Pardot is a great marketing automation platform with many useful features. Two of those features are called Engagement Studios (ESs) and Automation Rules (ARs). Engagement Studio’s main purpose is to allow you to create email journeys for your prospects and send automated emails at timed intervals. But the ES includes two powerful additional features. Rules and Triggers. Rules allow you to set criteria and evaluate prospect field values or list membership to send the prospect down to another branch of your engagement studio. Simply you can create complex logic with the help of Rules in studios to send emails or change prospect’s field values. In other words the Rule feature inside the Engagement Studio builder is the same Automation Rules that live outside.

If you are a Pardot owner or an administrator you will know that both Engagement Studios and Automation Rules are provided to you with limited supply depending on your Pardot subscription. So if you are like me you are probably thinking thrice before you set up one of these ESs or ARs. In my Pardot I have about 80 ARs that are currently running and I am close to running out soon. I’ve been thinking about how to reduce the number of ARs for sometime. But each AR is accounted for and I can’t really delete any of them. So I’ve been up against a wall. Either I have to buy more ARs from Pardot, yes, they will sell you additional ARs if you run out, but I am frugal so I don’t want to do that. When I was playing around with a new Engagement Studio one day it dawned on me, what I said above, the Rules in Engagement Studios do the same work as Automation Rules. Plus, I can chain the rules in Engagement Studio which is something I can’t do with Automation Rules alone. This was a eureka moment for me. Imagine all the Automation Rules I am running which I can group into a single Engagement Studio, all chained together, and make room for even more Automation Rules!

I know this is all great news for those who rely on numerous Automation Rules in Pardot but it’s also worth mentioning that Engagement Studios are also limited in number. Though in my case it’s well worth it to group my 50+ automations into an Engagement Studio and not have to pay for additional Automation Rules since I am nowhere near my limit with the Engagement Studios.

If you have any questions about how you can group Automation Rules into Engagement Studios please reach out to me. And if you have any tips and tricks up your sleeve for working with Pardot’s limitations I would love to hear from you.