By 2020 most businesses have experienced the beneficial results of personalising their marketing communications, and even the customers have evolved to expect it now. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.
This insight comes as no surprise to those who keep up with the marketing trends, especially those who use marketing automation to aid their efforts. With this in mind, we wanted to share three methods of using Pardot to personalise your messaging and with it — achieve more desirable results.
3 fundamental Pardot personalisation capabilities to help you achieve winning results
Handlebars Merge Language or HML
Handlebars Merge Language or HML is the merge language for personalising emails in Pardot. The term “merge fields” represents the action of using information from the prospect records to personalise content with inserting information that is relevant to the prospect.
Or in other words, merge fields function is what makes your email display—“Hello Mark”, instead of the generic —“Hello customer”.
What’s excellent about HML is that you can also use it to create conditional logic statements with its #if statement. Using the #if statement, you can check whether a field has data directly in the email. This feature is valuable when the prospect’s record is missing information (name or email address), as it allows you to find an alternative solution when it comes to the choice of content.
For inspiration on creating merge fields for any custom prospect or account fields – check out this list of HML’s.
Dynamic Content
Not all customers are made the same, which means that neither should your content be. Fortunately, with Pardot, there is a solution to that: Dynamic content.
Dynamic content means presenting content according to the customer’s preferences as Pardot identifies and stores them.
In Pardot, you can use dynamic content to personalise forms, landing pages or email templates.
The first step of using dynamic content is to choose the criteria you want to use to personalise by.
Here are some of the examples of criteria you can set to start your personalisation journey with Pardot:
- Geography — If you have customers from different countries, you may try to personalise the offer based on their territory.
- Behaviour — Use previously displayed behaviour to adjust your content to the current situation. One example where this type of personalisation shows is using “Welcome back, Mark!” instead of “Welcome!”.
- Job title and industry — Based on the professional background, you can adjust the messaging, the images or the design to reflect the prospect’s record better and magnify the effectiveness of the message.
A/B Testing
You haven’t experienced email marketing in Pardot if you haven’t tried its A/B testing feature. We have spoken about the power of A/B Testing with email marketing before, but now, we want to elaborate further. A/B testing is the process of using data-driven marketing to decide which message will be more engaging for the receiver.
To make it easy to tell which elements you’ve changed in your Pardot emails; Email Version A is blue, while Email Version B is orange. We advise our clients to test only one email variation at a time. Otherwise, it may become challenging to track the real reason a specific email is more effective than others. For more considerations regarding A/B Testing, click here.
Below are some of the ways you can use A/B testing with Pardot:
- The wording of your email copy and its length
- The subject line and the name of the sender (A generic sender vs a specific sender)
- Images (position and design)
- Place and form of the links and the CTA’s
Final Thoughts
As we progress into the future, personalisation is not going to be a best practice; it will be mandatory. Customers have evolved to expect more from companies, and if organisations don’t take action to adjust their approach — consequences could be harmful.
If you wish to step up your personalisation game with Pardot – connect with us and learn how we can support you in your journey.
