Pardot have this week released the Engagement Studio for General release after being available to selected clients in Beta phase.
We were heavily involved in the process from before the beta, and had early access to the first iterations of the studio, helping shape what we have today.
So what do we have today?
What we do have is a streamlined and powerful marketing tool that is going to change the way you run your campaigns and marketing efforts.
Pardot have listened to their customers and produced a really usable and functional tool, all the functionality that has made it to the first GA release is based on customer feedback.
Looking at the core functionality, Pardot have broken it down into three main functions – Triggers, Actions and Rules.
Triggers are a way of listening for Prospect activity, much like the open and click rules in the old Drip Programs, you now have the ability to leverage powerful triggers, including specific link clicks, landing page success and custom redirects. This is one of our favourite product features.
Once you’ve listened for a certain action you’ll then have the option to do something with these prospects. Using Actions you’ll be able to send an email, assign to a user, assign to a Salesforce campaign and much more.
You’ll be more familiar with Rules in the context of Automation Rules, Dynamic Lists and Segmentation Rules but now you’ll have to ability to run rules directly in the Engagement Studio - this is great! You can now direct Prospects using field values, Salesforce campaign, list membership, score, grade and again, much more.
The testing capability is really cool, when you test a campaign at every decision you are asked to make the choice whether the prospect matches or doesn’t match the trigger or rule. It means you can see exactly which path a prospect will take and if there’s any potential issues with your workflow.
Reporting is highly intuitive, giving you all the important stats and figures you need to make the right decisions to improve your program. You’ll see it at program level through tool tips and you’ll be able to drill down to see a report card which relates to that particular step. If you want to see an assets complete stats (if it’s used multiple times) you can drill down even further.
So that’s what we have today, and it’s great, really great, but what would we like to see in the future that will really make this tool stand out from the crowd?
- A/B testing directly within the Engagement studio would be huge, imagine having the ability to test an email within your program and the winner is then the default email send. Very powerful.
- Jump to step. An action that was in Drip Programs but didn’t make it into the GA release, would really open up the Engagement Studio and allow you to be much more flexible with your prospect journeys. I’d love to see the ability to push prospects both down and up a program.
- Wait times less than a day. This would enable a higher level of granularity in your programs, being able to have a wait time of less than a day in certain situations could really increase the flexibility in how quickly your prospects move through your program.
- Schedule email sends at specific date/times. This would be a really really powerful feature, providing the opportunity to manage time sensitive content directly from your program, meaning you can manage events from start to finish using just the Engagement Studio.
- Account Based Marketing (ABM) is on the increase in digital marketing, giving marketeers the ability to look at their customer base at an account level rather than as individual prospects. Eloqua, with their partnership with Demandbase, have recently launched their Account Based Marketing Automation product and Marketo announced at their Marketo Summit they will be launching an Account Based Marketing solution later in 2016. Due to this, we believe Pardot will need to offer some form of ABM solution and with the Engagement Studio they have a big opportunity to do this and provide Pardot users the ability to look at the account object and run triggers, rules and actions at an Account level.
If you're looking to get the most out of Pardot's Engagement Studio, we'd love to help.
