Summer ‘18 Release: Essentials for Salesforce Marketers (Pardot & Marketing Cloud)

The Summer ’18 preview release notes are hot off the press – all 476 pages of them.

When it comes to new Summer ‘18 features for Marketers, they cover a smattering of topics – from email design tools and lead conversion user aids, to new Marketing Cloud Journey capabilities with Communities and Einstein.

There’s such a variety, that it just makes sense to jump right in – first with Pardot, then Salesforce Campaigns, followed by Marketing Cloud and Einstein.

Pardot

Responsive Layouts for Landing Pages

I have to be honest, this is a much-needed addition to Pardot. Marketers need to create marketing assets almost every day, and we simply don’t have time to dig into the HTML and hard code. Responsive landing pages will ‘respond’ to the browser window size being changed, while still keeping your design intact.

You won’t find these new templates with the other stock templates in the Landing Page Wizard. You first need to create a new ‘layout template’. There’s a new dropdown option to import responsive templates for:

• Gated Download
• PPC/SEM
• Sales Ready
• Webinar
• & a general use one.

Match Leads to Accounts without a Website Value

The matched leads component is a relatively new Lightning feature that was released in Spring ’18, with the line (I love this): “Connect the Dots Between Leads and Accounts”. In the image below, you see that this aids the Salesforce Lead Conversion process by flagging possible account matches. Salesforce Accounts have a strong relationship to contacts, but Leads cannot be related to Accounts until they are converted into Contacts. So when leads come in, they are disjointed from the account they belong to in reality.

One of the fields the Matched Leads component uses to match leads to their accounts is website. So, what this update means is that you can now get more matches, even if the website field isn’t filled in. How does it do this? A matching rule will scan the account’s top contacts and match based on the domain part of the email address (AKA ‘suffix’), eg. in the email [email protected], ‘salesforceben.com’ would be used to match. Pretty nifty.

There’s also an update named: ‘See Fewer False Positives for Leads Matched to Accounts’, and this works towards the same goal, but by preventing matches for commonly used email suffixes eg. @gmail.com.

*you must have Pardot Pro and above.

Financial Services Cloud Compatibility

The Financial Services Cloud is an industry-specific Salesforce managed package that includes additional objects in its out-of-box data model, such as Assets & Liabilities, Households, and Referrals. It is marketed to ‘boost advisor and banker productivity’, and now that Financial Services Cloud is compatible with Pardot, advisors will be freed up from unqualified leads and all the guesswork that Pardot activity tracking eliminates.

Salesforce Engage: Include Salesforce Files in Engage Campaigns

Yep, just what it says. Use the files that are stored in your Salesforce Org in Engage Campaigns, which will alleviate version control and users sending out rogue files dug up from the dark depths of their laptops.

Salesforce Campaigns

• Campaign Member Sharing: control which users have the permission to view and edit campaign member details
• Add All Contacts from an Account to Campaigns: search for an account and add all contacts in one go.

• Filter Lead and Contact List Views by Campaign: a faster way to access campaign members from the Lead/Contacts list view.

Marketing Cloud

Use Marketing Journeys to Reward Member Question-and-Answer Activity

Marketing Journeys can now be triggered based on your community members (users of customer or partner communities) answering questions posted by other members. The release notes give some nice examples from both side of the question-and-answer engagement:

“automatically send email to members who have five answers marked as “best” and invite them to become MVPs. Or use Journey Builder to email thanks to users who ask or answer questions. Prompt questioners to endorse the person who answered their question. Or, create a journey to send a note to members who haven’t posted in a while and encourage them to come back”

Einstein (for Marketers)

Einstein Engagement Scoring Introduces Einstein Splits

If you have Einstein Engagement Scoring enabled, you will be able to use the following intelligent splits in your Journeys – all based on the ‘likelihood’ that they will interact with your brand in a certain way:

eg. Retention Split: Engage customers based on their likelihood to continue as a subscriber.

• Conversion Split
• Email Click Split
• Retention Split
• Email Open Split
• Persona Split

For the full descriptions, see the Knowledge Base page here.

Above: an Einstein Persona Journey Split in action at the Dreamforce Keynote