This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.
The Engagement Studio is the Pièce De Résistance of Pardot which transforms your marketing campaigns, automates the customer journey and enables you to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
As a fellow marketer, I understand that you'll have a million things to do that have a deadline of yesterday. Now you're given a blank canvas to build complex automation program's. No wonder it's hard to get started.
To help you get past the initial thinking france telemarketing stage, here are some ideas and concepts to get the creative juices flowing:
The Lifecycle Funnel
There's a perfectly good Pardot funnel which might help you structure your Engagement Studio's and define your objectives for each.
Pardot Lifecycle Report
Prospect to MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
This acts as your core lead generation program. The objective here is to get your new, unassigned prospects who have recently converted via a Pardot form, to become assigned to one of your sales team. You might do this based on a particular action they take within the Engagement Studio or follow best practice by using a blended scoring & grading model. Work with your sales team to define what a good MQL looks like.
MQL to SQL
A SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a prospect who has an opportunity associated to them in Salesforce. This program would work to assist the sales team in closing deals by sending relevant communications, perhaps when sales change a particular custom field which triggers the beggining of the email flow. There may be multiple Engagement Studio’s here depending on the sales team's requirements.
SQL to Won Deal
This program might consist of notifications for the sales team because the sales journey might consist only of 1-1 emails and phone calls. Remember, sales might have hundreds of leads to work on so this is where marketing can really assist sales in closing the deal and really help their team mates.
Marketing, marketing, marketing…
These are the most fun because marketing can take full credit for the results of these campaigns!
Pardot-retargeting
Upsell and Renewals
Using dynamic content, you can tailor your marketing messages to customers and upsell your product or service to them. It might be something so small in an email like a link to a more specific landing page or it could be full feature banners that change. Let your customers know about the products they don't know about!
If you have a subscription-based product or service, you'll definitely want to make sure you're nurturing prospects well in advance of their renewal date, making it more likely for them to renew. If they've not used your product or service in a while, remind them of why they signed up by sending them information on how valuable your offering is.
Brand Evangelism
Marketing shouldn’t stop once the prospect has become a customer. Think about the most successful brands, Apple have customers queueing outside for hours at a product launch and Google isn’t just a brand name it’s now a verb. The traditional marketing funnel is evolving and a new digital marketing funnel is emerging. The customer purchase triggers a new beginning followed by adoption, retention, expansion and finally, advocacy.