Pardot have announced a new feature to their Engagement Programs - scheduled email steps and enhancements to Engagement Studio testing.
Before this update it was a struggle to develop a clear approach to when emails were being sent. We would have to specify a wait period instead of an actual date.
With this new feature, we can now schedule when an email is sent!
This will help us organise and build Engagement Programs with clear knowledge of when you’re sending emails.This will be a real advantage for building event campaigns where we can now include a ‘thanks for attending’ email in the same Engagement Program. If we add everyone who attended into a recipient list in Engagement Studio, people who attended who were not sent email invites can flow down and be sent the ‘thanks for attending’ email and none of the other emails. It's as if a prospect reaches a send step that was scheduled in the past, the prospect will not be sent that email and instead carry through the program.
When we test our Engagement Programs, we can now specify a test date. Our example below shows the email send date is the 9th of January. If we want to see how long it will take a prospect to flow through the campaign after the send step, Pardot will tell you. We entered the start date on 10th of January, so this test would have run for zero days and because my test was dated after the scheduled send date, the test would not have received this email.
In contrast, this example test below was entered with a date of the 4th January. This test would have been in the Engagement Program for 5 days, waiting until the send step of 9th January which sent the email.