Pardot Summer '19 Release Overview
Summer has arrived, and with it comes the second Salesforce release of the year. The biggest concern for any Salesforce customer at the moment is the impending switch on of Lightning within all instances. The customer communications surrounding this change have already started, and fortunately they are accompanied by fairly comprehensive migration resources. However, these tools can't rewrite any visualforce code or action buttons affected by the transition from Classic to Lightning. Even after the change rolls out in October, users can still switch back to Classic view but it will no longer be the default unless they are configured to use a custom security profile with the Lightning Experience User Permission disabled. Thankfully, users will now be redirected to the right record if they do need to switch between the Classic and Lightning views. Previously, switching views dumped you back on the home screen.
More importantly, for many admins is the recently enhanced help features for users new to the Lightning UX. The out of the box help prompts can now be supplemented with custom ones created by a Salesforce admin through the Salesforce user interface, complete with links to external documentation that may exist elsewhere in your organisation. This should be of major help in transitioning confused users to what is otherwise a very different layout and very different workflow, particularly for instances that use a lot of custom links or visualforce.
One other enhancement designed to ease the transition to Lightning is a new Full View option for page layouts within Lightning. This removes the tabs and columns from the standard Lightning page layout, displaying all fields and related lists in a single column much like the Classic UI. For users forcibly migrated from the old experience to the new one, this is likely to be mighty popular as it will massively reduce confusion by ensuring that all the options people are looking for will be in roughly the same place as before. The activities-centric view of the lead and opportunity records in the existing Lightning page layout does not work for all user types. It is great for inside sales reps, who generally ignore activities otherwise but is less useful for marketing users and IT staff. As such, it will be possible to use both the Full View and original Grouped layout for an object, with different user profiles having a different type of view.
Pardot
From a marketing automation perspective, this quarter is a relatively quiet one for Pardot updates. Most of the new stuff is just an evolution of features introduced last quarter. There still some notable updates though. For a start, the Full View page layout type will apply to many Pardot for Lightning Experience screens, as well as to core Sales Cloud functionality. That's not the only Lightning UI change, as quick filters have been added to Pardot related lists throughout the application.
The headline feature is definitely the enhanced integration of prospect activity data into Sales Cloud. Assuming you're using Connected campaigns and the latest version of the Salesforce connector, all email and landing page activity is now available as activity records against both the asset and contact or lead record in Salesforce. This allows full reporting of opens, clicks and page views within Salesforce using an engagement history dashboard on the campaign record, or by viewing the brand new 'Engagement History' related list against the asset record, if using the Lightning Experience. The Engagement History related list can also be added to other Salesforce objects, such as the Campaign, Contact or Lead should admins so choose. There will be a limit to the number of users who can view the Engagement History dashboard though, with the exact number of licenses available depending on the contact's trim.
This should enable asset reporting within Salesforce rather than Pardot using Salesforce's excellent reports functionality. It will work a bit like Program Member Statuses in Marketo or Campaign Member Statuses in Salesforce. Each engagement record will list the prospect, asset and the type of activity that occurred such as 'Click', 'View' or 'Success'. Think of types as being like the aforementioned Campaign Member Status, except not customisable. Also, unlike Campaign Members, users will have multiple Engagement History records for each asset, as every engagement will create a separate record.
Pardot Einstein
The AI-powered Campaign Insights feature that makes recommendations on potential ways to improve campaign and list email performance has now reached GA. This is an optional Lightning component that can be added to campaign pages in Lightning Experience, giving recommendations on new audiences for campaigns as well as trend analysis and comparisons against other campaigns. In this respect, it is most useful as a reporting and analysis tool for providing real language context around campaign results. As part of the GA release, the feature will now provide commentary on landing pages and forms as well as emails.
The Einstein powered predictive behaviour scoring feature also gets an enhancement. This functionality is powerful but requires a large prospect database with a high volume of activity to be accurate. Additionally, there are some caveats around where it can actually be used and the licensing required. One of the main caveats has been lifted though. It is now possible to trigger workflows based off changes to the predictive behaviour score so that lead notifications can be sent to sales reps when a threshold is reached or alternatively assignment processes, and data update processes can be run in Process Builder for the related lead or contact. This opens much more flexibility for organisations using Einstein Behaviour Scoring so should definitely be considered if that applies to you.
April Release
Last quarter saw the release of Business Units, the long-awaited workspaces and data security feature that allows a single Pardot instance to be shared between different divisions of an organisation, while separating out assets and prospects so that one business unit can't see the prospects owned by a different business unit. The downside of this is that prospects and campaigns can't be shared between business units in both Salesforce and Pardot. Fortunately, users now can be shared between business units. This allows central marketing teams and system administrators to switch between business units without needing separate logins. There is now a dropdown that allows users to switch between business units when navigating the Pardot lightning app.
There is a small but critical update to the way the Salesforce connector handles opt-outs. By default, the 'Prospect Opted Out' and 'Do Not Email' fields that control the overall unsubscribe status cannot be overwritten from within Salesforce, as they are not part of the sync between the two systems. There is a setting from within the integration connector to override this, syncing the Do Not Email field in both places. Changes to the field in one system are then reflected in the other. This has caused problems when trying to update the Do Not Email field within Pardot through list imports, leading to the integration re-subscribing prospects accidentally in some situations. That is obviously totally unacceptable from a GDPR perspective. As such, the way the sync handles the Do Not Email field has been changed. Effective immediately, Salesforce will never overwrite the Do Not Email flag in Pardot if it was initially set to true in Pardot. The Do Not Email status will only be overwritten in Pardot if it was initially set to true in Salesforce. This ensures any explicit unsubscribe provided through Pardot by the prospect themselves is always respected, whilst allowing Sales-sourced marketing exclusions to be reversed if your organisation uses the Do Not Email field for that purpose.
Finally, there is a security enhancement that will be of interest to IT departments. Two factor authentication is now supported for Pardot only users using the same mobile app and SMS factors supported by Salesforce. This will only affect a minority of the userbase given that most users now connect to Pardot through their Salesforce logins. However, Pardot only users are frequently used for external or temporary users such as agencies. Many companies require tools containing personal contact data to be protected with two-factor authentication as this gives an extra layer of protection against leaked or hacked login details. If your organisation's security policy requires this then the change will be of interest.
As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official release notes. Contents of the release are subject to change.