Optimize Pardot Capabilities With Migration to Lightning Experience

Marketing automation is the key to building a successful business strategy. With so many market automation tools available, Pardot is one of its kind. It offers a comprehensive toolset that empowers teams to unite sales and marketing operations — driving more qualified leads, better prospect nurturing, and an efficient marketing/sales cycle.

Until October 2021, marketers could effortlessly access Pardot Lightning and Classic apps via their Salesforce accounts. However, with the retiral of the Classic app, users are left with only two options to access the Classic app. They can either log in to their Salesforce accounts legacy application at pi.pardot.com or enable the Pardot Lightning App in Lightning Experience.

While the legacy application on pi.pardot.com offers usability similar to the Classic app, it poses inconvenience in login, has access to limited features, and offers less scope for upgrades, something you cannot rely on as a growing business. If you have not enabled the Pardot Lightning application, it is high time you consider Salesforce Pardot Integration.

Switching to Pardot Lightning Experience will allow you to take advantage of new product enhancements and upgrades — available only within the Lightning platform. There are several features of the Pardot Lightning application that are not available in the Classic app or its legacy platform “Pi.Pardot.com”. In this blog, we have compiled the list of top Lightning-only features that can enhance your marketing engagements this year and beyond:

1. Pardot Business Units

Instead of running multiple Pardot instances, you can now unify your organization’s marketing goals for different products/geographies under a centralized Pardot instance. Pardot Business Units allow you to partition prospects and marketing assets by business units. These assets can be marketed separately and viewed centrally to get a global view of your organization’s B2B marketing analytics. With Pardot Lightning migration, admins can switch between different Pardot instances and configure which prospects to sync with each business unit through the Pardot Lightning app.

2. Engagement History Dashboards

Engagement History Dashboard is powered by Tableau CRM which gives marketers and salespersons the ability to visualize and explore data. By embedding Engagement History Dashboard components on account, lead, campaign, person account, and opportunity records, you can have a detailed understanding of data and users. By using the pre-built filter, you can find out the most active users based on their engagement time over a specific time and optimize campaigns based on the data. Before you turn on engagement history dashboards, check in with a Salesforce Lightning migration expert as the process requires managing permissions and embedding dashboards to the right Lightning pages, which can be tricky for most Salesforce users.

3. Pardot Email in Lightning Experience

The Lightning platform provides design features that allow you to quickly edit, clone, and preview emails. You can also insert custom HTML and access HML merge tags in the same view to enhance email capability. In the Winter’22 release, more enhancements are expected to be rolled out for the Pardot Email feature in Lightning Experience. One such feature which can be a part of the Winter’22 release is the ability to use email for engagement programs. Note that, earlier Pardot users had to create multiple templates to be used in the engagement programs. This not only wasted time of users but also resulted in endless templates in Pardot. With the new feature update in the Pardot Lighting application, a single email can be used to list emails and engagement programs. Soon, Pardot will enable developers to create custom components for Pardot emails which will boost email management capabilities.

4. Einstein Send Time Optimization

Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) is a popular feature in the Marketing Cloud which determines the best time to send a message. With these features, the likeliness of messages received by a target user increases massively. STO allows marketers to increase email and push notification engagement. By using STO and Journey Builder, you would be able to send messages to contacts at the right time and view analytics in the dashboard to manage plan future engagements. In the latest update for Pardot Lightning App, ESTO allows users to set a timeframe between 3 hours and 7 days for message delivery.

5. Snippets For Lightning

Pardot Snippets are only available in Pardot Lightning. These are a piece of data in the form of text, image, link, HML tags, or date that can be reused as a part of the content in landing pages, email campaigns, forms, etc. These are used to share data between business units eliminating the extra work required to create a snippet. After you create a Snippet in Pardot Lightning Application, you can edit/merge it and the changes will be reflected wherever the same snippet is used in your marketing asset. In case your Pardot instance was provisioned before 2020, you would require some additional steps to enable this feature.

In a Nutshell

After the retiral of the Pardot Classic App for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience, migration to the Lightning platform is inevitable. While you can still access pi.pardot.com, the Lightning platform is where all the future developments will take place. If you haven’t migrated/enabled the Pardot Lightning application, it is high time you do it with Damco’s certified Salesforce Lightning Migration experts. Migration to Lightning will not only make your marketing practice easy but will also help you eliminate the limitations of Pardot Classic and “pi.pardot.com”.