What is Pardot?
The SC Johnson College of Business uses Pardot for email marketing. Pardot is a marketing automation tool that connects directly with the college Salesforce org. Data is synced between Pardot and Salesforce on an ongoing basis.
How do you get access to Pardot?
Before you can use Salesforce and Pardot for email marketing you must have the correct permissions. You can request the following permissions through a service request:
- Pardot User Account
- Salesforce CRM User Account with the Pardot and the Non-Admissions Leads and Campaigns permission set
- Mailchimp User Account (only needed for building email templates)
How do you send emails from Pardot?
The process for emailing involves three components:
1) Manage your Leads and Contacts in Salesforce
Anyone you want to be on your email list must have a lead or contact record in Salesforce. There are many ways in which leads and contacts can be created in Salesforce. Once such channel is to setup a web form on your webpage to ask someone to provide their information and sign up for a newsletter. Here is an example of a web form. This web form can look to see if a record already exists in Salesforce with that email address and if not, create the new record. Another way that you can manage your leads and contacts in Salesforce is to understand what records might already be in the system. Currently this includes all college alumni, current students, faculty and staff. Finally, you can manually create records either by adding a single record or by importing a list of records.
2) Add Leads and Contacts to Salesforce Campaigns
Salesforce campaigns are used to manage your email lists. A campaign is a “bucket” that holds all your leads or contacts that are members of your email list. If one does not already exist, you will need to create a new campaign for your email list. Once the campaign exists, leads or contacts can be added to campaigns in two primary ways:
[OLD] Manually add leads or contacts to your email list campaign
Ask the web team to setup your web form (such as the example above) to automatically add anyone who fills out form to the appropriate Salesforce campaign. Please note, the web team must have the specific Salesforce campaign ID in order to make this connection.
3) Send emails from Pardot
Marketing and Communications should provide you with the following as a one-time setup with Pardot:
- Email Sender address that corresponds to the C&I.
- Email Template(s) to use for specific purposes
- Dynamic List that references the Salesforce campaign for email list
- Unsubscribe page specifically for the C&I.
Once you have all of the above, you can create, test and send emails.
If you are interested, here is more information about campaigns.