Salesforce Pardot Summer 22 Release Overview

With the arrival of warm days and sunny skies, it's time for the Salesforce Summer release. The next two weeks will see the arrival of a whole swathe of new features across the Salesforce platform. It's not the blockbuster update that we saw with the spring release back in February. However, there's still plenty of interesting changes that benefit both admins and end users.

From a Pardot perspective, the headline feature is undoubtedly Einstein Send Time Optimisation. This is a lightning experience feature integrated into the new email builder. As with similar features already available on other marketing automation platforms, Send Time Optimisation allows users to delegate decisions around email send times to the Salesforce AI engine. Pardot will choose the optimum send time for each contact based upon their previous activity history. Marketers can select a deadline by each all emails must be sent. The default for this option is 72 hours after the configured send time, although this can be reduced if necessary.

Send Time Optimisation is a useful feature for many campaign emails. It doesn't work with everything, so the traditional send now and send later scheduling options still exist for emails that are time sensitive and must be sent at a particular date and time. This rarely applies to newsletters or nurture emails. Experience from other platforms shows that using Send Time Optimisation to send emails at the optimum time for your audience does improve open and click-through rates. As such, it's a feature well worth experimenting with in the coming weeks.

ABM Features

That's not the only AI feature making its way into Pardot this month. Einstein Key Account identification is also making its debut in a beta capability. This takes the guesswork out of target account selection for ABM campaigns by using an AI model to do the job. Accounts are graded using tiers between A and F. In effect, it works like an automated version of Pardot grading or profile fit scoring from other marketing automation platforms. As with the other Einstein scoring models, Key Account identification also includes an explanation of the factors considered when the grade was calculated on the account record.

Another critical new feature for ABM programs is the rollout of Accounts as Campaign Members in both Salesforce and Pardot. This was made available as a public beta in the last release and is now being switched on for everyone. In doing so, it solves a critical feature gap for account level campaigns run through inbound channels, such as social or programmatic advertising. The new generation of personalised DM services such as Sendoso will also benefit from this feature. It means that accounts can be added directly as campaign members, even if they don't have any contacts associated with them. For the first time, that makes ROI reporting on ABM initiatives a realistic possibility in Salesforce. No doubt ABM and marketing automation platforms such as Demandbase will add support for this feature over time, but for now Pardot users get a headstart.

Do Not Email Changes

As exciting as all these changes are, the most important change for Pardot admins is the new marketability status settings. Pardot is gaining a new marketability section on the prospect record, which finally clarifies exactly when prospects can and cannot be emailed. This has long confused even experienced Pardot users, who struggle to understand the complex interplay between the Email Opt Out, Do Not Email and Pardot Hard Bounce fields. Understanding when Operational Emails will be sent has been a particular issue. The new settings section clears up the confusion by saying exactly when both operational emails and marketing emails can be sent to a prospect.

These marketability changes are opt-in only for now. Admins have until the Winter release in October before they're automatically enabled for everyone. The delayed rollout is required because the changes impact how the Do Not Email and Email Opt Out fields actually work. These fields are no longer linked. In the past, an unsubscribe would set both fields. That is no longer the case. When the prospect unsubscribes, only the Email Opt Out field will be updated. The Do Not Email field will not be changed.

This gives marketers total control over the Do Not Email field, meaning it can be used to suppress competitors or sensitive accounts that you don't want to email for internal reasons. You can even update the Do Not Email field from within Pardot using engagement studio or an automation rule, allowing you to temporarily override the Do Not Email status if you ever need to send a campaign to suppressed contacts. Additionally, it is now possible to easily reset both the Do Not Email and Email Opt Out fields from Salesforce should it be necessary to do so. That solves an age old challenge that even the strictest of companies run into eventually. There are compliance risks associated with this change, but it is a net benefit for Pardot, simplifying the admin experience and bringing it into line with competing marketing automation platforms.

Admin Enhancements

Also simplifying the admin experience is a new user role in Salesforce. An increasing number of Pardot features are now configured through Salesforce setup rather than in Pardot. This causes challenges in organisations where marketing is not allowed admin access to Salesforce. In the last release, a new Marketing Setup section was added to Salesforce, which grouped the relevant Pardot and Marketing Cloud configuration screens into one place. Now, a new Marketing Admin permission set in Salesforce will allow Salesforce admins to grant access to Marketing Setup, without giving access to the far more sensitive CRM setup screens. This will be sure to delight IT, so make them aware of the change.

B2B Marketing Analytics users should take a look at Object Sync for Pardot, an existing beta that now reaches general availability. Object Sync is intended to speed up B2B Marketing Analytics by pushing all your Pardot data into the Tableau CRM platform that hosts B2BMA. You may know Tableau CRM better by its old name of Einstein Analytics, following its renaming earlier this year. This new feature gives a lot more control over which Pardot data is synced to Tableau CRM and how often it is synced. Pardot users with large amounts of data will benefit substantially from this functionality, while smaller users won't see any noticeable impact.

Template Changes

Elsewhere in the Salesforce platform, a new Salesforce CMS option will benefit Pardot users. The new lightning email editor requires Salesforce CMS to be enabled. That's because all assets and images used by the editor are stored in the CMS rather than in Pardot. Some Pardot users have held off on enabling the lightning email editor for this reason. However, it is now much easier to enable Salesforce CMS because the requirement to configure a custom domain has been removed. Salesforce CMS can be configured to use a Salesforce branded domain instead, although I would still recommend using a custom domain instead where possible. There are minor deliverability and security benefits to using a branded domain for hosting images and files.

Finally, users of dynamic content will be pleased to see a minor UI enhancement to the list views. The asset ID for each dynamic content section will be displayed when viewing the list of dynamic content in Pardot. This makes it much easier to add dynamic content into templates, and makes it possible to check which section your merge tags are referencing prior to send. This will be sure to cut down on send errors.

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.