As B2B digital marketers, we understand that email content and design is critical at any stage of the buyer’s journey. Historically, email marketing has been very effective and will continue to be a powerful marketing engine as technologies improve.
With that said, to achieve a high level of email effectiveness, it’s important to have strong visual storytelling in your email marketing campaigns. Your engagement, email open rates, and traffic generated from emailing will rise significantly if you pay attention to the details in your content.
Beginner’s Guide to Pardot
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Why use B2B email marketing?
Today, most digital marketers agree that email marketing is the central core of their marketing programs. Email marketing is ranked as the best channel for customers and prospect communication, allowing clear and detailed conversations to be exchanged.
In fact, email marketing has an average ROI of 3,800%. For every dollar invested, the average return is $38, according to Salesforce.
Pardot email marketing
With Pardot marketing automation tool, you can effectively schedule and send personalized emails to thousands of prospects. You can choose to make responsive templates that you can reuse, or create and send emails that deliver personalized experiences to all your prospects individually.
However, with so many features and benefits Pardot offers, you may not know where to even begin.
Before we get started, let’s define the types of Pardot emails so we understand common Pardot functions:
- Engagement Studio
- Drip programs
- One-to-one emails
- List emails
- Autoresponders
Types of Pardot emails
Engagement Studio
The Engagement Studio is a complex prospect nurturing engine that marketers use to build intelligently automated programs. We’ll advance more in-depth with how Engagement Studio works in the next chapter.
Drip programs
A drip program is just an older version of the Engagement Studio. A big difference between the two is the interface. The Engagement Studio uses a canvas interface, whereas drip programs use a step-by-step wizard. These programs are quickly being deprecated in newer versions of Pardot.
One-to-one emails
In a one-to-one email, you are only emailing to a single prospect. This feature is mostly used by salespeople who are working out of Pardot.
List emails
List emails are commonly used for email blasts sent to specific lists. A classic use case for this would be a one-time single promotion — like an online-only sale of your product.
Auto-responders
Prospects receive this type of email as a follow-up after they complete a desired action. An everyday use case for this would be sending an email with a whitepaper attached after a prospect fills out a form.
Testing your Pardot emails
Before you push send on your emails, we recommend that you test all of your email drafts and templates. This is to ensure optimum deliverability, confirm that the populated data is correct, and that all formatting appears as designed.
Litmus testing with Pardot
If you have the Litmus testing integration, this useful feature helps you preview what your email will look like in various browsers and screen sizes. Utilizing the Litmus testing feature can benefit you in making sure your emails are responsive across multiple email clients and devices. Litmus testing also performs a Spam Testing that will help make sure your emails go straight to inboxes rather than spam folders.
Email testing
With this native Pardot email testing feature, you can see an identical version of how the email will look like in your email browser when you send it to an individual or test group. Remember: you are in testing mode, so not all links and variable tags that you may have included will come up accurately. As a general rule of thumb, you should always send yourself a test email to verify that your links and variable tags are all working.
Pardot Preview mode
This allows you to make sure your variable tags are working and preview it as one of your prospects. You don’t want to lose your brand’s integrity by sending emails with broken tags and links. Nothing can turn a prospect away more than receiving defective emails or viewing a link that doesn’t work.
Quality assurance
As marketers, we can schedule up to a thousand emails a month. Having an airtight quality assurance process is important when changing a variety of emails and managing a large segmented database.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the most important components of Pardot. Mastering this key aspect of it will be your launch pad to a successful email marketing journey.
Now, let’s move onto Pardot Engagement Studio and discuss how you can build effective automated programs to engage prospects within it.
