Pardot Winter '19 Release Overview

Fresh from Dreamforce, the Salesforce winter release is now upon us. Headlining the release is some new forecasting capabilities surrounding account territories. However, another key focus appears to be encouraging adoption of the lighting experience. It has been several years since lightning was first launched, but relatively few established Salesforce customers have made the migration due to the complexity of the migration process.

The general availability of Pardot in Lightning Experience is part of this push. This has been in beta for 6 months, and now finally reaches full release. It integrates Pardot directly into the Sales Cloud Lightning Experience for reporting and activity tracking. This allows for Pardot campaigns, activity and assets to be included in Salesforce reporting. With Lightning enabled, customers no longer need to use Pardot's weak reporting capabilities to prove campaign results because all the data needed to build reports is available within Salesforce Einstein Analytics as well as directly within Salesforce. The integration also replaces the Engage sales enablement plugin, ensuring that the capabilities of this tool match equivalent offerings from Marketo and Eloqua. As a result, the full prospect engagement history can now be displayed to Sales within Salesforce.

Engagement

The primary updates in this release are to Engagement Studio, as part of the ongoing process of bringing Pardot's workflow engine up to match the competition. This includes repeating programs that allow prospects to enter and run through an engagement program more than once. Copy and paste of program steps matches a feature already in Eloqua. So are the more granular reporting and user permissions that round out the upgrade.

The most significant change is actually the ability to send non-marketing emails through Pardot. This can be used for support communications and customer lifecycle emails, which previously could not be sent through Pardot. At first glance, the new operational emails feature is minor, but it indicates a shift in Pardot's usage policy. Historically, Pardot have had an extremely strict opt-in policy that they rigorously enforce on customers. Failure to comply can lead to account termination. Now, there is a setting in the email editor that allows admins (and only admins) to send emails to opted out contacts.

Also in this area is an integration change that allows the Pardot opt-out flag to be reset from Salesforce. Previously, the only way to opt-in a previously opted-out contact was to ask a Pardot admin to do it, or for the contact to make the update using a preference page.

Integration Updates

There are a few other updates to the Salesforce integration. Most notably the ability to sync Pardot campaign membership to the matching Salesforce campaign. Previously, this wasn't possible, which limited the usefulness of the connected campaigns feature that launched with much fanfare over the summer. Now connected campaigns merit further investigation as they allow Pardot campaigns to be used for first touch attribution and Salesforce Campaigns to be used for multi-touch models with no conflict.

For admins, there is a new integration capability that eliminates an annoyance found across all marketing automation platforms. When a new field in Pardot is mapped to a Salesforce field, the contents of that field are not updated on existing contacts in the marketing automation platform. A manual update is required. Pardot will now handle that process automatically.

Partnerships

There are still a number of areas where Pardot has no native solution to compete with competing platforms. Account based marketing is one particularly major feature gap. Consequently, it is interesting to see that Salesforce are leaning on Demandbase for this capability. Demandbase launched a new integration with Pardot earlier this year, which was promoted heavily at Dreamforce. This does fill the gap but at the cost of requiring Demandbase, which is far from cheap.

There has been a definite increase in the number of technology vendors integrating with Pardot over the last year, particularly at the enterprise end of the market. Until recently, vendors typically only supported Marketo, Eloqua and occasionally Hubspot. Many platforms still have a much deeper integration with Marketo or Eloqua than anything else. Demandbase are unusual in that they have leveraged their Salesforce integration to build a much deeper connection with Pardot than with other marketing automation platforms. With Pardot becoming a more integrated part of the Salesforce family, the quality and quantity of third-party integrations with it will continue to increase. This is good news for both Salesforce and their customers.