easily plug into the backbone.
In such an environment, each marketing organization could weave together its own unique fabric of different components — a best-of-breed strategy, but one that could be more easily executed because the integration points in the backbone would be stable and standardized. Implement one integration to the backbone and gain loosely-coupled interoperability with everything else that’s connected to that backbone. Zapier is a terrific example of an early incarnation of such an approach.
Marteq's insight:
It's a nice read about the industry, and worthwhile clicking through. The point is with regards to a monolithic SFDC with all components completely embedded and the associated complexity (impossibility) of this task vs. a native integration of external components (which currently exists). It will be the latter, using one common DB, one view, one perspective.
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Introducing Scheduled Email Steps & Enhancements to Engagement Studio Testing | Salesforce Pardot
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