Salesforce Pardot Spring '21 Release Overview

After a disrupted 2020, the Salesforce release schedule gets back on track this month. The roll-out of the Spring 21 release is now under way, with some momentous changes to Pardot. The core Salesforce platform has not been ignored either. Among the usual avalanche of new features are useful user experience tweaks that both admins and end users will appreciate.

Pardot users will already be aware of the biggest change: the end of Pardot only logins. Spring 21 marks a significant milestone on the road to integrating Pardot into the broader Salesforce platform. From next week, it will only be possible to login to Pardot through Salesforce, using a set of Salesforce login details. This has been a disruptive change for many Pardot customers, but one which will ultimately benefit the combined Salesforce and Pardot platform in the long run.

Yet, the end of Pardot's login system is not the only significant update to Salesforce login processes and the Salesforce Identity platform this month. Multi-Factor Authentication will become a mandatory feature for all Salesforce customers from 1st February 2022. After that date, all Salesforce users will need to verify every login using an authenticator app, verification code or security key. That's not an unusual requirement among enterprise software providers, but will be equally as disruptive for many, particularly those using shared logins or legacy integrations.

Campaign Members

Perhaps the most interesting update in this release is a beta. Campaign Members are central to attribution and RoI reporting in both Salesforce and Pardot, but ABM programs have been limited by the fact that only leads and contacts can be added to campaigns. No more. It is now possible to add accounts as members of a Salesforce campaign. This should make a big difference when reporting on many different tactics commonly used across both ABM and demand generation programs, particularly digital advertising channels. All the existing ways of adding campaign members are supported, as are all the existing options for reporting on campaign membership in Salesforce.

First-Party Tracking

In terms of Pardot features, the general availability of first-party tracking is both notable and long overdue. Browsers have started aggressively blocking the third-party cookies used by Pardot's existing web tracking functionality, so users are urged to upgrade sooner rather than later. When enabled, Pardot will now use your existing tracker domains for web tracking, as well as for vanity URLs and hosting landing pages. That will allow much more web activity to be tracked by Pardot, assuming those domains are subdomains of your main website.

The roll-out of first-party tracking does require you to update the Pardot tracking scripts on your website, and it also changes the way web tracking handles campaign association. Instead of having a different tracking script for every campaign, there is now a different version of the tracking script for every domain. You can then set a default Pardot campaign for new visitors to every domain. That reduces the flexibility of Pardot's web tracking slightly, but in a way that will affect few Pardot customers.

Two-Click Unsubscribe

Also on the long overdue list, is two-click unsubscribe. All emails sent from Pardot must include either an unsubscribe link or an email preference link. That requirement exists for good reason, but the unsubscribe link has always suffered from a major flaw: it's single click. Clicking the unsubscribe link is an immediate opt-out, no questions asked. Sure, there's an option to resubscribe on the confirmation page, but that assumes prospects actually see the page to begin with. If an email security scanner clicks the link, then the prospect will be opted out without their knowledge or consent. In an era of strong data protection laws, any such accidental unsubscribes are devastating for both marketer and prospect. This is not a theoretical risk either, there are a growing number of companies using email security scanners and they do show up in click and unsubscribe reports.

Business Units

Pardot customers that use the business units feature to sync one Salesforce instance to multiple Pardot instances will be looking forward to this release. It is now possible to safely sync Salesforce leads or contacts to multiple business units. The importance of this change cannot be understated. Many enterprise users require the kind of data segregation that business units is intended to solve, but those companies often share contacts even in the most segregated of organisations. All Salesforce have done is block the sync of Pardot package fields from syncing to the wrong Pardot instance, but that opens up much more flexibility for enterprises that need to use business units. You will need to re-configure your marketing data sharing rules to take advantage of the update.

Also affecting business units is the ability to report on campaigns by business unit. A new business unit field has been added to the campaign object which records which Pardot instance the campaign is synced with. That eliminates the need for another workaround in environments with multiple Pardot instances. Additionally, it is no longer possible for the Company name setting in Pardot to be different from the Business Unit name for that instance in Salesforce. If the two settings are ever in conflict, then the Business Unit name in Salesforce settings is updated to match the value in Pardot. This generally only affects admins, but does eliminate a potential source of confusion.

Platform Updates

In terms of changes to the core Salesforce Platform, the most welcome feature is the return of manual record sharing. A sharing button is now available for the core Sales objects  in lightning as well as any custom objects. As with the equivalent feature in the classic experience, users can share individual records or lists of records with additional users and groups. That will make the lives of many admins in high security organisations much easier.

Einstein Opportunity is now available to everybody. Previously, organisations needed to have a minimum number of opportunities before it could be activated. That limit has been made redundant by the arrival of global scoring models. Salesforce customers who don't have enough opportunities to meet the threshold can enable a global model, and then switch to a custom model after winning 200 deals and losing 200 deals. Also on opportunities, it's now possible to add custom relationships to Opportunity Product records. This is a long-standing feature request which will benefit many organisations.

Finally, the latest version of the Pardot API reaches general availability. This is a big deal for many reasons, not least because there are different versions of the existing API depending on whether your instance allows multiple contacts with the same email address or not. API v5 also significantly modernises the syntax and enables asynchronous methods, both of which are important to developers, particularly if they also use the Sales Cloud APIs. Most important of all, the new version opens up the API to far more areas of Pardot with an ambitious roadmap of new endpoints awaiting future releases. If those promises are delivered, Pardot is about to get a lot more flexible.

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.