You might have heard the expression “Solve for one, extend to many” – the mantra of inclusive design, which is a huge part of UX conversations. When it comes to Account Engagement Landing Pages, I believe this methodology is about making your pages easy to use for everyone. Continue reading “Build your Landing Pages with UX in mind”
Category: Best Practices
Leading with Data: How CRM Analytics Can Help You Make Better Decisions
Someone asks you to build a report and gives you all the necessary information. You proceed to create it, review it, and test its results. But when you present your dashboard, the person who requested it does not trust the numbers they see. How can you build that trust and start leading with data?
Continue reading “Leading with Data: How CRM Analytics Can Help You Make Better Decisions”
How to improve User Experience on Forms
When it comes to forms, a high submission rate is every marketer’s dream. However, quite often we face bad user experience on forms, which can even prevent the submission itself. Lucky for us, there are plenty of ways to make Account Engagement forms more user-friendly – read on for my top 3 picks.
How to Run a Successful Global Account Engagement (Pardot) Account
Running any Account Engagement (Pardot) account can be a challenge, but even more so when your teams are based around the world. We helped many businesses with the implementation, day-to-day operations, and building strategy for global teams. From organisation and access to brand consistency and training, we’ve seen it all.
Continue reading “How to Run a Successful Global Account Engagement (Pardot) Account”
What are Soft and Hard Bounces?
Any marketer who has sent an email to a list of prospects has likely seen several individual sends flagged as a soft or hard bounce. Keeping on top of your prospect health is recommended as it impacts your overall deliverability rate, which then has implications on your sender reputation over time. But what does a soft or hard bounce mean and what do you do with those prospects? Read on to find out!
Files in Account Engagement (Pardot)
As with all digital platforms, it is impossible to work in Account Engagement (Pardot) without relying on files. The company logo, your latest whitepaper, or a Javascript file doing all the magic on your forms, all of these exist on the platform as files. However, we often take them for granted without thinking about how they should be used. Now, that’s all about to change!
Define Your Global Marketing Strategy with Account Engagement
In the last few releases, the Account Engagement product team has given us some amazing enterprise-level features for global marketing automation. We’ve seen the introduction of Einstein, External Actions and a more powerful infrastructure to back up larger datasets and complex operations. Global enterprise businesses are now choosing Account Engagement more and more. But how does a famously simple tool fit the bill for these multinational organisations?
As with most strategies, success with global marketing automation is born out of planning. The two key parts of this recipe are People and Structure. In this blog, I’ll be focusing on how the structure of your organisation can drive excellence in Marketing Automation.
The key to structuring a successful global implementation of Account Engagement is defining ownership of the platform. The first step is to think about your overall approach to different areas of the platform. Will you opt for a collaborative, global approach or a decentralised, regional approach?
Collaboration AND decentralisation
First up, what does “collaboration and decentralisation” mean? These terms represent the two ends of the spectrum of ownership. In other words, the model for who owns what in your marketing strategy and the balance you strike between top-down central governance and regional independence.
Defining ownership is critical ensuring all the moving parts of your marketing automation platform work together. Poorly defined responsibility leads to duplication of effort, important details being missed, frustration amongst users, demotivation and ultimately, non-adoption.
Collaboration
The spectrum of ownership can be applied to any area of a business. The collaboration end focuses on areas of your strategy which must be globally consistent. This might look like:
- Central governance
- Top-down distribution of process, content or resources
- Consistent implementation across all global teams
- All users working together to adopt a common approach
In the marketing automation context, this might be your data handling policies or your core platform integrations.
Decentralisation
At the other end of the spectrum, you might implement a decentralised approach to strategy. This looks like:
- More flexibility for users in execution
- Regional or cultural differences
- Central guidance and support .
Newsletters or holiday campaigns are a common example of decentralised marketing automation.
Looking for help with Account Engagement?
Applying ownership to Marketing Automation
We’ve seen each end of the ownership spectrum, but it’s not quite as simple as picking a side. You can’t just say “We’re going to be decentralised” or “Let’s opt for collaborative strategies”. There’s a huge grey area, as what works for one element of your marketing automation strategy won’t work for another. So, you may need to be flexible. Ownership of each area is a spectrum and each organisation will fall on different parts of this scale. This position may even shift as time goes on and the market changes. Typically, as organisations grow there is tendency towards the decentralised end, but this is by no means a rule.
Spectrum of ownership
In the diagram below, you can see examples of what each end of the spectrum looks like when applied to different areas of Account Engagement. Try plotting where your organisation sits on the scale for each area. You will probably find you land somewhere more in the middle than right at either end.
Let’s look at an example to illustrate why that is. When it comes to data, you can have an entirely open sharing model. All users can access, segment and market to all records. This is a simple structure but can raise governance concerns, particularly around regional privacy laws and capacity for human error.
On the other end, you could have a totally segregated model, with multiple distinct partitions of data. This means each team “owns” their own portion of the data and users can only access and market to data which “belongs” to their team. This creates more confidence from a governance and security perspective, but can introduce challenges with architecture, permissions and duplicates, potentially creating unnecessary technical debt.
So perhaps you land somewhere more in the middle. This might mean having some way of controlling which regions have access to which data but with some degree of flex where it makes logical sense for a record to be shared. For example, a Prospect lives and works in the US but attends an event in Germany. Both the Americas and EMEA teams are likely to need to communicate with that record without creating duplicates.
How to define your ownership strategy
If you haven’t yet mapped out your ownership strategy, use these points and the questions in the table below to help you understand where your company falls on the scale for each area of Marketing Automation.
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Related processes
Parallel or downstream processes could have a big impact on how you are able to structure your marketing automation strategy. For example, if your sales data is heavily locked down, an open marketing data model may not be appropriate or even possible.
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Team structure
You may want to have centrally created email templates, but if there is only one central marketing manager with limited capacity, this creates a bottleneck and decentralising template creation may be a better option.
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Named owners
You may already have Product Owners or BPOs in your organisation but if not, it’s important that the buck eventually stops with someone. Then, once you’ve decided on an approach, it’s also critical that everyone knows who those owners are. You must not get into a situation of users being passed from pillar to post because everyone thinks someone else is responsible for this field on the preference centre or that newsletter list. Take ownership, write it down and share it. With everyone.
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Technical feasibility
It’s important to understand what the tools you have will do out of the box vs. what you’ll need to create custom. Although every Business Analyst will tell you not to solutionize when defining your objectives, you do need to keep a foot on the ground and make sure where you land is technically possible. If you’re ready to undertake a significant project to heavily customise Salesforce and Account Engagement to achieve exactly what you need then great. But if you don’t have the budget, resource or timeline to do that, you’ll have to colour within the lines a little more carefully and take that into account when defining your strategy.
Once you have defined ownership, it’s much easier to implement a platform that will deliver the results you want. And this applies right from the big structural decisions – whether to use Business Units – all the way through to the detail of execution – who creates the Dynamic Content for your email campaigns.
Summary
Trying to implement Account Engagement (or any Salesforce product) without a clear understanding of how you want it to work from a business perspective or what success looks like is a recipe for disaster. Understanding how you want to approach key areas of Marketing Automation will help ensure you get the platform delivering on that strategy more quickly and more effectively.
If you take nothing else away from this blog post, please remember this: Strategy comes FIRST. The technology is there to support and deliver on that strategy. Define who owns what in your marketing strategy BEFORE you try to design your architecture.
And if you’ve enjoyed this post, you can watch my full presentation of this topic at MarDreamin’ and here are some other resources you might find useful:
A Formula for Success
Formula fields are a great way to derive data using information from the record or related records. You can fall out of love with them because of the dread of updating a long and complex expression and having to understand what each bit does.
In this article, we will talk about some best practices and ways to mitigate against complex formulas. The sections below will guide you through different strategies which can help the future you. This can ultimately help you better understand, maintain and produce more robust and hopefully error-free formulas.
What are Operators?
An operator is an instruction which can manipulate data or apply logic in a specific way to generate a specific result. A full list of operators available to formula fields can be found here.
For example, how do we evaluate ‘Is the country United Kingdom’?
The == operator can help with this expression:
Country__c == ‘United Kingdom’
Now, how can we evaluate ‘Is the country United Kingdom and the county is London?’:
The && operator can help with this expression:
Country__c == ‘United Kingdom’ && County__c == ‘London’
Symbol and text equivalents
Operators can come with symbol and text equivalents. Below are some examples of these:
'X = Y' is the same as 'X == Y'
'X == NULL' is the same as 'ISBLANK(X)'
'X || Y' is the same as'OR(X, Y)'
(Has_Attended__c && Is_Active__c) is the same as AND(Has_Attended__c, Is__Active__c)
Why use a common language?
As symbol and text operators are interchangeable, it can often lead to complex/difficult-to-read formulas.
Imagine the following formula field called ‘Ready to Enroll’ which contains the following expression:
Mix
IF(Is_Active__c && OR(Has_Attended__c == TRUE, Is_Exempt__c = TRUE), TRUE, FALSE) && (Is_Complete__c || Is_Not_Required__c)
A mishmash of operators can lead to difficulty reading and understanding the expression. The above can be written as:
Symbols
IF(Is_Active__c && (Has_Attended__c == TRUE || Is_Exempt__c = TRUE), TRUE, FALSE) && (Is_Complete__c || Is_Not_Required__c)
Text
AND(IF(AND(Is_Active__c, OR(Has_Attended__c == TRUE, Is_Exempt__c = TRUE)), TRUE, FALSE), OR(Is_Complete__c, Is_Not_Required__c))
Having consistent language can help with readability and avoid sudden surprises when updating formula fields.
What are Booleans?
Booleans are a great way to distinguish whether something is true or false. We can further simplify the above example by replacing equal checks on boolean fields. For example, the 2 comparisons below are the same:
- Has_Attended__c == TRUE
- Has_Attended__c
Having a descriptive field name here is key.
Taking the symbol and text examples from above, they can be re-written as:
Symbols
IF(Is_Active__c && (Has_Attended__c|| Is_Exempt__c), TRUE, FALSE) && (Is_Complete__c || Is_Not_Required__c)
Text
AND(IF(AND(Is_Active__c, OR(Has_Attended__c, Is_Exempt__c)), TRUE, FALSE), OR(Is_Complete__c, Is_Not_Required__c))
After taking that extra step to simplify those booleans, it’s now clear we don’t even need that IF statement!
IF(X, TRUE, FALSE) is always equivalent to just X, therefore, our further simplified expression will look like this:
Symbols
Is_Active__c && (Has_Attended__c || Is_Exempt__c) && (Is_Complete__c || Is_Not_Required__c)
Text
AND(AND(Is_Active__c, OR(Has_Attended__c, Is_Exempt__c), OR(Is_Complete__c, Is_Not_Required__c))
Making formulas readable
Line breaks and spaces can play a huge role in readability. All the examples above use one line making it difficult to scan the blocks of expressions it’s trying to evaluate.
Symbols
Is_Active__c && (Has_Attended__c || Is_Exempt__c) && (Is_Complete__c || Is_Not_Required__c)
Text
AND( AND( Is_Active__c, OR(Has_Attended__c, Is_Exempt__c) ), OR(Is_Complete__c, Is_Not_Required__c) )
It is now easier to spot each block within the expression.
Break down those monolithic formulas
Splitting your formula field into separate fields can help alleviate complex expressions. The formula we’ve been working on called ‘Ready to Enroll’, so far, requires many fields to achieve this. If we captured fields into their area of concern, we can achieve a level of abstraction, further simplifying our solution.
We can break down(Is_Complete__c || Is_Not_Required__c)
to its own field called ‘Can_Enroll__c’
The final expression would look like this:
Symbols
Is_Active__c && (Has_Attended__c || Is_Exempt__c) && Can_Enroll__c
Text
AND( AND( Is_Active__c, OR(Has_Attended__c, Is_Exempt__c) ), Can_Enroll__c )
It is worth noting that referencing formulas fields within another formula should be used with caution. Salesforce applies a 3900-character limit, referencing formula fields without knowing their contents can easily hit this restriction.
Are there any tools that can help?
Salesforce provides out-of-the-box formula editors. These come in 2 flavours, Simple and Advanced. Although these generally do the job, there are tools out there to level up that experience.
Better Salesforce formula editor is a chrome extension which adds a new tab to the formula field editor. It provides syntax and bracket pair highlighting as well as other useful shortcuts/syntax-checking features.
Not exactly a tool embedded within Salesforce, however, DrCode – Boolean Expressions Calculator takes in an expression and attempts to simplify it. It can be useful for breaking down repeated logic.
Now it’s your turn
We’ve dived into operators and spoken about having consistent language when writing expressions; simplified expressions by removing specific boolean equality checks; made our expression clearer and more readable by introducing line breaks and better spacing; taken an extra step to break down our formula by separating blocks of expressions into their own concerning field and we’ve introduced tools to help write better, more concise formulas.
We’d love to see which of these combinations you’ve managed to adopt, and how this has transformed your complex, unmanageable formulas. Please share these with us by getting in touch with our team.
No more Spam Form submission in Pardot
Spam form submission is one of the most challenging causes of security risks in the Account Engagement (Pardot) platform. They open a gate not only into your marketing platform but your CMS as well, so you have to protect your platforms and be prepared.
Why you need an Account Engagement Audit
In a previous blog, we asked “Does your Pardot Account Need an Audit?”, where we explained what is involved in a Pardot Audit, and how we at Nebula run these for our customers to ensure they get the most out of their investment.
How to build an organised Account Engagement (Pardot)
Let’s imagine a library before we talk about Account Engagement (Pardot). Books are organised by genres to separate shelves and often categorised in alphabetical order. This makes it easy to find the book you need. Now, why can’t we have that, in the form of an organised account?
Continue reading “How to build an organised Account Engagement (Pardot)”
Preparing CRM Analytics Data With Clicks Not Code
When starting out with CRM Analytics, you have a blank canvas. Unlike with standard operational reports in Salesforce you do not have report types or any data to report on. This means you need to plan and prepare this data yourself in the Data Manager. Although you have to do this work yourself, it gives you great power and much can be accomplished using clicks not code. Continue reading “Preparing CRM Analytics Data With Clicks Not Code”