Salesforce Pardot Overview: 21 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Salesforce, which is a leading cloud-based organization providing Customer Relationship Management software as solutions, is also popular for launching product updates and releases thrice a year.

In its March ‘2022 Summer release, huge news is rolled out i.e. Marketing Cloud’s Pardot got renamed. The new name of Pardot is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE).

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud is more inclined towards serving B2C companies, Salesforce Pardot/MCAE is specific for B2B organizations.

Here are 21 FAQs that provide you with Salesforce Pardot Overview, about this change and other things revolving around Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

FAQ 1: Is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement the same as Pardot?

The big news for the Pardot community is that renaming Pardot to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has created hot headlines in the Salesforce world. But the good thing is that we only changed the name; we kept the pre-existing features, functionality, and add-ons of Pardot reserved. To stimulate this advancement, they have added a few capabilities to the platform.

The prime objective of MCAE is to sync sales and marketing around leads and potential buyers and to keep their accounts the same.

• The classic Pardot application was retired from all the organizations in October 2022.

However, users should know some necessary implications that come along with rebranding:

• Pardot or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement will not restrict Salesforce from communicating aside from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• A difference has been created between B2B and B2C with the repositioning of Pardot as a B2B platform.
• Well, “Pardot” was pretty easy to identify and recognize and could create a concern, as the users who are comfortable referring to it as Pardot might not take it easy in adapting the new term.
• And according to Salesforce, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a genuine term that should be used for the platform.
• “Account Engagement” does not encompass all of Pardot’s client requirements.

FAQ 2: What is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, known as Pardot, allows businesses to create meaningful connections, enhance sales, generate new pipelines, and build lasting relationships through personalized outreach functions. It offers a loaded suite of B2B Marketing automation tools that assists the sales team in closing more business deals quickly and efficiently. Businesses can scale up their B2B marketing and invite constant growth with sales and marketing alignment with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Sales representatives will feel more equipped to have full prospect engagement visibility and smoothly pass along the coming leads. In addition, Salesforce Account Engagement establishes a connection with the marketing tech stakes and presents data-driven insights, reducing the guesswork of lead and account management.

FAQ 3: What is Pardot?

Pardot (now known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is a marketing automation tool that lets marketers identify potential customers with a high probability of converting. Salesforce Pardot boost your b2b marketing and sales by providing various features like targeting email campaigns, ROI tracking, lead management, email automation, and more for marketing organizations. You can sync Pardot with your existing Salesforce customer relationship management software for better performance. This syncing reduces the time taken for analytics compared to other marketing automation tools available in marketing.

FAQ 4: Why Did Pardot’s Name Change?

With rebranding in mind, Salesforce has renamed one of the highly popular products to recognize them from the customer’s point of view. Users are the ones who contributed so well to the building of these tools, but when it comes to customers, they haven’t worked on these tools. And according to them, purchasing software is now obsolete yet resource-intensive.
Many businesses have tried multiple demos of different software that are accessible in the market to finally find a solution that works best for their business model and reduce the gap between teams who need more resources. You can damage your company by missing out on a demo session or an email because you don’t find the product name quite common and relevant. To ensure that the solution proposed by Salesforce won’t get lapsed due to its name, Salesforce has decided to rebrand it and continue to aspire for a more relevant, more consistent experience giving a name to all their existing and prospective customer base.

FAQ 5: What is NOT affected by the Pardot name change?

There are a lot of things that are going to be the same, even if Pardot’s name is changed, like:

• Features & functionality of the Product (for continuous growth and expansion as it is part of the normal release cycle)
• Pricing
• The original SKU names on your Salesforce Contract
• Packaging/bundles

FAQ 6: What is the benefit of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

We have seen what Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is and how the Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Account Engagement have a basic difference, even though they work over the same cloud theme: Marketing. Now comes the most important query; what is the benefit of using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)? It acts as a middle wall between known prospects and Salesforce CRM Data. It does not let businesses lose customers just because the customers are not “ready to buy” at the moment. Instead, to keep the conversation active with them, constant email marketing, behavioral tracking, and data capturing are the best medium.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Intuitive Email Builder is beneficial as it allows users to build professional emails with custom designs in just a few clicks. It even has the great functionality of track recording ROIs, allowing users to view and analyze campaign performances with customized dashboards per their requirements.

FAQ 7: What are the features of Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has various beneficial features, and they are listed below. You can use these features according to the business requirement and architecture.

Features

• Email Marketing: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement provides automated email journeys and customized emails delivered to the list of prospects as obtained from campaigns. Email automation based on triggers or specific actions helps keep the communication active with leads resulting in a better turnover.
• Forms allow receiving information from new prospects from campaigns and capturing information of existing customers, thus enriching their records.
• Engagement History is a log of activities accomplished by prospects over online platforms of businesses.
• Segmentation allows dividing prospect databases into groups resulting in more focus on advertising and marketing.
• Scoring is done of prospects according to their behavior to be worked upon accordingly.
• Grading is done over prospects to determine the alignment between the prospects and the ideal Prospect ideated by the organization.
• Lead Qualification: Leads are organized as per the priority of action according to scoring and grading received.
• Social Media and Search Marketing: Tracks post engagements over LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and post content over these platforms. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s work on keywords, SEO metrics, and tracking competitor SEO performance allows businesses to strategize better.

FAQ 8: Is there an update in the features of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Yes. In the Winter 23 release, Salesforce introduced the new features of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot.

With this “Account Engagement Developer Experience (DX) release, developers will now be able to limitlessly collude Account Engagement with various other external platforms and Salesforce objects. Another good news is that there are more updates like prospect activity tracking, prospect database update and sync, and easy Non-Salesforce user licensing.

Here are the updated features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement:

1. Account Engagement External Actions

With this feature, you can take necessary actions on prospects outside the range of Account Engagement. External Actions widens the horizon for several Salesforce Use cases by letting the users hook Engagement Studio into multiple automation and objects on the side of Salesforce.

Key Facts about External Actions:

• It is related to Marketing App Extension. It helps connect Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with External platforms through Pardot API.
• You can use External actions independently, which means you can directly apply action to a prospect by tapping into the functionality of a third-party platform.
• And you can also use External actions in combination with different external activities. This combination will apply action to both the prospect and log a prospecting activity in the Engagement history record of the prospect.

2. Pause Prospect Activity Tracking

It’s so common that records of prospects accumulate activities endlessly, even when you get too involved in the investigation. Here Prospect activities = Score Increases = Involuntary automated actions. And this bot-like activity is quite difficult to handle if it starts. But with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, you can now Pause Activity tracking for prospects with bulk activities.

• Make sure you do not set down the tracking code of Account Engagement on a website that is receiving heavy traffic loads. This means avoiding any activity that can lead prospects to rack up hundreds of pageview activities.
• Paused prospects who have opted in still have the option to receive promotional emails.
• An icon appears in the prospect list view, and you can see an error in the prospect record.

3. Prospect Database Full Sync

Pardot administrators have the authority to run a full sync in their prospect database, only on one condition when it happens every 7 days and when there is a list of 5000 prospects by business unit.

Users can look for a new connector setting called “Sync All Prospects”.

Although the number of records and frequency are bounded, still it’s good news for administrators. If Pardot is something you are giving your time to, then you might be familiar with several ways to trigger a huge quantity of prospect sync, which is not right. It could be by creating new prospect fields or by exporting records along with the IDs of current prospects in the list and finally importing the same bulky files with already mapped IDs.

4. Control Prospect Opt-out Field Sync Behaviour

You can map every existing Account Engagement field to Salesforce, and set a field sync behavior like “Use Salesforce’s Value”, “Use Pardot’s Value”, or “Use the most recently updated records”.

Users might not want to revert sync the prospect’s choice, considering the prospect opt-out is a serious concern to its previous state. For instance, if a prospect is opting out of the email unsubscribe link before the connector can complete its sync, if a Salesforce user updates their associated Lead/Contact record, then automatically gets opted-in.

When you get a dedicated record system, you can select from either “Use Salesforce’s value” or “Use Pardot’s value”. The “Use the most recently updated record” option has been taken down and is not available anymore.

5. Licensing for Users (who doesn’t require to have full Salesforce Access)

Pardot-only login vanished in 2021, and since then, if users don’t have the license of the entire CRM, then they need to obtain a Salesforce Identity License. The purpose of these licenses is to enable the single sign-on (SSO), making users still access the Account Engagement Platform. The new deliberate Permission Set

License and Permission Set permits your users access of:

• Many marketing tools are available in the Account Engagement Lightning Application in contrast to the standalone Pardot app.
• This feature doesn’t provide its user complete access to the various Salesforce campaigns.

FAQ 9: Is Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement a CRM?

Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that couples and works seamlessly with Salesforce CRM. Therefore, we can say that it is a B2B Marketing automation solution that uses CRM ID (Salesforce Lead/Contact ID).

FAQ 10: When is Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement required?

If your organization functions with a B2B architecture/business model and you wish to identify prospective customers who can be converted into actual customers, you need Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for its Intuitive Email Builder. Other marketing analytics and data-capturing tools help businesses capture target audiences easily and convert those leads to customers.

FAQ 11: What is the work process of Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with Salesforce?

Salesforce and Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement are built with varied authorization and sharing models. Since Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement works on Salesforce Lead/Contact ID. Users can integrate it with Salesforce Person Account record types where data is shared via the Salesforce-Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement connector using the connector user. Additionally, importing prospects into Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement from Salesforce is possible now.

FAQ 12: How can one learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a marketing automation tool. Hence, to learn Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in-depth, one should be thorough with Salesforce Marketing Concepts and the basic automation tools provided by Salesforce.
One can learn Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) through Trailhead, or a free website providing knowledge about Salesforce practices. Also, referring to Trailhead to dive into Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is recommended.

FAQ 13: Is Pardot a Salesforce Product?

Pardot is well known as a B2B marketing solution tool. Salesforce acquired it in 2013. Later in the summer release in March’22, Pardot’s name was changed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement by Salesforce.

FAQ 14: Can we use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for free?

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is not free. Users can adopt Marketing Cloud Account Engagement by purchasing a marketing automation edition as per their requirement even though they don’t use the whole of Salesforce’s Platform. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has four marketing automation plans, mainly named: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Growth, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Plus, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Advanced, and last but not least, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Premium.

Here is the detail of Editions of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing that you can consider to grow your business faster with marketing automation:

FAQ 15: How to Implement Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Implementation of Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement requires the proper creation of a blueprint aligning with all the requirements so that there won’t be any hurdles after setup. Salesforce admin should install Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement from Salesforce AppExchange and enable the same over Marketing Setup. Once enabled, set up the Salesforce User Sync, where the assignment of an admin will take place.

Users can refer to the Implementation Guide to set up Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for a detailed idea of how to implement it in the organizations.

FAQ 16: How Can Nonprofits Use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Talking about Non-profit organizations, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has worked as a marketing automation charm for already established organizations in Salesforce and those who have just begun their journey with Salesforce.

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Given this fact, the infrastructure of Account Management is completely different from Marketing Cloud, which lets it facilitates several marketing strategies by:

• Multi-location data visibility, advancing the collaboration opportunities among departments and fostering information silos.
• Mitigating a heap of workloads driving from long engagement cycles by small teams through automation and customization of campaigns based on volunteer or donor engagement data.
• Quantifying and Qualifying converted leads, accrediting the sales team to flourish good relationships with donors, and reinforcing more constructive journeys of donors.
• Using the CRM to modify stagnant user behavior into data that users can utilize to make sales and marketing decisions.

FAQ 17: Does Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement have an API?

Yes, Pardot has an API named Pardot API, which has now been updated. The new Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s API name is Account Engagement API. Pretty obvious name, isn’t it? Account Engagement API enables users to access more data through new and updated objects in Version 5 API, along with expanded support of approximately 28 objects. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement lets you take on actions in bulk by initiating multi-select table actions for asynchronous records processing in huge quantities.

FAQ 18: What is the Salesforce Pardot Connector?

Salesforce Pardot Connector synchronized records for objects between Pardot and Salesforce. It works on Prospect and opportunities data transferred between Salesforce and Pardot.

FAQ 19: How do I connect Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to my Salesforce Sandbox?

functionalities before deploying them to production. Therefore, functionalities comprising Marketing Cloud Account Engagement require it to be connected to Salesforce Sandbox. These are the steps to connect Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to Salesforce Sandbox:

Open the Connector page on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

• In Pardot, select Admin and then Connectors. In the Lightning app, select Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Settings and then Connectors.
• If no Salesforce connector exists, jump to step 4 and continue.
• If the Salesforce connector already exists, delete the existing connector and work according to further steps. (This is to be done usually after Salesforce Sandbox Refresh).
• Click “+ Add Connector.”
• Click “Salesforce.”
• Check the checkbox with the message ‘Sandbox.’
• Click “Create Connector.”
• Log in to Salesforce using the connector user’s Sandbox credentials.
• After the user logs in, click “Allow” to give the connector user access to your account.
• Choose the connector settings and click finish.

FAQ 20: What are the Pardot Custom Objects?

Pardot custom objects amplify marketing automation as they are just how we sync data from Salesforce custom objects to use in Pardot for automation & segmentation. With the Advanced edition, we can map up to 4 custom objects by default in Pardot accounts. For the Plus edition, these are available at an additional cost.

FAQ 21: How is Pardot better than Marketo?

Pardot, now referred to as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, allows multivariate testing to test the effectiveness of different landing pages, which isn’t available in Marketo. Moreover, Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement permits the creation of unique and customized forms for every campaign or landing page. In contrast, Marketo has concepts of Global forms and Local forms, which restrict usability.
Moreover, features like personalized messages for email marketing, SMS Marketing with configurable settings, mobile template, and Lead Management make Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement stand in a much better position in demand than Marketo.

Wrapping UP!

The ultimate key to all business marketing and marketing management problems is Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. It is a platform with various features for automating marketing activities and analyzing and managing leads.

And setting up Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is not as complex as it looks. All you need is to get Salesforce implementation services for a company that can use their knowledge to utilize Pardot at its best for businesses.

Cyntexa is an approved and highly potent Salesforce Implementation Partner. The team of certified B2C Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developers equips itself to help organizations grow to heights of success by leveraging Pardot at its best.