Speaker 0: Hi everyone. Welcome to ParDreamin’. My name is Connor Fitzpatrick. I’m going to be moderating today’s session. I would like to introduce our speaker today, uh, Kate Lessard, and she’s going to be presenting on Not Just for Customers: Internal Email Campaigns. Kate began her Salesforce journey in the nonprofit world and fell in love with the platform. Her career then took a, uh, turn into sales operations where she was able to hone her analytical and leadership skills. She’s now a Project Manager at Arcus, and she gets to spend her days customizing Salesforce for her clients. Her favorite part of her job is finding creative solutions for a plethora of use cases and improving that user interface to make sales teams more productive. Kate stays active in the Salesforce community as a trailblazer mentor, a Salesforce certification subject matter expert, and is a co-leader of the Portland Women in Tech Community Group. Outside of the cloud, uh, Kate also teaches yoga and enjoys spending her time with her husband’s her husband and her three dogs. Um, welcome, Kate. We’re so excited to have you, and I will turn the session over to you.

Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Connor. It sounded like you said I enjoyed spending time with my husband, so I just want to clarify. There’s only one of those. Yes. Awesome. Let’s see. Are you all able to see my screen now? Alright. Perfect. Um, hi, everyone. Welcome to Not Just for Customers, Pardot for Internal Email Campaigns. Um, you just had a little bit of an introduction to me, but, um, my name is Kate Lessard. I’m an engagement manager and part of the marketing practice at ARCUS, and I hold seven Salesforce certifications and have a long history of working with marketing and sales specifically, um, focusing in on the sales operation space. So one of my greatest passions is finding alignment across different departments and using Salesforce and marketing technology to drive efficiencies internally, um, for my internal team. So although they do it so well, um, Salesforce and Pardot aren’t solely meant to drive revenue and bring in new business. Um, this technology can be leveraged for so many different use cases, including internal use cases, um, two, which results in a better user experience and happy employees. So this session is an extension of my session from last year. So if you were a part of that, welcome back. Um, last year, we dove into a specific use case of leveraging Pardot for an internal onboarding or training campaign for sales users. Um, in addition to my experience in marketing and sales ops, I also do a lot of, um, technology trainings and have experience doing curriculum development as well. Um, our use case last year walked through the journey of a new sales rep’s training step by step. So we went through the individual emails that they received, the, uh, training curriculum that they received, explored how they went through the email campaign, how they received invitations to participate in training, and then built up a personal training library within their inbox. Um, that personal training library included things like Trailhead modules, um, email content, videos that we had put together, and then also links to step-by-step tutorials that were directly in Salesforce that they could click and follow along as they went through their training process. Um, during that session, we also brainstormed some other possible internal email campaign use cases, and that’s really what’s driving our session today and what I wanted to come back to. This year, we’re focusing a little bit more on the actual strategy, um, and less on how to actually set up your email campaign. So we’ll talk about some of these different ideas that we whiteboarded last year together, how you can leverage them in your own organization, and we’ll dive into how to make email campaigns effective for your internal organization by building partnerships with different departments and driving value for your team and for Pardot as a whole. Please switch slides. Alright. So tight agenda. We have about twenty minutes together today, um, and I want to make sure that we have a good amount of time for Q&A at the end of the session. So if you do have any questions that come up throughout the session as I’m speaking, please feel free to enter them into the chat, um, or the Q&A box. Don’t feel disheartened if I don’t answer them right away. I promise you we’ll come back to them and go through them all, um, and make sure that we have five minutes to do that at the end of the session. But today, we’re going to cover, um, an introduction to internal marketing, finding internal partners and creating your strategy, uh, and launching internal email campaigns. So that being said, let’s dive in. So last year, we talked about using an email campaign to onboard new employees. And that left the question, what else can Pardot do? What else can you do with your internal email campaigns? Internal marketing is most likely a term that you’ve heard, um, and it’s also probably something that you’ve seen in action at your own organization in some capacity. To put a box around the term internal marketing, though, um, it is the promotion of internal company information, brand, values, and services to the organization’s employees. So it’s something that has been on the rise for some time, and throughout the pandemic, I’ve seen increased internal marketing use cases. These increased internal marketing strategies are taking place across many different organizations for the simple reason that internal marketing promotes happy and educated employees, and that has made a vast improvement in the engagement levels of employees, which is really important. A lot of internal marketing is focused on brand advocacy with the theory that these happy and educated employees are more likely to share their employee experience and really become the face of selling the business that their organization represents. So that’s one use for internal marketing email campaign. But, um, I want to dive in and focus on some others that truly focus on the employee’s experience at work and with the culture of your organization. So, um, I’m going to highlight some of the examples that we came up with last year. We’ll dive into a few of these. Um, a lot of different examples that are effective email campaigns really come from human resources. Um, there’s tons of examples where an internal email campaign could really benefit your HR department, and some examples of that would include things like education about company wellness initiatives. Um, so you could use an email campaign to discuss the different initiatives that your company provides. Answer questions like, what are the perks? Where can you find out more? Are there different workshops or training sessions that you can attend? Another really biggie is open enrollment, which stems from the human resources department. Um, this is something that every company goes through on an annual basis, so it’s something that you can even reuse year over year. And it tends to be one of those things that employees have a lot of questions surrounding this process. And it really isn’t the same year over year, even though you have kind of a a general template of how it’s going to go. Some of the questions that you’re trying to answer are, what are the deadlines? When can employees learn more and have a forum to ask questions? And what resources can you share? So this is a really effective use of an internal email campaign that I’ve seen because it has a clear start and end date. Once employees enroll, they can drop out of the campaign and stop getting reminders. And then you can revise the campaign year over year using this as a template, um, as you go through future open enrollment timeframes, amending your content, um, to new offerings and to updates for the next year, um, that you make to the services that you provide your employees. Another great thing or use for an internal email campaign would be credentialing and training. A lot of different industries have certain credentialing requirements. Obviously, we are Salesforce professionals, and that’s something that we personally experience. Um, so using Pardot to to help drive action to your LMS by create creating reminders for trainings and credentialing requirements can be really helpful. You can share things like assessment dates and what your employees need to know prior to signing up for taking assessments, um, and any type of industry assessment information that you can see. Slide issues. I think we’re doing okay. Let me double check on what that looks like. Thanks, Connor. Okay. Good. No. We’re okay. I’m just talking to you right now. Um, another option or a great use of a internal email campaign is holidays, events, webinars, contests, and, uh, general fun. So treat your employees like you would treat your customers when you’re inviting them to an event or a celebration. Um, you can use these types of internal events as an opportunity for brand advocacy and culture building amongst your staff. Um, so do things like send out information leading up to your team events, including timelines, any potential contest that you’re hosting, or activities that you’ll have available. And then after an event, share any spirit winners. Like, if you have a best Halloween costume, share photos from the event. This is a great way to increase morale and employee participation. Let’s get to the next. Alright. So how do you start doing this? What is kind of the strategy behind this? Um, when you start building an internal marketing plan, I recommend starting small. Um, build partnerships in areas where you already see need or can provide a vision. Um, I already alluded to it, but, um, a great place to start is with your human resources department or if you have an internal learning curriculum development or training team. It has been my personal experience that once you demonstrate the power or the success of a single email campaign, um, other departments are going to just start seeking out your assistance, and it’s going to be really easy to continue to build these partnerships and continue to leverage this across the board for your internal teams. With the sales team training, that campaign that we discussed last year, once it launched and other teams had found out what we were doing, some of them by experiencing themselves going through the training and telling their managers, some by other managers just hearing about it and reaching out to us. This is what opens the doors to a number of different ideas from department leads. Um, we started getting regularly approached with plans for training specifically and other needs that people wanted to communicate to their teams. So the best part was that these ideas, especially the ones focused around training, were really easy to move forward on since we had essentially created a template of what this would look like with a single training. We just had to amend the content and the touch points. So starting small is going to expand and, um, create exponential growth for you as other people hear and see what you’re doing and want to experience that and put that forward for their own team. Another way to identify your internal partners if you aren’t sure where to get started is simply by paying attention to the goings on at your organization. So start by keeping an eye on who is regularly sending out all staff emails and what that content might be related to. Um, identify if there are any themes that you could help automate, and keep an eye on the frequency of communication that you’re seeing. If there are any type of follow-ups or calls to action, That’s going to help visualize and be able to, um, put together a plan and share what you could possibly do with a potential partner. Pay attention to the types of internal events that your company hosts, whether it’s holiday parties, trivia nights, all staff town hall meetings, regular workshops or webinars. Um, the sky is the limit, basically. And most likely, you already have a template of how you would create an email campaign for these types of events if you were marketing to your customers. So you really just need to shift your audience to focus on employees rather than customers. And then think if there’s anything that you regularly need to register for. This might also include things like workshops, credentials, open enrollments, things that have deadlines you might want regular reminders for. Leverage the ability to track these interactions within Pardot and send reminders automatically. And then annual employee events are another great thing to keep in mind, things like employee picnics or baseball games. Although, if we’re being honest lately, I feel like it’s more Zoom holiday parties or Zoom happy hours, um, that are a little bit more frequently happening. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a great use of an internal email campaign. Alright. Start with your stakeholders. Another great starting point is with people that already are stakeholders. Um, who is a proponent of Pardot and your marketing efforts at your organization? Reward their support by automating something for their internal team. They will sing your praises and share success even more than they already do, and that might, again, bring in other internal partners and stakeholders. So you’re essentially building a chain of stakeholders by providing success to individual teams. So reach out to your stakeholders, um, get insight into what they are working on that could use an automation overhaul. A lot of times, training is a really good example, and then some of the other examples that we’ve discussed. Um, you can do the same type of research that we discussed on the last slide going into these conversations with a proposal. Um, maybe even an idea of what something might look like. Um, coming in and saying something like, I know that $x$ has been a problem for your team. And if we put this into a multi-step email campaign, we can do things like monitor activity and provide frequent reminders to your team to complete this process, whatever it might be. Um, if you continue to make your stakeholders’ lives easier and innovate for their individual teams, they will continue to support Pardot and sing your praises. Um, if you haven’t yet identified your stakeholders, think about maybe sending out a survey to take a pulse of your visibility across the organization and where your support lies. This will most likely highlight some people that you’re already aware of, but it can also bring new stakeholders to your attention. I’ll keep saying it, but human resources and internal training teams often have insight into this as well. I feel like they’re just the gatekeepers for all of this. Even if you don’t they don’t know of a specific team that might be able to leverage what you’re offering, um, they do typically have a sense of what departments need assistance reducing friction and manual work, um, and that’s a really great starting place for you to come in, gather requirements, and see if you can make their lives easier with some Pardot automation in the form of an internal email campaign. HR is a common starting point, um, for lots of different types of concerns. So they tend to be the gatekeepers, um, in all different areas of your business. Alright. For any consultants in the session, um, this will be second nature, but I recommend treating any of your stakeholder meetings, um, like you would treat a requirements call. Come prepared with suggestions and lots of different questions to gauge the content need and the desired end goal that you’re working towards. I like to always think about working backwards. What are we working towards? What does this ideal solution look like? And then how do we get there? What are the steps that we take? Be prepared to listen to what they’re struggling with, and try to get a big picture sense of what an email campaign could do to fill some of those gaps. Keep in mind that you’re there to listen and not to solution on the spot, which is a really big challenge sometimes. And the more that you can take in regarding the need and the ideal end scenario, the better result that you’ll be able to create in the long run. Um, I would also advise to make sure you get an accurate timeline. A lot of email campaigns are event or time of year specific, so it’s important to identify what you’re able to do and when. And if it’s something that isn’t feasible this time, maybe you have a sense and can get it on the calendar so that the next time around that this event happens that you’re prepared and that you know what you’re working towards. Documentation is also key. Document everything that you hear so that you can create a user story of how to address the concerns and return it with a visual or a story map of your email campaign. I feel like that is key for so many people that are visual learners and they need to really see what that flow is going to look like to envision its success. So having a wireframe or a flowchart with different responses based on interactions Helps to get the creative juices flowing, um, and lock in that ideal end result that’s going to be best for the team. This also provides a clear cut map for you to create the automation within Pardot once you’ve worked through the details and are ready to start building out your automation. Leverage these partners that you’ve built. Um, use them to test the automation once it’s ready and provide feedback on the experience. They will understand their teams and what their teams are looking for and might be able to foresee any type of reaction or struggle that the users might have after go live. So having that information beforehand and being prepared for how a user is going to react is hugely valuable. Launch your vision. Whatever you decide to launch for your first email campaign, think through the steps and touch points. Where are you tracking interactions? What content do you want to share? What is the timing of your emails? I find it helpful to work backwards. So with an example like open enrollment, maybe we start with the last day to register. The day before that, we want a reminder that tomorrow is the last day. And what steps come prior to that? I have a couple proposed, um, out here on the list. Different emails with content, um, to keep people’s interest and keep them moving in in the open enrollment process. Any types of informational sessions that you’re offering or forums where you might answer questions, things that they employees might register for. And then obviously a big all-staff launch at the beginning of open enrollment. Yay. It’s open enrollment. Let’s have a pep rally and get get informed and, um, move towards this end goal of getting everyone signed up for their benefits. So I’d like to close with a 2020 blog post by Todd Koonsman that was called Internal Marketing, Why Your Company Should Prioritize It. Uh, and this quote states, as you can see on the screen, that now more than ever, getting employees involved in the marketing and sales process will greatly benefit the results of your overall business. We’re all marketers here, and we understand the value of a nurture campaign. So I like to think of internal marketing as a way to nurture your employees with the end goal of making them happy, educated, and engaged. So with that, I will go ahead and open up, um, and take a look at the questions that we have coming in. Sorry, guys. I didn’t realize the slides weren’t updating. So, hopefully, we ended in the right spot there. Any other questions? Let’s see if I can scroll down a little bit. Connor, am I missing any?

Speaker 0: I don’t think so. There can be a slight delay from when people type to when it shows up in the chat bar. So we will just give people, uh, everyone in the call here a few moments to just type in any questions that they might have or thoughts on

Speaker 1: the chat. Perfect. Well, um, as people are hopefully typing and asking questions, um, I love to talk about this type of stuff, internal email campaigns. It’s just such a funny niche, but it is something that I’ve seen such success with at different organizations that I’ve either worked with or that I have worked for. Um, so if you ever think of anything that maybe you don’t get into the questions today, please do feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I am Salesforce Kate, K-A-T-E. Um, and I’m always happy to talk through this, to brainstorm, to whiteboard, to think of other ideas. We had a ton of, um, um, different ideas that we couldn’t even touch on half of the ones that we whiteboarded last year in the session. Awesome. Thank you everyone for your your nice comments. I’ll stay on for a bit if any questions do come up. I appreciate you being here.

Speaker 0: Lots of thank you. So that’s great. Yeah. I would say then if you do have any questions for Kate, um, feel free to reach out to her. I love that you’re so open, Kate, to to taking any any questions and feedback. Um, everyone, thank you so much for attending the presentation today. Thank you, Kate, for for joining us again this year for ParDreamin. Um, We hope to see you again next year, all of you, and, uh, have a great rest of your week. We’ll hopefully see you in some more in some more sessions this week.

Speaker 1: K.

Speaker 0: Thank you. Take care.

Speaker 1: Bye.