ParDreamin’ 2020 was nothing short of dreamy, but after every conference comes the time to open up the ol’ toolbox and apply all the rich insights we learned. Five presenters from some of the conference’s most popular sessions share their key takeaways and advice for taking action.

Read on to see what inspired these leaders and how you can apply their tips to your marketing efforts.

Jen Kazin
Session: 11 Key Insights About the New Pardot Email Builder

Q: What inspired you to lead the session?

A: Who likes shiny, new Pardot features? Everyone! The Email Builder is especially exciting because it’s such a big enhancement. I anticipated many people would be interested in what it can do and how to enable it.

My presentation was a tour of the less obvious but immensely valuable Email Builder aspects — things that someone playing around in it for the first time might miss. I wanted to make the Email Builder easy to learn. 

Q: Share a takeaway that might surprise marketers.

A: The Email Builder has three features that may surprise marketers. They are:

• Undo: Easily reverse an earlier action.
• Buttons: Say goodbye to buttons in HTML! Add customized buttons with a new drag-and-drop motion.
• Use Email Builder templates in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud: Simply save, and sales can access your email templates.

Q: What advice do you have for putting these takeaways into practice?

A: Don’t delay! Set up your Email Builder and begin experimenting. Creating an email template for your newsletter is a great starting point. Don’t forget that you can still use the classic email sending process. The Email Builder is a hassle-free option to create customized email templates — it’s the future of email sending in Pardot.

Matt Lincoln
Session: Benchmark Your Pardot Database Health

Q: What inspired you to lead this session?

A: I wanted to walk through some common red flags I see when auditing organizations that use Pardot. Rather than just showing a slide deck or demo, it was a great chance for a hands-on session — and for crowdsourcing benchmark metrics for the community at the same time!

Q: Share a takeaway that might surprise marketers.

A: Across the metrics from over a hundred Pardot accounts, around a quarter of all mailable prospects have never been sent an email! With this in mind, consider doing some analysis on the prospects you haven’t emailed. Should they still be in your database? Are you missing key segmentation values?

Q: What advice do you have for putting this takeaway into practice?

A: Look at a cross-section of list emails and Engagement Studio programs in your Pardot account. How are you building your send lists? Take note of your segmentation criteria and run dynamic lists to find prospects with missing values. Can you enrich the data, or should the prospects even be in your database if you can’t segment them accurately?

Lucy Mazalon
Session: Deliverability vs. Mailability — Nightclub Guide for Pardot Marketers

Q: What inspired you to lead this session?

A: Email deliverability is a marketing automation topic that got a lot of airtime in 2020. This was thanks to marketers’ new reliance on email to communicate necessary messages to their prospects and customers and an increased dependency on digital channels for lead generation.

Deliverability and availability are so crucial to understand, yet they’re two concepts that are often misunderstood. Worse still, they get confused with one another! I often think in analogies — partly from training clients for many years, and partly from my love for reading — and the upscale nightclub analogy just fit so well.

I wanted to give attendees a clear, relatable way to distinguish between the two and help them further understand how they can plan future campaigns with full awareness of the data they have and the state it’s currently in. 

Q: Share a takeaway that might surprise marketers.

A: “Unmailable” prospects aren’t all the same. Your ability to include them in future marketing efforts like reactivation campaigns depend on whether they simply opted out or are marked “do not email” for another reason.

Q: What advice do you have for putting this takeaway into practice?

A: Segment your prospects correctly. Use mailability metrics to draw realistic expectations on results before you launch the marketing campaign. That way, you’re not starting out with unrealistic expectations and setting yourself up for failure or disappointment.

David Kreitter
Session: More than Martech: Wall-to-Wall Automation

Q: What inspired you to lead this session?

A: Our friend Kristin Keefer of SalesLoft said it best: “There is a new horizon of automation maturity hitting sales and marketing. It requires intelligent workflows that not only connect your tech stack, but also your full-cycle customer journey.” I couldn’t agree more, and I want to shout it from the rooftops.

Q: Share a takeaway that might surprise marketers.

A: If the only marketing automation you’re doing is within Pardot, you’re doing it wrong! Automation builds on itself. It’s time to automate across the martech stack.

Q: What advice do you have for putting this takeaway into practice?

A: To be successful in this new era of enterprise automation, you must first ensure your Pardot house is in order. There must be standards, structure, and conventions. Without these, it’s impossible to achieve automation at scale.

Jessica Hope Wimer
Session: Getting Sophisticated with Scoring

Q: What inspired you to lead this session?

A: Lead qualification is one of Pardot’s greatest strengths, but it’s also one of the subjects I hear the most about as a Pardot consultant. Sophisticated scoring is just one piece of qualification, of course, but it has the greatest opportunity for quick wins with minimal time investment. 

Q: Share a takeaway that might surprise marketers.

A: How you score your prospects in Pardot needs to be a big discussion that extends beyond the marketing department. Invite your whole team — especially sales — to help you build a sensible, customized scoring model that works for everyone.

Q: What advice do you have for putting this takeaway into practice?

A: Set up a team meeting and prepare your case ahead of time. Be prepared to explain why scoring matters and how it can be used outside of marketing. If you can persuade others of its critical importance, you’ll get the participation you need to put it all together.

Keep learning

There’s even more to explore from ParDreamin’ 2020! Get your free video pass to access every session.