Pardot Implementation Guide: Setting Up in 12 Easy Steps

Pardot, now referred to as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, is a B2B marketing automation tool. The tool comes with powerful features to generate and nurture leads alongside automating marketing activities.

The Salesforce Pardot platform facilitates targeted actions, offers personal customer experiences, and facilitates targeted emails that meet prospect intents.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement enables sales and marketing teams to work together and win more customers by providing a single source of truth.

The Salesforce Pardot is unsurpassed as a tool for B2B automation. Businesses interested in using it should review the Pardot setup implementation guide to learn how it can be applied to their business.

This guide will help you with Salesforce Pardot implementation best practices to meet the specific goals of your business.

Inclined to understand more? Let’s get started.

12 Steps For Pardot Implementation Guide

Step 1 – Identify Key People Who Need to be Involved in the Implementation

Salesforce Pardot implementation is a team effort that directs expertise from different departments such as sales, service, IT, marketing, etc. Therefore, it is best practice to make sure you have identified the people to seek their help to implement the Pardot in the right way meeting your business requirements.

Step 2 – Planning a Journey Map

Pardot implementation without planning a journey map is similar to cooking a meal without knowing a recipe. You’ll have no idea of what ingredients and steps you need to create a delicious meal.

A journey map helps you prioritize the most important goals of your business and recommends the best way to achieve them. Furthermore, Pardot offers two-way sync to ensure alignment between the sales and marketing teams. Journey helps you define the data that needs to be synced between sales and marketing teams, and the criteria for moving a prospect from one stage to another.

Here are the best practices you can follow to create a Pardot implementation guide journey map:

• Prioritize the feature that needs to be done, and plan the timeline & resources accordingly to achieve implementation deadline goals.
• Identify the pain points that you might encounter during the implementation process.
• Define your goals that you want to implement.

Step 3 – Technical Tasks Setup

Technical task setup is the cornerstone of any Pardot implementation. Here are the different setups that are required:

1. Tracking Code Implementation

Tracking code helps you to keep track of your website visitors and their activity.

2. Adding a Tracker Domain

The tracker domain is used to mask your Pardot-hosted content with a custom URL. For example, instead of addressing Pardot-hosted content with a URL beginning with go.pardot.com, you can use your URL like info.yourcompany.com.

3. Authenticating DKIM and SPF Email

Authentication of DKIM and SPF emails is essential for the following reasons:

• Improving delivery of email and credibility by making sure that emails are sent from legitimate sources and not spam.
• This also ensures compliance with the email authentication standards which help in spam filtering.
• Improves email open and click rate by building your trust among your receptions.

4. Enabling First-Party Tracking

Enable first-party tracking will help you make use of a custom domain for tracking cookies rather than the default domain from Pardot. This improves your tracking accuracy and eliminates browser restrictions.

Step 4 – Add Users to Salesforce Pardot

The next step would be to add users to Salesforce Pardot who are going to use it. Assign each user the appropriate role and permissions so they can perform their tasks efficiently. For example, a user with administrator privileges can only manage all aspects of an account but cannot edit marketing assets.

Step 5 – Salesforce-Pardot Integration

Pardot Salesforce integration ensures alignment between the sales and marketing teams. You can use Salesforce Pardot connectors to perform this integration. These connectors can seamlessly sync data between Salesforce and Pardot resulting in high-quality leads, data-driven marketing campaigns, etc. Salesforce professional edition is required for Salesforce Pardot integration.

Step 6 – Salesforce Engage Setup

Salesforce Engage Setup is essential to bring transparency and alignment between sales and marketing. It enables the sales team to create a personalized buyer experience with the help of Pardot data such as email interactions, and web behavior. Furthermore, it also enables the efficient building, sending, and tracking of personalized emails from Salesforce or Gmail.

Learn here how to boost B2B Marketing and Sales with Pardot.

For Salesforce Engage setup it is a must to have access to both Salesforce admin and Pardot admin.

Step 7 – Marketing Analytics Setup

Marketing Analytics Setup enables the business to stay informed about the performance of their marketing campaigns across multiple channels including social media, email, web, and so on. It helps you gain insights into your campaign performance, and optimize the strategies to generate better outcomes from it.

Step 8 – Creating Marketing Assets

Marketing assets can be thought of as the elements that are required to create and deliver your marketing campaigns to your customers. There are following marketing assets are available in Pardot:

1. Landing Pages

Landing pages are one of the most important marketing assets in Pardot used for engaging with prospective customers and capturing leads. Pardot offers two different ways to create landing pages. You can use ready-made Pardot stock templates and customize them with your content and branding. You can also create new layout templates using HTML code.

2. Forms

Forms can be created for your website to collect essential information from your prospects. Pardot enables users to customize their forms using different fields, layouts, styles, and actions to meet specific needs.

3. Email Templates

These are pre-designed emails that can be used to send automated emails to customers. Email templates can be customized with different layouts, styles, images, buttons, etc. to make them adaptable to your needs.

Make your email campaigns more effective with Pardot AI.

4. Center Pages

Center pages also referred to as Email Preferences Centers (EPCs) allow the prospects to manage their email preferences. These pages bring relevancy to emails, improve email delivery rates, and reduce unsubscribe rates.

Step 9 – Pardot Hosting Files Setup

Pardot hosting files refer to all the files that are uploaded and stored in Pardot. These files could be anything from images, videos, audio, documents, JavaScript, and CSS. Here are some of the reasons why it is required to set up Pardot hosting files:

• You can keep track of the engagement and performance of the files such as views, downloads, and clicks with Pardot analytics.
• By making use of Pardot hosting files you can create dynamic content that speaks of your prospect’s preferences, and behavior.
• With the help of Padot hosting files, you can create consistent branding across all channels.
• You can use Pardot hosting to keep your files secure from unauthorized access.

Step 10 – Create User Segmentation

User segmentation is the process of dividing your customers into a group depending on the similarities in their attributes and behavior. Having a list of customers with common interests, you can send them relevant and personalized content that matches their needs.

Salesforce Pardot offers four different ways to segment users:

• Lists: It is a collection of prospects to whom you can send the targeted emails. Lists can be static which needs to be created and updated manually or dynamically which can be updated automatically based on the criteria.
• Rules: You can define the rule to segment the customers based on criteria such as field values, activity scores, grades, or customer interactions. Either you can set automated rules that will run continuously in the background or segmentation rules that may run once or on a schedule defined.
• Tags: They act as a label to categorize the prospects based on any criteria you select. You can add tags either manually or automate them with the help of automation tools.
• Profiles: It is used to segment the prospects based on their geographical and demographic characteristics.

Step 11 – Automation Tools Setup

Automation tools are used to execute mundane tasks with human assistance. These tools simplify, speed up, and streamline marketing tasks by identifying the prospects and executing defined actions such as customer segmentation, lead scoring, trigger email campaigns, etc.

Some of the most common automation tools offered by Pardot are:

• Completion actions are associated with marketing elements such as forms, files, or emails. These actions are triggered automatically when a customer interacts with these elements and performs a specific action.
• Automation rules are used to perform ongoing tasks whenever a specific criterion is met. These rules perform tasks such as adding prospects to the list, changing field values, and more.

Step 12 – Integrate the System and Test

Pardot can also be integrated with other systems such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Slack, and so on. You can integrate Pardot with other systems using Pardot API, Salesforce Connector, Microservices, etc.

You can make use of tools like Pardot Sandbox to test your integration in a safe environment and make sure they are functioning properly.

Test the Pardot implementation to make sure the features such as email marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing, etc. are working as per your expectations. Once the Pardot functionality is confirmed to be on par with your expectations, you can deploy the Pardot system and provide the training to your staff to make them familiar with the system.

Final Take

Salesforce Pardot (Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is one of the most powerful B2B Marketing automation tools. Pardot implementation guide consists of several steps and is complex therefore it is essential to have the right skills and planning to ensure proper execution.

If you’re looking for assistance in Pardot implementation or Salesforce Implementation Services, feel free to contact Cyntexa. Cyntexa is a Salesforce crest (gold) consulting partner with extensive experience in helping companies of all sizes implement Pardot.