Snippets as a tool for distributing data ownership in Salesforce & Pardot.
Marketers have enough to manage without being responsible for running down and verifying details of products or events. With Snippets, organizations can put ownership of that information back into the hands of stakeholders within Salesforce, while leveraging the data in Pardot.
When using Connected Campaigns, Pardot emails can now leverage Snippets. These snippets live in the campaign in Salesforce and are dropped into emails as variables. If the snippet is updated, then the email content is updated. Upon send, the snippet values are captured and rendered to the reader as of that moment.
Want more power? Leverage Salesforce Flows to capture values from Salesforce Objects (Standard and Custom) to create, populate, and overwrite snippets.
Snippets: the Connected Campaign Power Tool
I’m Marianne Fields. I am a Marketing Technologist, a Certified Pardot Consultant and the Marketing Ops Manager for Givelify.
As Pardot and Salesforce continue to grow closer together on the platform, you’re going to find that there are a lot of these wonderful, hidden gems. Today, I’m going to give you a few reasons to track down the details and explore the possibilities of snippets within your own work.
What are Snippets?
First, if you don’t know about snippets, they are simply reusable content that can be associated with campaigns or business units. They reside in the Salesforce standard object or standard campaign object.
They’re available to Pardot email templates and landing pages and, you know, that’s exciting. I mean, it really is. Reusable content is very exciting. But by living in the Salesforce platform these little gems are available to any Salesforce e-work with permissions, as well as any processes on e-work, and that’s the really exciting part for me.
So it expands their management beyond just the marketing team and allows you to leverage data from throughout your org. That means you can distribute ownership, you can distribute quality control checks, and you can share the burden of having accurate data.
But first, let’s talk about, you know, marketers and effective marketing campaigns. A great deal of the burden of a marketer, beyond just trying to create incredible marketing campaigns, is trying to make sure that they’re accurate and that they’re intimate. And intimacy is often established through very specific details that are very timely and can really take a marketing from ho-hum to, you know, that next level.
So what we always say, I mean, every marketer’s said this a million times that we were trying to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Personalization is a huge part of that. And details are a huge part of conveying that personalization because you’re giving them the details that they want.
But of course, every marketer knows that the more details there are in the collateral or in the asset the more you are making sure they’re right, so that is one of the biggest challenges for frontline marketers. There are so many details that are constantly changing that much of the process revolves around, as I said, gathering, updating, maintaining, and QCing these details. However, since they are essential, it’s work that must be done. So let’s look at some of the details.
Ownership of Details
So imagine the value of putting ownership of the details back in the hands of stakeholders. This allows those stakeholders to control the data they manage while allowing marketers to move more quickly with confidence that those details are going to be accurate, based on the people who own them having the ability to update them, and additionally having the ability to send it through reporting and whatnot.
Traditionally, the way marketers share ownership of details is by routing briefs, routing proofs, and getting sign-off by other people, or by creating this master document with all these details, and they keep seeing it to themselves, which kind of leaves the marketer hanging out on a limb by themselves when they go to send that email. And, you know, we all kind of have that little prayer that we got all those details right. But, you know, we don’t have to dig back into that template and switch them up at the last minute because, you know, nothing ever changes at the last minute.
So one of the values or snippets is that because you’re distributing ownership and the details are coming in through merge fields, which we’ll talk about, you have that advantage of making sure that you’re focused on the most effective campaign not just being able to stay ahead of the details or the burden of building.
Key Benefits of Snippets
Visibility
Visibility is key. You can produce a report that is going to show you all of the snippets associated with a campaign or with all the campaigns, if that’s what you want. You can also route that report, you can, and set up tasks off of them because again, it’s standard Salesforce functionality. So you’re able to leverage that with all the goodies that exist in Salesforce.
Accessibility
That leads us to accessibility. Anybody with permissions can edit the template, edit the data from Salesforce. And if it’s data that lives in another object, you have that ability to shuffle the data between these using a tool like Flow.
Versatility
\With snippets, you can use them as content blocks and you can also use them as granular facts. And you can put them in email templates or landing pages.
Availability
Because they’re available through Salesforce, you know, as a standard sale, they can be created, deleted, updated, et cetera, with Flow. And to me, that is a huge piece because you’re adding muscle to your overall team because marketers are not responsible for doing it all themselves.
Prerequisites for Snippets
There are some prerequisites for using connect or using snippets. First and foremost, you have to be using connected campaigns. And I guess I say that, you also have to be on a Pardot Lightning app, that’s how you’ll manage them. And then finally, it’s going to be leveraged through HML or Handlebar Merge Language.
So when you’re planning for snippets, you know, those prerequisites are key, but then, you know, that’s kind of all in the marketing territory.
How to use Snippets
You really have to think about what kind of data you want to include. As I showed you earlier, dates are huge and the use case that I’m going to talk about, we’re dealing with events, so registration URLs, venues, speakers, even exhibitors that were participating, these are all things that are changing late.
We definitely had them all on our events system, but we wanted to have them in the email. So the way we were doing it was cut and paste. So, you know, it’s the same planning, but it’s thinking, okay, well, do we need a flow that’s going to pull this data from somewhere else in Salesforce, or do we just need to train another team on how to update the snippets directly, on those campaigns?
Let’s see, so that gets you into who’s going to manage it and how. And then, the final piece that I like to think about as the content blocks versus the individual values.
Snippets allow the marketer the maximum flexibility to where if they’re presenting them on an email template, they can arrange them one way. They’re presenting them on a landing page, they can, they can arrange it, you know, in a different way.
However, there are some times when the arrangement of the data is very specific, like maybe with the product description and skews, and you know, and specs, so a product marketer may want to control how that looks within the email or the landing page.
In that case, you can provide a content block that the marketer can just take and know that it’s arranged just the way they want it. So, I said we were going to talk about real-world applications.
Recruit Military Use Case
As I said, my previous company was Recruit Military, which hosts about 140 career fairs onsite in 60 cities for employers who are looking to recruit veteran talent. So the logistics of that were pretty intense and they were actually managed on our Salesforce form or Salesforce platform by our logistics team.
So all of the data about the event was in Salesforce, it was up to date, it was exactly what we needed. But for several years, we were literally copying and pasting those into flex fields within Pardot in order to not have to update them on templates because at any given time, we had roughly 30 active campaigns supporting the event schedule, and obviously, that would be a lot of things to edit if you had to make changes down to the minute.
By putting them in flex fields, we were able to step back a hair but we’re still having to copy and paste every event detail, which I think we had 38 per event, into flex fields that we were then using an automation roles to update the values on individual prospects, and then merging them into the actual send.
Flow allowed us to step back even further and actually capture all of those event details off of our customer event object, create snippets on the individual campaign, and then we had an additional button on campaign that would let us refresh those any time there was an event change or if we just wanted to make sure we had the latest and greatest before we went to press.
The next iteration that we had planned that, you know, I don’t know if it’s come to pass, was hopefully to be able to trigger that refresh based on changes in the data so that then the marketer would never really be responsible for having to make sure their information was current.
Using Snippets During Covid-19
The other application I really wanted to mention was COVID. A lot of businesses that have really succeeded or at least survived well this year have been because they’ve been able to provide their customers with up to the minute information about, you know, availability, delays, if there were alternate forms of business based on COVID protocols, any of those details, getting them disseminated to their customer base is hugely important.
That information changes all the time, so it was really important to be able to have it controlled in one place, which, you know, if you’re using the CMS tool that, you know, that’s an excellent application, if they can control it in one place in Salesforce, then that can be pushed into your campaign. Or you can actually control it on snippets on your campaign and have it be up to the date on auto responders or nurture emails, whatever you’re doing, or even engage templates that your salespeople are using. So it takes the burden again, off of the marketer, of trying to keep those information, those details up to the minute.
Final Thoughts
So you’re really looking at your planning through how you’re going to use snippets, to think about what’s the lifecycle of the information, where is it coming from, who can help keep it up, you know, keep it current. And this is kind of my, you know, like sales pitch for snippets is that they are one of the undiscovered gems in your Pardot sales resource.
With a few prerequisites and planning you can drive engagement with specific, accurate details that are maintained by stakeholders throughout your organization. Further, through partnering with your admin and learning to utilize Flow, you can power snippets from other objects, standard and custom, within your orgs.
Snippets can set your product team free from chasing down and verifying details managed by others without sacrificing email and landing pages that are anchored with information that drives outcomes. The use case for snippets in its simplest forms is just being able to park a detail on a snippet and be able to use it in every asset on the campaign. If that’s all you do with it, it is definitely worth looking into and using in your organization.
But if you can step back and consider the ownership and shared responsibility for that, I think you can get a lot more out of your marketing team with a lot less resources, which I think we’re all trying to do this year. But if we face it, as marketing, we’re always trying to do that.
