All You Need to Know About Pardot Engagement Studio

Pardot’s Engagement Studio is a powerful lead nurturing tool designed for running automated email campaigns for a number of use cases. 

This dynamic marketing automation tool goes beyond the traditional email drip program. It empowers you to create personalized, logic-based nurturing campaigns that guide your prospects through their buying journey while testing and refining your approach in real-time.

It sounds complex, but it’s actually quite intuitive. Engagement Studio is a way to send emails to a list of prospects, see how they interact with them, and then react to them differently based on how the recipient interacted with each email in the drip.

This automated series of messages depends on your custom logic, so you can tailor your campaigns to the needs of your target audience. By doing so, you can create a powerful automated program that keeps your prospects engaged every step of the way, guiding them toward a successful conversion.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about how to build an Engagement Program in Engagement Studio and how it can help you improve your marketing efforts. 

Types of Campaigns You Can Create in Partdot Engagement Studio 

Pardot Engagement Studio is a powerful marketing automation tool designed to help businesses create and manage email marketing campaigns. Within Pardot Engagement Studio, you can create various types of email campaigns to engage and nurture your leads. Here are some different types of email campaigns you can create:

1. Welcome Email Campaign

Welcome series campaigns are typically triggered when a new lead subscribes to your email list or interacts with your website. They introduce the lead to your brand, products, or services and set the tone for the relationship.

2. Pre-Sales Program

Pre-sales involves the initial steps of getting a potential customer ready for the sales discussions. Pardot enables you to automate routine pre-sales activities, such as sending links to customer success stories or offering free product demos, with the aim of influencing the prospect's decision-making process.

3. Onboarding Program

The process of customer onboarding stands out as a crucial element in guaranteeing customer contentment and commitment. It involves a comprehensive effort in terms of education and cooperation.

4. Product or Service Renewal

One of the most simple methods to generate revenue is by proactively notifying existing customers about the approaching end of their product or service. Pardot enables you to automate renewal notifications to be sent to both the customer and the account owner, ensuring that both parties are well informed and updated.

5. Sunset Program

Not all of your potential leads will exhibit active engagement, some may remain unresponsive to your marketing efforts. Pardot's pricing is tied to the number of prospects you can send emails to, whether or not they are actively engaged. The goal of a sunset program is to make an attempt to re-engage these passive prospects. If there is no response, they are categorized as unavailable and excluded from future email communications.

How to Successfully Build an Engagement Program in Pardot Engagement Studio

Building a successful engagement program in Pardot Engagement Studio involves careful planning, segmentation, and automation to nurture leads and move them through your sales funnel. Here are the steps to create a successful engagement program:

Step 1: Establish Clear Goals for Your Campaign 

The first step is to define the objectives of your Pardot engagement program. Next, determine what success looks like for your campaign by setting clear, measurable goals. Your goals should align with your overall marketing strategy and be specific to your target audience.

Some examples of campaign objectives include:

• Convert prospects to opportunities
• Turn cold prospects into sales-qualified leads

To track the effectiveness of your campaign, establish metric goals such as 

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Deliverability rate
• Number of conversions

For instance, if you are running a large-scale engagement program that offers a long-form piece of content to a cold database, your objective could be to increase traffic to your content and website by having recipients click the link in your email. 

Your metric goals could be an email deliverability rate of 95%, an open rate of 25%, and a click-through rate of 4%.

Develop personalized content that speaks to your audience 

The next step is to create targeted content that speaks to your audience's pain points and interests. Develop engaging and customized content that aligns with your campaign goals and the stages of the buyer's journey. Use Pardot's powerful segmentation and automation tools to tailor your messages to each prospect's behavior and preferences.

Build a logic-based nurturing campaign 

Use Engagement Studio's drag-and-drop interface to build a logic-based nurturing campaign that guides your prospects through the buying journey. Define rules and actions that trigger different messages based on each prospect's behavior. Doing so lets you keep your prospects engaged and move them closer to conversion.

Test and refine your approach 

Finally, use Pardot's reporting and analytics tools to track the effectiveness of your engagement program. Analyze your metrics, test different scenarios, and refine your approach to optimize your results. By constantly testing and refining your approach, you can build a robust engagement program that drives results and helps you achieve your marketing goals.

Step 2: Identify Recipient and Suppression Lists

To effectively target the prospects for your engagement program, you should identify the recipient and suppression lists. Here's how you can go about it:

Determine your engagement program's objective

Before you decide which prospects to target, you need to define the goal of your engagement program. For example, if your goal is to reconnect with past customers, your recipient list will be a static or dynamic list of prospects who have purchased your products/services in the past.

Use dynamic lists

Dynamic lists run continuously in the background of Pardot, constantly changing based on the criteria you set. They are ideal for a completely automated engagement campaign like a welcome series. As you add prospects to the dynamic list, you will see them added to the drip campaign.

Use static lists

Static lists require manual addition or removal of prospects. For example, if you add a static list to an engagement program, it will only email the people on the list at that time and anyone you manually add later. Use static lists for testing or one-off campaigns like promoting a limited-time sale.

Suppression lists

Use these lists, which can be static or dynamic, to remove prospects from email recipient lists. They take priority over your recipient lists. For instance, if you already sent an email to a group of prospects last week and don't want to send them another one, upload their recipient list to the suppression list of the current campaign. 

If a prospect is on both your suppression and recipient lists, they will not receive the email. Suppression lists are helpful when there are prospects on your recipient lists that you don't want to receive your email and don't want to create an entirely new list.

Step 3: Writing the Copy

Before writing the content for your email, you need to determine your email's objectives, target audience, and goals. If you already have email templates, you can clone or repurpose them for a new campaign. Some people even develop drip logic before writing their emails.

To ensure your marketing message resonates with your audience, it's best to follow email marketing tips and best practices. Visit the previous section on B2B email marketing to learn more.

Step 4: Developing Drip Logic

Once you have created your email content, developing a workflow or drip logic is next. Pardot's Engagement Studio offers an intuitive logic builder to create a visual workflow for your email campaign.

While planning your drip logic, keep your goals and objectives in mind, and think from the prospect's perspective. Consider the following questions:

• What happens if the recipient opens the email?
• What happens if the email is not opened?
• What if they click on the link inside?

It's essential to plan every step of your drip campaign from start to finish. First, consider all scenarios for when your campaign works or does not. Then, weigh all possibilities to develop the most efficient way to nurture your prospects through the customer journey.

Step 5: Building the Engagement Studio Campaign

Now that you have the information needed, you should be ready to start building your first Engagement Studio campaign. You can follow the steps below to ensure a smooth process:

1. Prepare your assets: Before building your campaign, ensure all the assets are ready to go live. This includes email templates, prospect lists, and any actions you want to trigger.
2. Choose your Pardot elements: You can add three elements to an Engagement Program: an action, a trigger, and/or a rule. You can add as many of them as you like along the drip campaign.
3. Add an Action: Engagement Studio responds to a trigger by executing a specific action, like dispatching an email immediately, enlisting them into a category, or adjusting their Pardot rating. Some examples include sending an email in X days, changing one of their default/custom field values, or assigning them to a user.
4. Add a Trigger: A trigger is a condition that you must meet before the following action occurs. For example, if a prospect clicks on a specific link in an email, it can trigger a follow-up action like sending them a personalized message.
5. Add a Rule: A rule is a condition that affects the prospect's journey through the campaign. For instance, you can set a rule to exclude prospects who have already received a specific email from receiving it again.

Engagement Studio Screenshot

By following these steps, you can create an effective Pardot Engagement Studio campaign that engages your prospects and helps drive conversions.

However, to create a successful Engagement Studio campaign, you must be able to utilize triggers and rules effectively: Here are a few tips for doing the same.

1. Trigger - Listen for Something: Use a trigger to tell Pardot Engagement Studio to listen for something the prospect interacts with. Some common triggers include:

• Email Open
• Link Click
• File Download
• Form Fill-out
• Custom Redirect Click

2. Rule - Check Something: A rule checks the prospect database for specific criteria. Some standard rules include the following:

• Pardot Score
• Assigned User
• List Membership
• Custom Field Value
• Tag Presence

3. Utilize Yes/No Pathways: Both triggers and rules will provide you with a yes or no pathway that alters the structure of your engagement program. For example, if a prospect opens an email:

• Yes: Send email #2 in 3 days
• No: Resend email #1 in 3 days with a different subject line

Tips to Consider: Keep in mind the following tips when building your Pardodt Engagement Studio program:

• You can only set triggers to wait for whole numbers, not half-days.
• Only send emails during business hours and days.
• You can only use an email template once during an engagement program (by default).
• You need not have your Engagement Studio program finalized before dispatching it.
• By default, prospects can only enter an engagement program once (but an administrator can change it).

Craft a compelling Engagement Studio campaign that fosters conversions and captivates your prospects by skillfully leveraging triggers and rules.

Here are some pointers on how to optimize your engagement program using Pardot's Engagement Studio:

Step 6: Test and Send

Pardot's Engagement Studio offers a testing feature that enables you to simulate how a prospect might progress through your drip campaign. This feature also calculates the duration of the engagement program. By navigating through each possible path, you can gain insights into its functionality and identify opportunities to optimize the customer journey for greater efficiency.

Engagement Studio Screenshot

Step 7: Report

The "Report" tab within Engagement Studio offers comprehensive insights into the effectiveness of your engagement program. It serves as a valuable tool for comparing your metric objectives with actual data, revealing the percentage of prospects who have followed your pathways, the open rates for specific emails, click-through rates on your links, and more.

Step 8: Optimize

The last crucial phase in building a thriving engagement program within Engagement Studio is optimization. Continuous improvement is key, so closely monitor your reports and experiment with various scenarios. Small changes, such as tweaking email subject lines, can have a significant impact.

If your campaigns are falling short of their objectives, it's essential to be open to re-evaluation. Avoid sticking rigidly to the same email templates. Instead, remain vigilant for signs of waning prospect interest during nurturing campaigns. Look for opportunities to enhance specific emails or segments within your workflow to revitalize engagement.

Wrapping Up

Engagement Studio stands out as the most potent tool within Pardot, and its mastery primarily comes through a process of trial, error, and hands-on experience. Don't hesitate to experiment with various email content, actions, and drip campaign logic to discover the strategies that yield the best results for your specific business needs.

Ready to Nurture Your Leads Using Engagement Studio? Let’s Talk! Our Pardot experts will take a tailored approach to help you optimize your Engagement Program. Just drop us a line at info@growthnatives.com and we’ll take it from there.