This spring, I was thrilled to be named general manager for Salesforce Pardot — one of the fastest-growing marketing automation platforms in the B2B space. I’m a product person at heart, and I couldn’t be more excited about our recent innovation and planned roadmap.

Earlier in the year, we gave you a sneak peek of upcoming innovations for our account-based marketing (ABM) technology. Today, I’m excited to share more details about those innovations and other features included in our Summer ‘21 release. Together, these features will help you reach the right accounts for your business, launch ABM campaigns in seconds, deliver more compelling email messages at the right time, and much more.

Here are just a few highlights from the Summer ’21 release along with a preview of what’s ahead. For a complete view of what’s launching, review the Pardot Summer ’21 release notes or watch the Pardot Summer ‘21 release readiness webinar (number 13 in the playlist).

Generally Available Now

Einstein Send Time Optimization for Pardot

One of our most popular Marketing Cloud features is now available to Salesforce Pardot customers. Use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand your accounts and boost email engagement. Einstein evaluates open and click times so you can send email messages at the right time for every prospect on your list — whether they’re on the East coast of the U.S. checking email after dinner or just starting their day on the opposite side of the globe.

We’re so excited about this feature that we’re dedicating an entire blog post to it. Watch for it later this week.

Accounts as Campaign Members

Once you’ve identified your top accounts, you can now add them directly to a campaign — even before you’ve identified the account buyers. 

Historically, Salesforce Pardot campaigns have centered on contacts and leads. But as more organizations rally around an ABM approach to account selection and nurturing, building campaigns at the account level is more important than ever. With Accounts as Campaign Members, you can run prospecting campaigns with outbound sales reps to identify the right buyers in each target account. You can also target accounts for virtual events before you finalize the RSVP list, then automatically add new account contacts as they’re identified.

Simply put, this feature is a game changer that will empower sales reps to help marketing target the right buyers for upcoming campaigns. 

New Email Marketing Settings to View Mailable Prospects in a New Light 

Have you ever struggled to understand why a prospect didn’t receive your email, or how to make a prospect mailable again? To solve these types of mailability issues, we’ve upgraded Pardot’s model for qualifying prospects to receive marketing messages. 

The updated model offers more insights into a prospect’s mailability status, their Do Not Email and Opted Out settings, and bounce information; it also provides more options for editing mailability data via Pardot automations. This means you can filter out undeliverable prospects from future communications faster and prioritize opt-in preferences more easily into your compliance workflows.

The mailability upgrade is available now and must be enabled to use. It will become a permanent upgrade for all customers in the Winter ’22 release. 

Email Builder Enhancements

We’re always working to improve the user experience for Email Builder. With the Summer ’21 release, we have:

• Expanded the list of default font options to help you build eye-catching messages
• Improved our error handling so you can easily identify which components on the canvas have issues that need to be addressed before saving
• Provided an in-app video tutorial to help acclimate new users
• Added packaging capabilities for email templates so you can easily gather all related assets and save them for future use

You can also send operational emails for critical notifications using the Pardot Email Lightning experience and access a streamlined setup experience for Pardot Email, including a simplified setup page and the ability to leverage a default domain for CMS — eliminating the need for IT support.

In Beta

Einstein Key Account Identification

Don’t rely on intuition to guide your account selection strategy. Einstein Key Accounts Identification draws on the power of AI to identify accounts in your CRM with the strongest buying signals so you can spend your time on the right deals. 

Einstein will look at buyer engagement data across the account in Salesforce Pardot, along with data from your CRM, to highlight key account characteristics and buyer behaviors that indicate an account’s viability as a business opportunity. It will tier each account as an A, B, C or D — A being accounts with the greatest buying potential. Einstein will also dig deeper into the data and surface the “why” behind each account’s ranking. 

More Pardot Resources

See what’s next for Pardot by joining the June 22 webinar Pardot Product Roadmap: Powering the Next Generation of B2B Marketing.

Watch our on-demand webinar Pardot Release Highlights: ABM, Privacy, and More.