3 Ways to Use Your Pardot Data to Drive Engagement

If you’ve used Pardot, you may have noticed that it’s pretty great for gathering data. You can track how your emails are performing, get to know your prospects better via forms and landing pages, and even understand their overall interest and preferences by listening to cues on your Engagement Studio programs. Now that you have all of this great information, what do you do with it?

Here are three ways that you can make your data work for you.

1. How to Personalize Content in Pardot

We have all been on the receiving end of promotional emails. We know that the best emails resonate because they are targeted to our specific interests. Your audience is no different. They want to feel like you know them. But you DO know them! You have all of that great data that tells you exactly what they like and you have all the tools you need to personalize every communication you send.

• Use Variable Tags: This is information pulled directly from your prospect record. Variable tags can be used to dynamically populate emails or landing pages with an individual’s information. You will likely fill in a person’s name in an email with a variable tag, but there are also fun ways of using them—you can send a happy birthday email to a valued donor or volunteer.
• Dynamic Content: Taking it one step beyond variable tags, dynamic content actually lets you create content blocks that will change depending on who is looking at them. For example, use an individual’s city or state to send them information on upcoming events in their area, or use their industry to create a form that includes only relevant fields.

Use dynamic content to personalize your resources

2. Do More of What Works and Less of What Doesn’t

After sending a few Pardot emails, you know more about prospects’ interests and preferences. If you sent a registration link to an event and got hundreds of responses, that’s a good indicator that the event or the topic that it covered was pretty important to your audience. On the other hand, if you sent a downloadable resource and only got two clicks, it’s likely that the resource is not hitting the mark. As you continue to build content for your constituents, this kind of knowledge is invaluable!

Before you plan any new resource or initiative, go back and take a look at how similar offerings have fared. You can find this information by navigating to your Marketing Assets report in Pardot (Reports > Marketing Assets) and reviewing which of your emails, forms, landing pages, or downloadable files have the most positive responses. Review those high performing assets and note any obvious trends or patterns. You may find that one of your services is much more in-demand than the others, or that emails with images do much better than plain text. Whatever your findings, plan your future outreach with them in mind.

3. Put a Number on Your Constituent Engagement

With Pardot, you have an excellent tool to help you gauge your prospects’ engagement: scoring. A prospect score measures how interested someone is in your organization by evaluating their responsiveness and interaction with your content. Pardot has a default scoring model in place–this great tool shows you how you can measure your prospects’ engagement. Even though the default scoring model is a great starting point, the feature works best when it is properly customized. However, to create a custom model, you need to have adequate information on what of outreach works best or what types of resources you use most frequently. This is where your data comes in!

• Identify Your Top Performers: Just like with planning for future programming, you can go back and take a look at your best performing assets. This may be emails, downloadable files, videos, or even event registration forms. Based on this information, make a top five list of your most popular resources–you’re not looking for individual assets, but asset types. For example, if your most successful way of interacting with your prospects is email, you would put that at the top of your list.
• Decide on a Threshold Score: If you plan to take action upon a prospect reaching a certain score, decide what that score should be for your organization. There’s no “right” number; however, you want it to be feasible for a prospect to reach it, while still being high enough that it shows a significant interest.
• Assign Scores to Each Top Asset: Go back to your list of top assets and, keeping the threshold score in mind, assign a numerical score to each one. The higher an asset is on your list, the higher the score that it should carry.
• Determine One-Off Exceptions: You may decide that a form completion should be worth 25 points, but then find one form that is more important than all the rest. To assign more value to a specific asset, you will need to utilize completion actions. In the case of that one important form, you will include a completion action that adds an additional 25 points upon form submission. Keep in mind that the value you indicate in the completion action will be on top of the existing value a form carries—in this case, it would be 25 for general form submission, plus an additional 25 for this specific form, coming to a total of 50 points.

A scoring model can help put a numeric value to constituent engagement.

By using your prospect information in a constructive and strategic way, you can ensure long-term, successful interactions with your audience. Keep talking to your constituents, keep learning more about them, and keep improving their experience with you!

Check out Pardot’s Scoring and Grading Lab to learn more.