How to Get More ROI from Marketing Automation

At a recent Pardot meet-up, numerous attendees expressed that their main goal was to utilize their marketing automation tool more. With all of the bells and whistles the platform provides, it’s easy for companies to get lost in the system, and then spend most of their time focused on just a few key areas.

Here’s some great news for all of you overworked marketers out there! Don’t try to spend hours locked in a boardroom coming up with a comprehensive strategy. Start small. Make minimal adjustments to your campaigns now and start testing what’s working. Below are a few examples of how our customers are getting more ROI from their marketing automation investment:

1. Increasing Lead Information

Capturing lead information allows you to set up a series of communications designed to take the prospect through the buying process. Based on their behavior, you can score these leads from “cold” to “warm” so that your sales team can allocate their time to the leads most ready to purchase.

Pardot Customer Success

It’s important for the marketing team at Mediacurrent to deliver a personalized user experience through relevant and timely content. Enabling progressive profiling with Pardot has allowed us to gather demographic data and preferences over time. Rather than asking a prospect to fill out a long form, we usually only ask three to four questions initially and use subsequent forms to gather the additional data we need. This approach helped us achieve 129% year-over-year growth in content conversions.    

Shellie Hutchens | Mediacurrent

How To Set Up Progressive Profiling:  Pardot’s progressive profiling feature gives you the ability to conditionally display form fields based on the information a prospect has already provided to you in prior form submissions. This allows you to show fewer fields on each subsequent form, helping drive a higher conversion rate. Here’s how to implement progressive profiling.

2. Setting Up Drip Campaigns — seriously, it’s easy.

At the aforementioned Pardot meetup, I was surprised to hear how many users still are not optimizing drip campaigns. Admittedly, many of them were unsure of what content to use, while others just didn’t know where to get started.

Start with one simple campaign (or segment of your database). Drip campaigns are all about breaking your subscriber list into subsections, and targeting information to niches of customers.

Pardot Customer Success

Insightpool is a huge fan of Pardot! The ability to send personalized drip marketing emails is just one of our favorite features in the platform – these emails have allowed us to consistently nurture new leads and reengage old leads with useful, educational resources. We can easily gauge if the timing is right based on the amount of actions they take, and we can transfer them over from one soft touch track to a more aggressive track. It truly is a personalized experience for marketers.

Ashleigh Kaufman | Insightpool

How To Set Up A Drip Campaign: If you need guidance or examples as you create your drip nurturing campaigns, bookmark Pardot’s Drip Campaign templates. For example, below is a sample “Reengagement” campaign. Designed for leads that have been inactive for a period of time, this campaign is centered around providing exclusive content and promotions to excite and re-engage sales prospects.

3. Sending Specific Messages to a Mass Database — Dynamically 

No matter how large your target market, it is composed of individuals with individual characteristics and preferences. The key to effective mass marketing is not to treat your market like a mass. The more in-depth your intelligence about individual customers, the greater the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Pardot Customer Success

In order to display content to where our prospects were in the buying cycle, we used Pardot’s dynamic content builder on the CollegePlus website. For example, the message and call to action in our bottom welcome bar changed based on what stage the prospect was in. It was easy to set up in Pardot and our marketing team saw an increase in conversion rates after implementation.

Allie Cappitelli | CollegePlus

How To Implement Dynamic Content: Using Pardot’s advanced dynamic content functionality, you can display certain HTML content on your website or Pardot forms, landing pages, layout templates, and emails based on a prospect’s score, grade, or field value for default fields or custom fields. As people match the criteria set for your dynamic content, a variation of content will display where you embed the generated code on your website or email. Here’s how to implement dynamic content.

4. Deepening Relationships with Your Current Customers

Obtaining detailed customer knowledge is one thing — effectively integrating it into future marketing campaigns is another. Use marketing automation to improve overall customer retention.

Marketing Automation can be one of your most powerful tools for bringing customers back to your site to make new purchases. For example, lead scoring to identify brand evangelists or customer retention drip campaigns can help to increase your retention rates and significantly increase your brand’s sales.

Pardot Customer Success

Rigor loves using Pardot to send personalized messages to clients about upcoming events, new features, and to make sure users receive important technical information about product updates. For example, we don’t have to ask a user whether they heard about our latest feature because we know they already engaged with our blog post or documentation. Insights from Pardot help us make better use of time when we’re personally connecting with our users.

Melanie Crissey | Rigor

How To Implement Lead Scoring: A lead score, displayed as a numerical value, indicates how interested leads are in your product or service. By assigning points to the prospect actions you deem the most valuable, like visiting the pricing page or requesting a demo, you can create a score for your leads that will show how active they have been and how high their interest level is. Visit our Lead Scoring and Grading Lab for more tips on creating a scoring and grading model for your organization. 

Need A Marketing Automation Audit?

Finally, the Pardot Client Advocates are here to help our customers achieve their marketing goals by providing Pardot strategy and marketing automation best practices. If you’d like to receive a free account audit, reach out to your Advocate or email our team. We’ll be happy to pop the hood on your account and see what features you could be utilizing more.