Speaker 0: Alright. We’re right on time. I’m gonna give it just, like, ten more seconds just for the few people who had to go get that that glass of water. Five more seconds. Alright. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, uh, and good afternoon, good evening. I think we’re past the good morning side of things. Uh, we’re super excited to have you all here with us this afternoon. My name is Jen Henderson, and I’m a senior consultant with Sercante, and I’m gonna be moderating this session today. I have the pleasure of introducing, uh, Dan Komen and Alexea Lerner, both from Laser Fish. And they’re gonna be talking today about engaging customers throughout their life cycle with Engagement Studio. I’m probably the most excited person on this call today. So without further ado, I will pass it over to them.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Jen. Hello, Marjorie. And thank you for joining our our session today, engaging customers throughout their life cycle with engagement studio. Uh, my name is Dan Komen. I’m the director of demand generation at Laserfiche. We’re an enterprise SAS technology company. Uh, I am joined by my colleague, Alexea Lerner. Alexea is our senior manager of marketing operations. You’ll hear a lot from her today. She’s our our Pardot guru, uh, at Laserfiche. And, uh, we’re we’re both Pardot consultant certified, so we really know our way around the the platform. And we’re excited to talk really about how we, as an enterprise software company, uh, nurture, educate, uh, and engage with customers throughout their life cycle using engaging the studio. So we’re excited to, uh, to delve into that further here today. So taking a look at the agenda for today, we’re gonna really the three key focus areas that we’re gonna cover are, uh, automating lead nurturing in engagement studio, automating customer onboarding, and automating review generation campaigns from a b to b perspective. So first first topic area, I wanna start with, uh, automating lead nurturing and engagement studio. This is kind of the the meat of the discussion where we really have the most things going on, I think, through engagement studio that we’re gonna dive into. Um, so really just to kind of frame the conversation, some of the challenges that led us to lead nurturing are we have a fairly complicated product that can do a lot. You know, buyers aren’t always aware of the different solutions that we provide as an enterprise technology. And to kind of support that point, uh, this architecture diagram here on the right, you can see all these different components of what our software does. We have intelligent data capture where you can capture structured and unstructured content into your system in the center. You’ll see document management represented where we have document management, document centralization. Uh We offer process automation uh, integrations with, you know, we have purpose built integrations with different line of business applications. We have um, integration platform as a service where you can get all these integrations, uh, connect to all these different platforms as part of your enterprise content management system. So as you can see, we have this rich ecosystem of different, uh, capabilities as part of our product, and we really need a way to communicate those to customers. And our our product serves so many different industries, so many different use cases. So that was one of the challenges that kind of led us toward lead nurturing. And so where lead nurturing comes in, it really shows buyers how our product solves those problems across across different industries, different use cases that we serve. Um, and we really launched engagement studios with different product and industry branches as we call them. So we can really serve the right content to the right audience at the right time, uh, throughout their journey. And so with that, I’ll kick it off to Alexia to kinda talk about how this is structured, uh, in engagement studio.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So hi, everyone. Here you can see our data diagram, uh, something that we’ve kind of drawn out, uh, prior to building in Pardot. So our process for really kicking off this project first was to take a step back from Pardot itself and categorize all of our content into these different product categories or industry categories, which made it super easy to design email content as well as figure out which landing pages should connect to which branches, uh, and I highly recommend that. And then we actually drew this out on a whiteboard originally. I still have the, uh, pictures on my phone from the conference room when we did, uh, and really thought through how the data should flow before we ever started building in Pardot, and that gives you a road map that makes it super easy to build. And so on this next slide, we’ll see up at the top kind of the breakdown of the different parts of this. Up at the top here, we have the three different data sources that feed into our nurturing program. On the left, you would, uh, you have here the form handlers and the Pardot forms, which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. Um, and we use completion actions on these to tag prospects as they’re coming into the system, which feeds into this engagement studio. On the right slide, we have or right right side. Sorry. We have our list imports, which we do tons of third party engagements, trade shows. We’re doing imports all the time. And when we’re importing, we build these into lists and tag those as well to feed into the program. On this next slide, you’ll see in the middle, we do some data filtering to make sure we’re targeting the right audience. Um, and I’ll get into that in a future slide. On this next one, you’ll see down at the bottom here where, uh, these are the actual branches where the emails are being sent, and there’s enrollment lists at the start of each branch that we’re comparing the prospect against to make sure we’re sending them down to the right content. So on this next slide here, you’ll see what it actually looks like in Pardot. It’s a lot and, uh, I I don’t wanna overwhelm anyone. It does go from right to left, which takes a little bit of getting used to to read, um, but it does end up looking like a real monster. Um, and you can see each of these individual branches are actually kind of clear to to see here, uh, for each of those pieces of the flow. So on this next slide, we’ll start breaking it down piece by piece. Um, so that that first one where we started off, um, so all of those tags are feeding into that start node at the very top. We do have some suppression list there, but our Pardot instance for our business holds several databases. So we have customers, leads, resellers, they’re all in the same Pardot database. So we’re constantly double, triple checking to make sure we’re getting the right audience no matter how we’re building lists. So we do have a couple of data checks here to make sure we’re pulling out those customers that we don’t want to send down nurturing, and we love complex rules. When we originally built this several years ago, those were not a thing. So there were about 10 more different data checks here. Now you can combine them all into complex rules, which keeps it a lot cleaner, makes it a lot easier to manage, and is visually just a lot more appealing. Um, and so we do use that tag to bring people in and we remove it when they leave. Leave. This next section is where we start topic checking. So those same landing pages that enroll people into the flow are also on some dynamic lists for each of the product topics. We’re checking to make sure that they’re on that list. We’re also checking for a completed tag. So every time someone goes down the flow and completes the content, they get tagged as having completed it. This allows our prospects to be able to come back and experience a different product nurturing without going down that flow. And this is important in our business because someone may come download a piece of document management, uh, asset that we have, and three months later, be interested in integrations and fill out a completely different form as they’re going through the long business cycle that b two b companies have. Um, and so it will check against each of these dynamic lists until it finds the one that they belong with. And we love tags. They’re super lightweight and easy to use. Um, and on this last slide, we’ll see here, um, the actual flow itself when they’re getting that tag that they’re in the flow. We like that to be able to monitor who’s in the flow at any time and be able to suppress them out of other emails. Um, and this is where they actually receive the emails. We’re also listening for demos. This was important for our business at the time. It may not be for everyone to listen to see if they’ve requested a demo at any time because we wanna hand them off to sales at that point and stop kind of bombarding them, not bombarding, but sending them emails. Um, and so after every email send, we’re listening for that demo, which is just a dynamic list of our demo pages, and we’ll pull them out if need be. If not, they’ll receive the next email in the chain. And important to remember, well tags are amazing. You need to make sure to remove that enrollment tag upon exit of the program, uh, just to keep everything clean and orderly. And on this next slide, you’ll see one of our email examples, built by our wonderful email marketing manager, Gayleah. Um, and this is kind of the template that we use for all of our email nurturing. On this next slide, you’ll see up at the top, uh, our our logo is really clear. We have a navigation on the right hand side that is kind of driving the leads to some of our popular destinations for them to get information. That demo request is always up there at the top as that’s, uh, kind of our, uh, single thing that we want them to do the most, I would say. Um, but our blog and our webinars are also linked up there, um, because they have great content for people to continue to learn. On this next slide, you’ll see in the middle, we have really succinct, um, body copy. It’s straightforward to the point, links out to another piece of content with that clear button, um, makes it really easy for them to digest. And down at the bottom on this next slide, you’ll see we have that demo banner, uh, always accessible for them to be able to request a demo and, of course, our CAN SPAM compliant footer. Very important.

Speaker 1: And so Alexia wrote she talked about how all of the, um, in the interworkings of the different engagement studios. And now we get into KPIs, really how we judge success of all these, uh, automation programs. So first and foremost, like Alexia talked about demo requests As a b to b, uh, software company, that’s super important, um, key performance indicator for us. How many of these leads are interested enough, engaged enough to want to, uh, interface with sales, to wanna see a personalized demo of laser fish, see the software in action. Uh, so that’s really kind of the chief, uh, KPI metric that we think about. Another one is unique click through rate. You know, how interested is the, uh, the prospect in the content that we’re offering? Are they at what rate are they clicking through? We can compare that across different, uh, destinations that we’re sending our our prospects to, uh, through engagement studio. Unsubscribe rate is another really important one. You know, how much audience fatigue might they be experiencing? It’s also an indicator of how again, how interested they are in the content. And I’ll delve a little bit more into these metrics in the subsequent slide sharing our our benchmarks for them and kinda how we optimize based on those metrics. Um, but in the meantime, I did want to, uh, really float the question to the audience. Really, what KPIs do you use to judge success in your, um, email marketing, marketing automation programs? You know, obviously, that can vary based on your, uh, business model, b to b, b to c. But we’d love to hear in the chat any any KPIs that you use to judge success, whether you wanna share those right now, or we could also, um, comment on those later as we get into our q and a section. We’ll have about ten minutes for q and a, um, at the end of the session.

Speaker 2: It looks like Miranda wrote qualified leads to sales is one of the KPIs they use. Uh, Michelle said form fills, uh, in general is one of the KPIs they use as well. Uh, click through rates from Adrian. Lot of different ways to measure that.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Those are some good ones. MQLs, form fills. Lot lot of a lot of metrics that we look look at as a b to b marketing organization as well. So so thank you for that. Alright. Now I’ll get into really how we, uh, optimize nurturing based on, uh, the different KPIs that I just went through. Sorry to flip around on the slides there. But, really, our approach to optimizing, uh, uh, our email nurturing programs, we meet quarterly, uh, to review those performance metrics that I mentioned. We’ll meet with our copywriter, our part of admin, that’s Alexia, uh, our email marketing manager, Galia. Uh, and we really get together to see what’s working, what’s not, where can we optimize. Uh, one tip I’ll give the audience, many of you may be aware of this as marketers already, but, uh, you definitely wanna ensure that you have that statistical significance before you assess results. You know, our sweet spot is to meet, like I said, quarterly. We don’t as a as a b to b marketing organization, we don’t have I wouldn’t say at least compared to, you know, a b to c marketing organization, we don’t have a massive, you know, email database where we’re we’re pumping in tons of data into our engagement studio. So for us, that sweet spot where we get that statistical significance is on a quarterly basis, but, of course, that can vary based on the business. So delving a little bit deeper into how we optimize our email nurturing based on those KPIs I mentioned. Um, and I’ll kinda I’ll kinda share, you know, what levers we pull for optimization based on what kind of, um, results we’re seeing. So if the open rate is low, we’re gonna test some different subject lines. Obviously, there’s a inherent connection between, uh, the subject line and whether somebody decides to open. That’s really the only thing that they’ll see for the most part. They might see the subject line and the teaser copy, but, really, that subject line is what kinda drives the decision of whether they wanna, uh, open or not. So if that open rate is below our benchmarks, which I’ll share in a subsequent slide, uh, we’re definitely gonna want to, uh, tweak that subject line, see if we can pique the the reader’s interest more. Um, if if click through rate is low, we’re gonna wanna test different body copy. Uh, you know, obviously, that body copy is what the audience is looking at as they decide if they wanna click through, take the next step, um, in that interaction. And then, of course, if the open rate and the click through rate are both low, really, that’s a signal to us that I I you know, we’re gonna wanna try just a different email entirely. Um, both things aren’t working very well. They’re not opening at a high rate. They’re not clicking through at a high rate. Let’s try a different email promoting a different piece of content. A lot of times the content that we’ll promote in our emails are, uh, blog posts, case studies, uh, really emails that can show how our our products and solutions, uh, benefit customers. So, um, again, if that open and click the rate are low, we we kinda take that as a sign that we wanna try something something different as far as different, uh, a different email. And then, of course, we’re always keeping our ear to the ground as to new, uh, market demand, new new trends. Um, our our industry is rapidly changing with AI with, uh, different current events involving data security. And really, we listen for those different, uh, events that the market is interested in to, um, add new branches to our our nurturing programs. So we’re always looking to expand based on what’s going on on in the market. And then we’ll just to share our email marketing benchmarks. This is kind of an amalgamation of our own first party data, the benchmarks that we see, as well as, uh, industry benchmarks for b to b technology. We have about a 21 and a half percent unique open rate for our benchmark, uh, unique click through rate, two and a half percent, uh, delivery rate 99.08%, and then unsubscribe is point one seven percent. So if we ever see, you know, any of our emails kinda dragging below the benchmark, that is, uh, an immediate sign that we wanna make some optimizations. We wanna make some changes. Alright. Now I’m moving into the next section of our presentation today. And we talked about at the top of the funnel how we nurture leads, how we, you know, pique their interest in our in our products in our solutions. Uh, let’s talk about something that happens later in the, uh, the life cycle journey, which is, uh, automating customer onboarding. And why customer onboarding? Why why do we focus here? Why do we put our efforts and resources into that customer onboarding? For one thing, we wanna keep our SaaS product, our software as a service product that’s that’s Laserfiche cloud. Uh, we wanna keep that product sticky with customers. We wanna educate customers on our various features of which we have quite a few as as I mentioned previously. Um, really, when we bring a a new customer on board, we wanna show them how our product can support their, uh, different use cases from a, uh, industry perspective, departmental perspective. As I mentioned, there’s there’s so much that you can do with our products. We really wanna lead our customers in the right direction as far as educating them, uh, you know, nurturing them. We also wanna improve renewal rates with customers as a software as a service company that’s really important to us to improve those renewal rates. Make sure and and lastly, really, in a related sense, make sure we’re improving customer satisfaction that our customers are happy, our customers see the the benefits of the product. And with all that, I’ll hand it off to Alexia to kinda talk about, again, how this is structured in engagement studio.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So here you can see a data diagram for this particular flow. A little bit less complex than the last one, but we’ll still go through it step by step. On this next slide up at the top, you’ll see here, we’ve only got one data source currently for this. Um, we did build it expecting perhaps in the future to have multiple, but we have a form handler that’s embedded in our cloud product. So the first time a user logs in to their cloud account for the product, they do have to agree to the end user license agreement, which also has a few fields, you know, name, phone number, etcetera. And it also has our privacy policy and email opt in, and it’s connected to a form handler that feeds directly into Pardot, and we’ll tag them with that, which enrolls them into this flow. On the next slide, you’ll see that we’re still doing that data filtering that we’re doing before. Um, and on the next slide after that down at the bottom, you’ll see here that’s where the emails are getting sent and they’re getting filtered out of the flow. On this next slide, you’ll see what it actually looks like in the system. Again, much simpler, but still goes from left to or right to left, um, and is is really only one branch currently. Um, we do still use tags to control entry into the program, and they do still need to be removed upon exit. And we are still filtering to keep unwanted Pardot prospects out. Our resellers are also creating cloud instances, signing into cloud products for the first time, multiple times a day even, and so we try to filter them out as well, um, because they don’t need to receive the sequence. We’re also using a Sales Force campaign here at the very, uh, top of the email section. Uh, before the prospect gets any emails, we’re adding them to a Salesforce campaign to track the people who are going through here. And that allows me to go into Salesforce and build dashboards and reports that look at expansions, renewals, ARR, all different kinds of sales related metrics to these accounts.

Speaker 1: So now that Alexia kind of took us through that flow, again, I wanna return back to how we judge success. You know? What are those KPIs? Uh, for one thing, as Alex said, uh, alluded to, we wanna add those customers who went through the customer onboarding flow to a a dedicated Salesforce campaign, which is shown here on the right. And we also wanna report on longevity and ARR of customers who went through the flow. Um, as Alexia alluded to, we wanna compare the control of customers who’ve gone through the flow, uh, to those customers who haven’t gone through the flow. In other words, those customers who are unsubscribed from email, uh, and who who we can’t email. And so we do actually see a a a healthy lift, a healthy improvement for those customers who went through the flow, who got that nurturing, got those tips and best practices on how to, um, to set your laser features up for success, to use laser features success. We see better, uh, better longevity, better a ARR of those customers who did go through the flow. Um, so it’s kind of a comparative look, uh, in this case of, again, the control of those who didn’t go through the flow with those who did. And we’ll also compare the performance benchmark benchmarks to, uh, the benchmarks I mentioned before for those email specific metrics, click through rate, open rate, unsubscribe rate, etcetera. So we’re kinda looking at, you know, the the pipeline benefits, uh, in terms of longevity and ARR as well as those email specific, um, key performance indicators. And then I wanted to to float the question to the audience. So we I mentioned we we look at, you know, longevity and ARR to measure success for our flow. But, uh, you know, with so many Salesforce marketers in the room today, I wanted to just float the question. Is any do any audience members have a formula, uh, like a Salesforce report formula for, uh, customer lifetime value? That’s something that we haven’t come upon just yet. And, you know, obviously, as a b to b marketing organization, that’s a that’s an important metric to track, and we wanna see if there maybe if there’s any help articles or any formulas that you could share from a Salesforce report perspective, uh, on customer lifetime value. Um, I know that might take a minute for someone to to dig up the right resources there. But if you, uh, if you could share that in the chat, we’d love to, uh, get that information and then perhaps discuss it a little bit as we get into the, uh, the q and a section. Alright. So we talked about it, you know, at the top of the funnel how we’re nurturing customers, peaking their interest in our products and solutions. We talked about customer onboarding, how we’re nurturing and educating our new customers and how to best use our product. Uh, now I wanna move a little bit later in the customer journey and talk about really an, uh, customer advocacy effort and how we automate review generation campaigns from a from a b to b, uh, technology perspective. So first of all, why review campaigns? Why are those important to us? Well, for one thing and and other b to b marketers that they can attest to this, Reviews are crucial to the b two b tech buying process. You know, we, as a SaaS company, need to have quality reviews, uh, and a high quantity of reviews to win deals. Um, I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m looking for a new, uh, product within our marketing tech stack, uh, ABM marketing automation, AB testing, whatever that is, uh, g two for me is one of the first places I go. I’ll look at I’ll compare, you know, the different vendors out there. Um, there’s there’s different customer satisfaction ratings for different areas, whether that’s ease of use, ease of implementation, um, the feature set. I’m looking at all of that review data to help make my decisions. And we’d similarly, we see a lot of, uh, customers and prospective customers. Go to g two, go to Gartner peer insights, Capterra to look at all of this different review data. And it’s really a key a key place for to support, uh, the decision making process from a software selection standpoint. So it’s really important that we have a presence within these review platforms. And really for us, as we think about automating review campaigns and asking for reviews from the right audiences, we really need to target those champion customers to improve, uh, conversion, to improve the rate at which they take us up on leaving us a a a review, leaving us a five star review is what we prefer. And so we actually use NPS, uh, net promoter score nines and tens to, um, target those customer champions. And for those who don’t know what it is, I’ll give a quick background, but, um, net NPS net promoter score, it is a survey of your customer health metrics. It’s a question that comes up as a prompt within your product where you’ll ask a customer, how are how likely are you to recommend a friend or colleague to laser feature in our case? Uh, and they’ll they’ll give you a score based on one to 10 of how likely they are to recommend your product. And, you know, there’s the highest scores are considered your promoters. Um, middle of the road scores are considered your, uh, neutrals. And then those lower scores are considered detractors. People that those are your at risk customers. You’re less, uh, happy customers. So for the purposes of this review automation campaign, we’re really focusing on those nines and tens. We get a lot of nines and tens from happy customers and we wanna focus on them as far as having them advocate the business and, um, you know, really share a positive review for laser speech. So that’s kinda how we think about how we target the, uh, customer champions as part of this campaign. And then I’ll I’ll again, I’ll hand it off to Alexia to talk about really how it’s structured in engagement studio.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So here’s the we’ve got our data diagram for this particular flow. And on this next slide, we’ll start up up at the top, uh, which is where our data is coming in from Salesforce related to, uh, NPS. So we use a platform called Delighted for our NPS currently, and Delighted integrates directly with our Salesforce instance. And that sends over the score that we got, any comments we received as well as the date that it happened. And so all of that is getting synced over to Pardot, of course, as well. And so we’re sending that into, um, the engagement studio here. Um, down below that on the slide after that, we’ve got our data filtering. Um, we’re still filtering out people that we don’t want to receive things, and we’re also doing a decision point here. So we target two different platforms, Gartner Pure Insights and g two. Gartner Pure Insights has some restrictions around industry, job level, uh, etcetera, around who can submit a review. So using that criteria, we’ll send the right people to the Gartner side, which is on the right. Anyone else gets sent over to g two because they don’t have restrictions like that. On this next slide, you’ll see what the actual email section of the branch looks like, and it’s mirrored exactly the same for both. Um, and so they’ll receive emails, and we’re also doing a listening step in there that I will get into on the next slide, um, and then they get filtered out of the program. On this next slide, we’ll see what it actually looks like in Pardot. Um, so it’s it’s not too complex of a flow. It does have those two branches there. We’re still using tags for the entry and upon exit. Um, and you’ll see there in the middle, there’s a little green node. That’s a listening step. So we send them the first email in the sequence, and then we’re listening for a click on the review link. We don’t have a full feedback loop with the review sites to know when someone’s actually submitted a review. So the best we can do is listen for a click on that link. And if they don’t click, we’ll send them a follow-up email. If they do, we’ll filter them out. This is just more to personalize the flow, make sure our customers don’t feel like we’re sending them emails unnecessarily when they already took an action or could be confused or really feel like they’re getting an automated drip. We wanna make sure that we’re paying attention to the actions they’re taking.

Speaker 1: So then as a question for the audience, you know, we talked about kinda how we use NPS to proactively identify who are those champion customers that we can bring into these email sequences. But wanted to post the question to the audience, what data points do you use to identify your champion customers? And as is the case with the previous question asked, you know, we realize this can vary greatly depending on your business model, your whether you’re b two b, b two c, what industry you’re in. Uh, but we’d love to hear kinda your data points to to determine, uh, who’s a champion customer. And, you know, that that could be useful for us as we, um add on to this program beef up this program for review automation uh maybe expanding the audience of customers that we bring in as as you know champion customers. Do we have anything to check in the chat, Alexia, from the audience today?

Speaker 2: Um, looks like people are probably still typing. So we’ll we’ll take those at the end.

Speaker 1: And we’ll we’re not far from the q and a section, so we can get to I see there’s been some other questions in the chat too. We’re eager to get to those. Alright. So as with the other, uh, topic areas, focus areas we we covered, I wanna talk about really those KPIs. How do we judge success for the review automation campaigns? First and foremost, as I talked a little bit about for review quantity and review quality are really some some chief metrics that we look at. How many reviews do we have coming in and and perhaps more importantly, what’s the quality of those reviews? Uh, we wanna get as many, uh, five stars close to five star reviews as possible. Another big one for us in terms of the KPIs is the consistency and recency of reviews. Um, in particular, g two has an algorithm that they use to, um, rate different vendors based on the customer reviews that they get. And one of the factors in that algorithm is the consistency and recency of reviews. They don’t wanna see that, you know, you got, you know, a big bump in reviews a couple years ago and then you remained kinda stagnant after that. They wanna see that there’s continuously new reviews coming in from real customers. And so that’s one thing I think that the engagement program really, uh, helps us with. It it drips out these these review emails, emails inviting them to leave us a review. And it does so, um, at the right time in the journey. You know, right after they’ve filled out this NPS, uh, survey for us and given us a a nine or a 10 score, um, we’re quickly following up with, uh, an email asking them to leave us a review. So it’s the right message to the right person at the right time, which is, I think, part of the the power of engagement studio. And, um, just as a, you know, a success metric for us, we we ever since we did launch the review automation program, we have seen the average star rating increase from four and a half stars to 4.7 stars on both g two and Gartner Pure Insights. Uh, as we talked about, those are the two review platforms that we really focus on. So we’ve seen the power. We’ve seen the success of these, um, of these drip campaigns, and they’re there’s something we’re that we’re continuing to run and continuing to optimize. And as and speaking of optimization, you know, how we optimize review campaigns, we review the performance regularly, like like the other, uh, flows we talked about to identify those areas for improvement. Uh, we tweak the subject line to improve open rate, which we body copy to improve the click through rate. Um, we kind of know what leverage to pull based on what, uh, KPIs we’re seeing from the data. So we talked about, you know, three different focus areas for us in terms of how we use engagement studio to nurture customers throughout their lifecycle. We talked about that those at the top of the funnel, those lead nurturing campaigns to make make leads aware of our our products or solutions that we offer. Uh, we talked about the, uh, customer onboarding campaigns for a newly generated cloud customer, making sure that we’re showing them how our SAS product works, the features benefits best practices to really set them up for success. And then lastly we talked about review automation campaigns that review advocacy campaign where we’re trying to uh, find those happy customers, get them to leave us a positive review on those review websites we talked about. So kind of rounding out the conversation today, I wanna go through just some conclusions that we wanted to leave the audience with here today. Um, I know we covered a lot of information, but we tried to really boil it down to a few points that we think will be helpful for the audience. Uh, first and foremost, when building out any kind of, uh, engagement program for customers, for leads, whatever it may be, Uh, think about the whole journey from a customer’s perspective, not yours. You know, I think as marketers, it can be tempting with all the tools and bells and whistles we have at our disposal. It’s easy to think about things from the marketer’s standpoint. I know I do. I find myself doing it a lot, but, uh, uh, really try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Uh, put yourself in the shoes of the person receiving that email, receiving that content, um, when you’re sending it to them, how you’re sending it to them. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes as you as you make decisions and as you optimize. As Alex say, I think it alluded to earlier in the presentation, start with your KPIs, start with your business requirements, and really start diagramming out the flow before you start building an engagement studio. Again, there’s a lot of fun, like bells and whistles and engagement studio can be be easy to get in there and just start building things, but you really wanna make sure you know what you wanna accomplish, what those KPIs are that are important to you and to the organization, uh, uh, before you get in there and start building. That way that way, once you have those things nailed down, once you get an engagement studio, you really know you have a direction in mind. You know what you wanna build. You know how you wanna build it. And then don’t don’t set it and forget it. You know, review regularly, make continuous optimizations to your engagement studio flows. I mentioned we’ll meet we’ll meet, uh, quarterly for ours to make sure we’re getting enough sample size of data to understand, you know, what the performance has been over the past quarter, uh, and how can we optimize accordingly. And then lastly, learn from both the wins and the losses as you look at the data. You know, it’s a lot of times if, uh, you know, when you look at the win a lot of times, marketers may be focused on those things that didn’t work so well. And and how how can we optimize this lower performing email or this lower performing content? Uh, and and, of course, that’s important. It’s important to optimize in the areas where, uh, your marketing programs need it. But also think about learning from those wins. If something worked really well, you’re seeing, you know, some sky high click through rate. What is it about that content? Is there something about that topic? Is there something about the way you frame that topic? Uh, you could learn from that and kinda repeat those successes as you continue to optimize, continue to build out your marketing programs. So really learning from both the wins, and the losses as you analyze your data. And with that, I wanna thank everybody for being on the session today. Really fun talking about what we built out in engagement studio, how we automate the customer life cycle through engagement studio. I’ve put our, uh, a couple QR codes up for my LinkedIn, uh, for Alexia’s LinkedIn. Feel free to to reach out and, uh, connect with us or if you have any questions that you wanna take offline from the call here today. And I’ve included our, um, our email addresses as well here. Um, with that, I’ll kick it over to to Jen as we kinda, uh, get into the QA portion here.

Speaker 0: Yes. We’ve had some good questions come through. Let me start in the QA channel. So early on, right at the beginning of the talk, uh, Carly wants to get a better understanding of what are complex rules.

Speaker 1: Allison, you wanna take

Speaker 2: that one? That’s a great yeah. That’s a great question. So complex rules are, um, one of the options for one of those nodes you can build in engagement studio. And what it is is it just like when you’re building a dynamic list in Pardot, how you can have multiple criteria that’s built out with ands and ors, complex rules are doing the same thing. So you can evaluate multiple data points within that one node, which makes it a lot cleaner than having to spread that out, say, with five different data points over five different yes and no nodes, which would lead to a ton more branches in your engagement studio and take takes up a lot more space, is a lot more complex to maintain. And there is actually a performance limit for engagement studio of, um, having, you know, too many of those nodes in. So being able to combine them helps save, uh, some performance as well.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That was something we were we were, like, upvoting it on the on the Salesforce. Uh, I think it’s the idea exchange of all the different feature requests that, you know, folks are making. We’re we’re having people internally help upvote it for us. We wanted it, uh, we wanted those complex rules so badly. So the day that it came, we were able to really clean things up, really optimize things with complex rules. So they were a godsend for us.

Speaker 0: Yep. Same here. Uh, next question. Also from Carly. Um, and I hope I’m saying your your name correctly. How did you how do you decide on your marketing benchmarks? Are there certain things to look at?

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think, uh, really, number one, we used our first party data to see those average average, um, click through rates, average open rates, all the different you know, average unsubscribe rate, all the different averages that we see with our own first party email marketing data. And then we also combined those with some data points that we were seeing just from third party websites, um, what are the average email marketing benchmarks for b two b technology, which is the the category that we fall into. We kinda averaged out those metrics between those two those two different information sources. We wanted to make sure we’re using our own data to set our our benchmarks, our averages, but also rely on the data for, uh, you know, from other authoritative sources and and kinda use that as our our North Star benchmark to compare ourselves against as we as we evaluate our email programs.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Alright. Next question from Michelle. Is your SAAS platform connected to Pardot Salesforce, meaning users are pushed into Pardot for customer onboarding?

Speaker 2: In a way, yes. They actually are. So we, um, our SaaS product is connected via a form handler. Um, so currently and I think we have some plans maybe to expand where we’re building this connection. But currently, the connection is the first time the user logs into our platform. They are presented with, um, a form basically to accept their end user license agreement, And that form itself is connected via a form handler into Pardot, which is fantastic. It means that the data is coming in basically in real time, um, as they’re signing into that platform for the first time, and it’s really reliable for us to be able to use that as a trigger point for customer onboarding.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Alright. Let me stop sharing. Just mark that one as answered. And I think we had some questions coming in the main chat. Let me give it a quick scroll. I’m just gonna start at the bottom here. What kind of content are you gatekeeping, uh, for form fills?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So there’s a couple different ones. I think first and foremost, it is ebooks. We we get a lot of ebook downloads across our website. Like, our buyers guides are one piece of content that’s particularly popular, like, document management guide, buyer’s guide, uh, process automation buyer’s guide. We have a series of different, uh, buyers guides that are really popular. Analyst reports are hugely popular as well. We’ll purchase the, uh, the, uh, publishing rights to reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the, uh, Forrester Wave, Gartner voice of the customer report, and we’ll gate those behind a a landing page in a form. So those are the types of content that we’ll get, uh, to get, you know, leads into the flow of 90% of our leads. The first touch is they’re they’re downloading content with us. They’re not, you know, as as many of us know from the buyer’s journey, they’re not just coming straight in and asking for a demo or asking, you know, for us to contact them. They’re they’re starting with, uh, educational research and downloading, you know, those buyers guides, those ebooks. So that’s kind of that that first touch that gets them enrolled into lead nurturing. And and then from there, that’s where we nurture them with different, uh, blogs, articles, case studies, uh, to kinda warm them up further, um, get their lead score up high enough to where they’re marketing qualified, um, and ready for sales to reach out to them. But it’s primarily those forms of gated content, um, ebooks and and analyst reports.

Speaker 0: Alright. I’ve got another one here. Yes. I can pull it up. Uh, Cindy’s asking, is it best practice to create a separate campaign for each engagement program?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So that is definitely an org specific type question. I think it really depends on how your Salesforce campaigns are set up. Um, there’s a lot of different ways to set up campaigns, uh, for your org depending on on where you want that marketing attribution to come in. Do you want it on the form filled? Do you want it website visits? There’s a there’s a lot of ways to, um, kinda decide that. And for us specifically, um, we don’t have campaigns connected to every single one of our engagement programs, and this is just from the way we’ve structured it in our org. And also the fact that we built our lead nurturing engagement studio prior to setting up Salesforce campaigns. Um, so it’s something that we’re definitely looking at for a future iteration of it. Um, but I would definitely say air on the side of caution. If you think in any way you wanna be able to connect the data from engagement studio into a Salesforce campaign, just make a campaign. Even if you have never used it, at least the data is there and it’s collected. And if you do want it, you can go back and grab it.

Speaker 0: Yep. I agree. From Axel, engagement programs only let a person, uh, be added to a program once a day given that they that you enabled that function. Is there a good way to work around that if prospects fit the criteria to be added to the program again?

Speaker 1: That was

Speaker 2: That’s an interesting one. We specifically, uh, didn’t really want people to be coming in more than once a day. So that’s, uh, an interesting use case that I’d be really curious to hear more about, and I’m sure Dan would too. Um, that’s not something I’ve ever tried to specifically do. But I do know, as Tyler mentioned in the chat, there is going to be instead of just day long waiting periods in engagement studio, they’re introducing hour waiting periods. I believe it’s a minimum of two hours up to eight hours, uh, between emails and actions. So that is something to look forward to that maybe would help with what you’re looking for. But in terms of adding someone multiple times to the same program in the same day, um, I would I would defer to the rest of the Pardot experts here. Is is there a way to do that? There’s not one that I know of.

Speaker 0: Nope. Not that I’m aware of either.

Speaker 2: But definitely shoot me an email. I’m curious about that use case and and what you’re trying to achieve there.

Speaker 0: Alright. We still have another minute left. I’m scrolling through. A lot of lot has been dropped into the chats, and so I’m just looking to see if I’ve missed anything. You still have time to ask a question if you’d like. Yep. Okay. Looks like we are good to go. Fantastic. This this was a lot of great information. Um, I enjoyed this. I’m certain that all of our attendees enjoyed this as well. Um, if you haven’t already, for all the attendees, be sure to grab quick scans of these QR codes so you can connect with Dan and Alexea on LinkedIn. Um, and, uh, Dan, I’ll let’s leave this up for just one more second here before we go to the other slide, but just know that you have more sessions to attend this afternoon

Speaker 1: after this one. And then

Speaker 0: tomorrow’s a full day, and Friday, we’ve got a lot going on as well. So lots of good stuff coming up for all of you. Alright. Let’s go back one screen just so I can give our sponsors one more shout out. Thank you so much to all of our incredible sponsors. They make all of this go so much more smoothly. Um, and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the conference. Thank you so much, Dan and Alexia.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Jen. Thank you, everyone.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having us. Thanks. Bye.

Speaker 0: Bye, everyone.