The 5 most exciting new features in the Salesforce Pardot Winter '21 Release
It's hard to believe how far this year — dominated by the corona pandemic and its effects on all of us — has now progressed. Fall is here and brings us shorter days, cooler temperatures and... the Salesforce Winter '21 release expected in October!
What exciting developments are expected in the Pardot sector? In our opinion, here are the five most important new features that Salesforce Pardot users are eagerly awaiting.
1. Lightning Experience Email Builder
This update has certainly been awaited by many users for a long time: Salesforce presents a new user-friendly email editor, which features, among other things, a drag-and-drop functionality that was previously unavailable in Pardot. This allows content elements of a template to be moved and adapted flexibly. In addition, reusable elements such as buttons, image and text areas are introduced.
In the area of file hosting, Pardot offers the option of using the Salesforce CMS with the release. If this feature is enabled, there is no additional effort required to re-upload resources that have been used multiple times.
In addition, testing and preview options are being expanded. In the future, it will be possible to preview the mobile view directly without time-consuming rendering testing.
There is also a nice addition in the area of shipping management: Emails can be assigned to a corresponding Salesforce campaign directly in shipping management. This makes reporting at campaign level easier and more flexible and makes ROI tracking easier.
Overall, we expect the new Lightning Email Builder to provide a much more intuitive interface for creating and sending emails. For example, the repeated sending of emails is also made easier and much more flexible. This makes it much easier to send the same email to different target groups — e.g. as part of tests or for reporting.
The Salesforce Winter '21 Release also offers new reporting options:
Every email created using the Lightning Editor is automatically created as a content record in Salesforce. Within this content record, a detailed evaluation of the KPIs is provided. In addition, an aggregated evaluation of all individually sent emails is automatically created based on the respective templates. This makes the performance of various templates visible at a glance, which makes optimization much easier.
Requirements for using Lightning Email Editor:
- Using the Pardot Lightning app (Salesforce will no longer support Pardot Classic extensions)
- Enable Connected Campaigns functionality
- Using HML (Handlebars Merge Language)
You can find out more about this in the Release Notes from Salesforce.
2. Preparation of analyses and reports
Salesforce is also following up in the area of analyses and reports in the winter '21 release. There will be new analytics features, clearer B2B marketing analytics dashboards, improved campaign statistics, and expanded Einstein features. In addition, a beta solution should make it easier to synchronize custom fields. The evaluation options for email KPIs and list email statistics should also improve.
The continued expansion of Salesforce Pardot Einstein functionalities is particularly remarkable. The Einstein AI solution was recently made available in Pardot as part of the Summer '20 release and the fact that additional functions will be added in the next release illustrates the importance of the new analytics solution in the Salesforce universe. Pardot Einstein Attribution's primary goal is to enable seamless campaign reporting by closing gaps through missing links between Pardot prospects and Salesforce opportunities and campaigns.
3. Marketing databases and domains
Other news concerns the Pardot WordPress plugin, which is now compatible with the WordPress block editor. The WordPress plugin can be authenticated using Salesforce Single Sign-On. In addition, Pardot Assets can now be customized with any tracker domain. Only emails without an underlying template are still automatically associated with the primary tracker domain. Using the Pardot account settings, SSL certificates can now be automatically activated for new tracker domains, which previously had to be done manually.
4. Add Salesforce contacts to lists in Pardot
Since the Summer '20 update, sales reps without a Pardot user can also add contacts directly to Pardot lists.
With the Winter '21 release, this option is no longer limited to specific records and page views. It will be possible to select contacts directly at account level, which will certainly make daily work much easier for some.
5. Easier mass synchronization of prospects
We've been waiting for this: In the future, prospects that could not be successfully synchronized between Pardot and Sales Cloud, for example due to incorrect field assignment (matching), can easily be updated via mass synchronization as soon as the problems have been resolved. Until now, it was always necessary to import or manually adjust the affected prospects in such cases.
