If you’re familiar with it you will agree that Pardot is a great marketing tool for emailing, audience segmentation, and it also has good features like forms that you can embed into your website or integrate with your existing web forms to help you collect your customer data. And if you are in a business where your customer’s interests change over time it may become difficult to track the interest data within Pardot, especially if you are offering a wide range of products the data collection can become a nightmare.

A while back a customer of mine was collecting customer interest in a single field and were running reports and automations on, let’s call this field Plant of Interest. They offered many plants to their customers and their customer’s interests kept changing, a customer who was interested in the Pothos plant became interested in the Jade plant six months later. So the Plant of Interest field kept a running list of plant like Pothos, Jade, Snake Plant, Aloe Vera, etc., and the list went on. When the customer wanted to reach out to their customers who were interested in Pothos they would simply build a list of those contacts where the plant name Pothos was included. However there was a flaw in this approach. By doing so they were also following up with customers who were interested in Pothos years ago therefore delivering irrelevant messages to the customers’ inboxes.

To remedy the problem I mentioned above, the customer decided to emails those customers whose records were recently created, for example Radhika whose contact record was created in the system in the past 60 days and where “Pothos” was in Plant of Interest field. This is great though it solves one problem while creating another. What about those customers who have been in the system for years and have just become interested in the Pothos plant in the past 60 days? Those weren’t being targeted in their outreach.

So we said, why don’t we create a date field for each of the plant offerings on the contact record so that we know when the customer became interested in which plant. This method allowed the customer to accurately target their customer base with relevant messaging. Though this has also brought its own challenges. Now we would have 10s of date fields on the contact record, one for each of the plant offering in the portfolio, and while it was working for the the customer and theirs, we started looking a better solution.

So when it comes to working with data, especially manipulating the captured data, Salesforce, or any other programmable relational database really, becomes an extension to Pardot that really stretches the possibilities and let you run your business. Pardot out of the box connects to 4 standard objects in Salesforce, Contacts, Leads, Accounts, and Opportunities. If you had built a custom object and wanted to connect Pardot to it you would need to upgrade your Pardot package, to Plus I think. I am telling you this because we decided to create a Plant of Interest custom object in Salesforce to track customer’s changing product interest in time. The object is tied to the Contact object so when a customer fills out a webform to ask questions about Pothos, Salesforce creates their Plant of Interest record for that plant with the date when customer became interested in the plant. Now this freed up all those date fields we’ve created in the past and cleared up the page layouts. Since the customer’s Pardot instance was already the Plus package we then connected it to the new object and tied it to the automations to run in the background.

This whole progress took a few years of solving problems gradually and in small parts then implementing each solution step by step, and constantly discussing marketing automation challenges with customers, professionals, and developers.

What marketing automation challenges are you faced with? Do you use your data wisely? How do you keep things fresh? Drop me a line below, I’d love to hear from you.