Speaker 0: Hey, ParDreamin. Uh, for those of us joining us for the first time, welcome. We are excited for you to be here joining us in on the ParDreamin conference. My name is Kate Godley. I am with Sercante, and I’m here to introduce Andy Theimer while he discusses how to create real content personalization in Pardot. Welcome, Andy.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Kate. Welcome, everyone. Uh, my name is Andy. I’m the founder and CEO of Feed Otter, and I’m here today to talk a little bit about how to, um, personalize content in the Pardot realm. As a longtime, uh, proponent of content marketing and SEO and a longtime marketing automation user, one of the constant topics that I’ve struggled with as a marketer, and I’ve also worked with a number of, uh, uh, different employees at times and other folks in our consulting engagements, uh, is finding the best way to deliver content to customers via emails and Pardot. And one of the most common formats of those emails are, of course, blog posts that often live on a website. But we also, today, talk about videos, podcasts, uh, white papers, case studies, and lots of other web-born content. Pardot does not have a native way to bring those items from a website into a Pardot email. And so there’s often a lot of questions around how best to deliver personalized content to Pardot prospects via email. And that’s what I’m gonna run through today. Some of the questions that I hear on a regular basis and probably the best answers and kind of the state of, uh, uh, trying to deliver personalized content via Pardot emails. We’re not gonna be talking about first and last merge codes. Uh, Pardot and Salesforce do a great job of listing out all the tokens that are available. What we are going to talk about is we’re gonna talk about collecting preferences from your customers, um, and then figuring out how best to deliver content or create email content that can match up with those particular prospects’ preferences. So, uh, personalization, again, consists of the prospects and subscribers telling you what content they would like to receive and marketers honoring those selections. I’ve known more than a few marketers in my time that have done a great job of collecting preferences. But when it comes time to, uh, sending the emails that respect those preferences, uh, that is often overlooked, and the reason we will get to in a few moments. Why should you be personalizing content? You know, personalization was all the rage, uh, on every blog post headline in the space a few years back. Um, the buzz, I will say, has died down a little bit. Personalization is often relegated in the B2C world and not so much in the B2B world. Although just as valuable, uh, personalizing the content in the emails that you’re delivering to your prospects and subscribers, uh, builds a stronger relationship with them. Um, it also produces more click-throughs. Honestly, just emailing your content any way, shape, or form, uh, typically ends up in more website traffic, uh, and has a fairly high click-through rate. But personalizing it to the user’s preferences is even more sticky. The two most popular types of content emails that I’ve seen people attempt to personalize, they typically go in the form of a notification. So, uh, I want to be notified every time there is a new podcast episode, a blog post, uh, you produce new features in your application, or there’s some new piece of content that I wish to receive. And I want those alerts based on my preferences. So, uh, I only want weather alerts for X region, or I only want, um, blog posts if they’re of X category. So notification emails. The second type of email that we see personalization happen in is a newsletter. So a larger email that has multiple sections. You can see this great example here, uh, where there’s, uh, I think the actual newsletter has around seven sections, all different categories of content. And those sections will potentially show different content based on who receives the newsletter. Um, it can be done. So what are our options today in Pardot for email notifications? Uh, this is a quote from a gentleman that I received in my inbox several months ago, uh, who wanted to do basic personalization of those email notifications. And what can be done to do that with Pardot today? Well, uh, Pardot has a couple of tools that are going to help us with the first part of that, which is collecting the preference. Uh, we’re going to use the familiar Pardot lists and preference centers to grab, uh, and give the user a way to tell us what their preferences are. So, um, it’s always best to use the Pardot preference center merge tokens, uh, when available. Uh, the primary reason is is that Pardot does require either an unsubscribe or an official preference center token to appear in all of your emails. So, um, you can use and do some fancy things with, uh, external landing pages, but we typically recommend using actual preference center pages, which are somewhat limited and list memberships have to be there. So, uh, very basic subscription center. We here we have three options to collect the user’s preferences. Do they wanna learn about a specific topic? And we’re gonna try and send them only notifications relevant to those topics. What does the rest of the process look like for personalizing a notification? So when a new content item is published, we wanna create a new email. Uh, we want to place that new piece of content in the email, and then we want to send that email to the list that match, uh, the preference selection on our natively. The best way to do that, um, and the best way to do that if you’re publishing only one or two items per month is to create the email manually. And the best way to streamline that process is to create an email template that makes use of the Pardot region tags. Uh, so here’s an example email. This email, um, this Pardot template is actually going out in the goodie bag, uh, for the the digital swag bag, there it is, of, uh, the conference. Uh, we also have it available on our website in a blog post on this topic. But in that template, we make use of that Pardot region to make sending out and building this multiple times very quick and easy. Uh, we set up an email that allows us to change the title of the episode, featured image for the podcast, and also the title and the link, and keep everything else on rails so that we can’t break anything else in the template that helps us speed up testing and get that out the door. So, um, here’s a great way to speed up doing this manually. You can focus on pasting in three or four fields that change and not have to worry about reconstructing the entire structure of an email every time. What other options could we use to help make the content more personalized? Well, unfortunately, Pardot’s dynamic content and the new HML tokens aren’t going to help us here. Um, we’re sending out a single piece of content, so the trigger is not going to having multiple variations isn’t going to matter here. We wanna just send one piece of content to a particular list. Um, the engagement studio also is not going to help us. It does not have any tools built in for integrating a content feed or updating a content feed, um, in any kind of automated way. So, uh, the state of sending personalized notifications with Pardot, collecting the data on preference center, and having a really dialed-on-rails Pardot email template that allows you to makes it easy to change those three or four fields that are gonna change every time there’s new content. Um, you can then quickly go in, create that list email, and send that email to the particular preference list. This is manageable until you get above five or six preferences. Most of the time, um, it becomes pretty hard to manage that, uh, at least with a single operator once you get above four or five different categories of preferences. So, um, there are some limitations to that. It just, uh, requires a larger team or a lot more manual work. The other personalized content type that we hear about very often are newsletters. And Pardot presents some really great options in this front, especially with the, um, new implementation of HML tokens and conditionals that were added a couple years back. I’ve personally seen a consulting company do a really amazing job for a huge financial company, uh, sending out personalized content, uh, using these tokens, and it’s it’s just incredible to see how personalized these emails can actually become. Uh, the goal, of course, is to give each subscriber something a little different. On the left, Marketo Tom gets content related to Marketo, and Pardot Melissa gets content related to Pardot. It’s one email send, and the content changes based on the end subscriber, which is the ideal way to do this. Um, tools we have available in the Pardot tool belt, we have dynamic content. We have Pardot custom fields that are gonna help us capture some preferences. In this case, we have automation rules. We have lists and then our familiar preference center and landing page forms. Just like our first personalization, we’re gonna use the preference centers to capture, uh, preferences. The simplest way to do this, again, is going to keep it list-based. So by directly putting people in the lists, um, sometimes that’s not always so obvious, but brainstorming, spending a few minutes figuring out how to create a list and segmentation structure that can be used in the preference center, um, is a really good way to keep things simple and keep people into, uh, category-based segmentations when it comes to emailing these, uh, newsletters. The newsletters themselves, uh, you can use the Pardot HML tokens. They are our preference to use. You can build an email. It’s a more advanced email and does require coding knowledge, um, but you can wrap content with a particular token that will say, if the prospect has a certain value, show this section or don’t show this section. So what you would do is you construct a giant email full of all of your content that has different blocks wrapped with these preference tags. And then as the email is delivered, Pardot will show or hide the various content based on the user’s custom field value. Um, I did allude to that. It does require a custom field. So, uh, both dynamic content in Pardot and the HML tokens require you to create a number of custom fields to record the preference values. So, um, in this case, you would create a custom field for Pardot, for Marketo, for Feed Otter, for the three types of content. Uh, you would then need to create some automation rules that are going to connect the list selection on your preference center to those custom fields. So in this case, if a prospect becomes a member of Pardot content, then we wanna change the custom field play, um, of Pardot blog to true. So, um, that allows you to use dynamic content in Pardot and also the HML, uh, with the preference center options. So you would need to create an automation rule for each one of those different preferences, and you would actually need to create, uh, another set of automation rules to update the field when a user leaves the prospect list as well. So if you have three preferences like we have on our preference center, you would end up with three custom fields and six automation rules to manage the field updates necessary to show and hide conditional blocks in an email that looks like this. Um, it’s a lot of back-end work, but the result is really great when you see it happen. Using dynamic content versus the HML tokens, that’s a little bit more of a user preference. We’ve seen both used. Um, I think the preferred approach is sometimes the HML. At this point, if you’re going down this road of personalization, you’re probably pretty technical or have pretty technical resources or have a technical consulting person on your, uh, team that is going to be able to create that email, lay out the content, and add those conditionals quickly and easily. Dynamic content is great too. The limitation there is in the styling of things. Um, you can’t, uh, control how the content is going to look uh, quite as well as you can using the HML approach. So that’s why most of the folks I’ve seen that have personalized the newsletter end up going with the HML tokens because it does allow you more flexibility in personalize or, excuse me, designing the email and displaying in a certain way. So where does that leave us when you want a personalized newsletter? Um, we capture tokens or excuse me. We capture the preferences of the preference center. We need one list for each preference. We need one custom field for each preference, and then we actually need two automation rules for each preference. One to operate when people join the list and one when people leave the list to update those custom fields. And, again, the custom fields are necessary in order to flag or show and hide the content no matter whether you’re using HML tokens or the dynamic content feature built into Pardot. Um, a couple of gotchas that, uh, you have to be aware of when using these personalization options, you always need to have some default content. Uh, there always has to be a default fallback so that, um, somebody might get the email that does not have a preference, and there has to be something for them to see. Oftentimes, we see people put in, uh, an option to visit the blog and read the content or subscribe, um, or maybe a call to action or button that says select your preferences to get content in the email if they somehow miss that step during sign up. Um, as we talked about earlier, all these options still require a human to place the content, the image, the title, the description, and build that email manually. So if you want to personalize an email, whether you’re using notifications or you’re building a newsletter, it does take time. Um, and that’s really the question that you want to ask yourself if you’re interested in personalizing content, uh, to your customers and prospects is, is it gonna be worth it for your particular use case? Because it does take time. Uh, Pardot actually does this better than most. Believe it or not, most of the options I’m talking about aren’t available in HubSpot or in Marketo. Um, the other systems just don’t let you even come close to doing what you can do with the HML tokens and the dynamic content. Um, it’s not perfect by any means, but it is better than most systems, and we love that about Pardot. Um, if you’re daring and adventurous, you can do some other fun things to, um, simplify preference collection. Here’s an example, uh, where I have embedded a custom form into a preference center page layout template. Um, on the top, I have the basic subscriptions where people opt into blog updates and newsletter or podcast episodes. On the bottom, I can capture their interests, uh, and those are mapping directly to custom fields. So, uh, you can then use the intersection of those lists and custom fields, uh, in your personalization efforts as well. So, that’s an interesting trick that we were able to pull off recently for a customer. Um, so, hopefully, that was helpful in telling you a little bit about what options are available for truly personalizing your content with Pardot these days. Feed Otter, my company does allow you to pull content automatically from your blog or podcast hosting platform and build the emails automatically. Uh, so if you want to build very complex personalized emails, um, it does cut down some of the legwork, uh, in terms of that where it will build the email and put all the content into place for you, um, so that you can skip all the steps of composing that email that sometimes take a lot of time. Personalization is always very desired. It’s great to see it happen in the B2B space, but it does still require a good deal of effort to get that into the email. Um, and I hope this has helped kinda clear up clear up some of the best ways and the options that you as a Pardot user have, uh, if you want to go down that road. So thank you very much.

Speaker 0: Thank you, Andy. This was an excellent [session], and we really appreciate it. It looks like we do have a few time a few minutes left over for questions. So if anyone has any questions, you can go ahead and type those in the chat, and we can see what answers we can get for you. All right. It doesn’t look like we’ve got any questions for you right now, Andy. Uh, so that is going to conclude today’s session. We thank you again for joining us, and we want to give a special shout-out to our sponsors for their support. Without them, ParDreamin’ would not be possible. So make sure to pop into the sponsor booths to learn more about what they all do. Uh, you’ll note Feed Otter is one of our sponsors. Um, you can get points to win some cool prizes by going to those sponsor booths. Uh, continue. So, uh, thank you so much for joining, and we hope you have a great rest of your day.