Salesforce Pardot Spring '20 Release Overview

Spring always comes early in the Salesforce ecosystem. 2020 is no exception. After a month of pre-release previews, the Salesforce Spring release lands over the next few weeks. It's a relatively quiet one with no headline grabbing new features, but there are plenty of productivity enhancing changes.

Productivity Enhancements

The most useful of these is the ability to assign tasks to queues. Tasks are frequently used to enforce SLAs and notify account owners of new leads that need to be followed up at their accounts. Some organisations even use them to inform LDRs of new MQLs to call. That latter use case can now be expanded with task queues, which work in the same way as lead queues. Any campaign follow up activities for contacts without a defined owner can be added to a queue for anyone to pick up and action.

The ability to pre-populate new records from parameters in the link will have many uses. This is a feature that existed in classic Salesforce and is now making its way to Lightning. In doing so, Salesforce admins can now create custom buttons within the application or dedicated links outside the app to create new leads, opportunities or activities with required fields that Sales always miss. As such, marketers can make sure important source or campaign details are always correctly populated.

Einstein Everywhere

The nearest thing to a headline feature is Einstein Voice Assistant, which is Salesforce's answer to Alexa or Siri. As with Amazon's famous virtual assistant, Einstein Voice includes the ability to create custom skills. Admins configure these custom skills for Sales reps to use while out on the road. This ensures that records created or updated by voice are including the most important information for your business. Salesforce is highly configurable, and few customers exclusively use the default fields. The emphasis on custom skills for the virtual assistant continues this trend. Unusually, the new virtual assistant is available to almost everyone. Any business using any Einstein product can take advantage of the new app.

AI enhancements feature heavily throughout the release, including in the expansion of another Einstein feature. Einstein Opportunity Scoring is now available to everyone. This feature works in the same way as Einstein's predictive lead scoring features. It just needs to be switched on, assuming you have sufficient data volumes for the scores to be useful. The scores are displayed as a percentage, in effect acting as an automatically calculated probability to close figure. Alongside the percentage, Einstein will also highlight how the score is calculated listing the key positives and negatives affecting the likelihood to win the deal.

Einstein meets Pardot

Equivalent enhancements will make their way to Einstein Lead Scoring in Pardot after this release. In January, the AI powered Einstein behaviour scoring was made available to Pardot-only prospects. Previously, it had required leads and contacts to be in Salesforce before scores could show in Pardot. That has now changed, and all Pardot prospects now have a predictive lead score. Scores are much more useful too because they can be used in engagement studio and in automation rules for segmentation and campaign decisions. Greater detail into how scores are derived is offered through a new dashboard in B2B Marketing Analytics. This dashboard shows the weightings used by Salesforce's AI to score leads, broken down by activity type and the top performing assets. Users can then drill down into the contacts who have performed the most successful activities.

Also coming to B2B Marketing Analytics is an Einstein powered ABM dashboard. This dashboard will only be offered on a pilot basis to select customers initially, but shows an account based funnel as well as top accounts. Eventually, it will be extended to offer predictive analysis on the best tactics and strategies to progress ABM target accounts down the funnel. The existing campaign engagement dashboards also get an ABM makeover, with an additional graph showing the top accounts for each campaign. In addition, Pardot can now link accounts with campaigns by adding a related list to the Salesforce campaign record showing accounts that responded to a campaign. These are small steps that make ABM through Pardot viable for the first time.

HML Landing Pages

January saw a much bigger step forward for landing pages and forms in Pardot. Over the summer, the syntax used to code merge tags in emails changed from the existing PML to HML (Handlebars Merge Language). This rather arcane switch opened up a number of new capabilities in the email editor, including Snippets, which are sections of content that can be reused across emails. The transition to HML / Handlebars has now been extended to forms and landing pages. I covered the advantages of HML over PML in my Winter Release Overview. In short, it's a big deal and admins are advised to migrate their instances to it as soon as possible. Handlebars enabled landing pages now support adding Snippets and Dynamic Content through the UI for the first time, allowing content to be shared across landing pages. In practice, dynamic content has always worked if added through code. HML adds a UI that makes dynamic content much easier to add and edit.

Another benefit of HML relates to the recently released resubscribe feature on forms. The feature allows opted-out prospects to opt themselves back in when they submit a form by triggering a resubscribe email to their mailbox. Unfortunately, the message on the form is hardcoded, and can't be edited or translated... until now. It is now totally editable on a form by form basis, and can be switched off if necessary.

Pardot Improvements

Finally, there are two smaller updates in the January release worth calling out. The first is a new export API for visitor activity that will come in useful for data warehousing scenarios. This new API removes the limits on the existing methods for exporting activity data from Pardot, allowing as much data as possible to be retrieved for analysis and archiving.

Secondly, there is a change in policy regarding dedicated IPs. The Advanced or Ultimate editions of Pardot have always included a dedicated IP for sending email campaigns. This is great for high volume senders because it gives them full control of their deliverability. It's not so good for low volume senders, because ISPs penalise IP addresses which send less than 100,000 emails per month. Consequently, Pardot Advanced customers are no longer required to use their dedicated IP and can choose to send their email campaigns from the shared IP pool. Pardot customers sending less than 100,000 emails per month should make sure they're using the shared IP pool.

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.