In the world of customer engagement, having a personalised and branded space for your community is essential. Salesforce Digital Experiences provide a powerful platform for collaboration and interaction, and one way to enhance your Digital Experience is by setting up a custom domain to make this personal to your brand. Continue reading “How to Set Up a Custom Domain for Your Salesforce Digital Experience”
Category: Technical
GitHub Copilot
To my surprise, GitHub Copilot is an astonishingly good tool for developers. In this post, we will look at some AI history and context, then get into some example interactions of coding with Copilot.
Validate your Email Sending Domain in Account Engagement (Pardot)
One of the changes for Account Engagement in the Spring 23 Release is a new way to validate your email sending domain. If you’ve been using Account Engagement for a while, chances are you set up your domain during implementation and haven’t thought much about it since. So, what does this change mean and what do you need to do?
Continue reading “Validate your Email Sending Domain in Account Engagement (Pardot)”
Manage your Webinar Campaigns with Account Engagement
Integrating your webinar platform with Account Engagement allows webinars to become part of your marketing automation strategy. Lucky for us offers an out-of-the-box connection to the GoToWebinar platform that can work seamlessly with your campaigns.
Continue reading “Manage your Webinar Campaigns with Account Engagement”
May 2023 Update: Opt Out Sync Behaviour
Based on valued feedback, you can now use the most recently updated field value as a source of truth for the prospect Opted Out field.
In the Spring’23 release, you would need to set either Account Engagement (Pardot) or Salesforce to win if there is a discrepancy between the two systems. But in the recent Summer’23 release, the third sync option is back after community users raised the idea to reinstate the field sync behaviour of “If values differ when data is synced: Use the most recently updated record value” on the IdeasExchange. The value will be available again on 13 June 2023.
If you needed more time to prepare for the update, good news!
The date of this update has now been postponed to 18 October 2023 as detailed here – so make sure to mark the new date in your calendar. You can read our blog post about what this change means for you in greater detail and what steps you can take to prepare. Salesforce has also released their recommended workaround if you need to be able to sync the Opt Out from Salesforce to Account Engagement here.
Looking for help with Account Engagement?
Note that if you do choose to have neither Salesforce nor Account Engagement as the source of truth for the opt out field, you will need to collaborate with your Salesforce Administrator to enable Field History Tracking on the opt out field.
Find out more information about opt out field sync options here.
Philosophy, Challenges, and Opportunities of DevOps on Salesforce
DevOps on Salesforce is not simple. But why does it have to be so complex? If we go back to the beginning and think about the philosophy of DevOps, it reminds us of what we’re actually trying to achieve. It helps us to understand which scenarios demand layers of tools and processes, and which scenarios can be solved simply. It also highlights the opportunities: What can we gain by adopting these practices?
Continue reading “Philosophy, Challenges, and Opportunities of DevOps on Salesforce”
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.
What do the diffs in a GitHub Pull Request actually tell you?
You’re reviewing a Pull Request (PR) on GitHub. You see a list of diffs from the files changed in the PR. But what, precisely, do the diffs represent? I had a model for this in my head. Recently, I was forced to realise that my model must be wrong. Reviewing a PR started me on a journey into “two-dot” and “three-dot” diffs in git. That journey updated my mental model for GitHub and I hope that it will also be a useful lesson for you when you are working with PRs on GitHub yourself.
Continue reading “What do the diffs in a GitHub Pull Request actually tell you?”
Become an HTML email marketing expert
As a digital marketer, you have likely come across HTML at some point, and let’s face it, it can look a bit overwhelming when you are unfamiliar with how to code.
Whether you are trying to just understand how HTML works or want to up your email marketing game by adding new features but are not sure where to start, this post is for you. It will provide you with the best practices, resources, and HTML generators to get you started plus make you look like an HTML pro.
Why You Need to Stop Using Completion Actions on Custom Redirects
Form-free event registrations, double opt-in processes, ad click tracking… there are many use cases for adding Completion Actions on Custom Redirects. But in a cookie-free future, marketers will need to look elsewhere to automate actions based on link visits. If this is all gobbledigook so far, don’t worry. Let’s break it down and see how you can create some smart automated processes with one simple trick.
A Typical Use Case for Custom Redirects
Custom Redirects are Pardot’s way of creating uniquely tracked links. These links allow marketers to see how many prospects have clicked a specific link and, most importantly, who they are as long as they are a tracked Prospect. Think of them a little like Pardot’s equivalent of utm tracking. You can have one landing page and create multiple Custom Redirects to identify who came to that page from your different sources – social media, an email newsletter, a blog etc.
Pardot also allows you to add Completion Actions to these links. This means that when any tracked Prospect clicks, Pardot can automatically update their record, add them to a list, assign them and more. A really common use case for this functionality is a two-step email verification or opt-in process (illustrated below). When a prospect signs up via a form, they receive an autoresponder and must click a link within the email to verify their subscription. That link is a custom redirect and, because Pardot is already tracking this Prospect following their form completion, the completion actions will apply immediately:
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- The verification email is triggered by a Prospect completing a Form or an Automation
- Rule to verify imported Prospects from an event, for example.
- The email is sent to the Prospect via Completion Actions. This email contains the Custom Redirect.
- When the Prospect clicks on the link, they access the Custom Redirect.
For a cookied Prospect, the Completion Actions fire and an Activity is logged on the Prospect Activity History. - At the same time, the Prospect is redirected to the destination URL.
What’s the issue with Custom Redirects?
However, tracking on Custom Redirects is entirely reliant upon the Pardot cookie already being in the browser when a Prospect clicks it. This means that if the browser is not already cookied when the Custom Redirect is clicked, the actions won’t fire and your confirmed opt-in process will not be reliable. For example, if they have been imported from an event delegate list. Read more detail in this Salesforce help article. You could end up excluding valuable prospects from your email campaigns all because of a missing cookie. In our use case, step 4 simply does not happen:
Solutions
There are two potential workarounds to this cookieless scenario. Both are simple to set up but we would highly recommend the second approach listed here, using Pardot Form Handlers.
1 – Engagement Programs
There is a more detailed description of this issue on this Salesforce help page. In this article, Salesforce also suggests one potential workaround using an Engagement Program. As they describe, rather than using an autoresponder to send the email containing custom redirects, you set up an Engagement Program which sends the email and uses a Trigger step to listen out for a click on the specific link. Although this does work and is much more reliable than a Custom Redirect, there are two key downsides to this approach:
- Timing – Prospects can take up to 10 minutes to join an Engagement Studio and perhaps longer for actions to be applied. For anything which requires an immediate response, such as sending an autoresponder, you may not want to introduce this delay.
- Scalability – each Pardot tier has a limit on the number of Engagement Programs that can run at the same time. Using Engagement Programs to replicate Completion Actions could risk hitting this limit.
2 – Form Handlers
An alternative approach uses Pardot Form Handlers to mimic the behaviour of a Custom Redirect. Because a Form Handler submission relies on an email address, rather than a cookie, the Completion Actions will always fire. Even if the prospect has not already been cookied or clicks the link from a non-tracked browser or device.
To set this up:
- Create a Form Handler:
- Set the Success URL and Error URLs to Specific URL and enter the Destination URL you want Prospects to go to
- Add email address as the only field using email as the External Name
- Add your Completion Actions
- Copy your Form Handler URL (make sure you use the version with the Tracker Domain NOT go.pardot.com)
- In your email, update your CTA to add the Email Merge Field at the end of your Form Handler URL like the example below:
If you are still using legacy Variable Tags, use %%email%% instead. Then go and upgrade your account to HML 😉
To visualise this more clearly, below is the journey that a prospect goes through using this Form Handler method:
In this instance, the process is exactly the same as our first scenario using the Custom Redirect, but with a Form Handler instead and step 4 will complete even when there is no existing Pardot cookie.
This whole process takes the same amount of time to resolve as a Custom Redirect so there is no negative impact on user experience. To demonstrate that, here’s a live action demo of this taking place from the customer perspective!
Summary
So, there you have it. Why you need to stop using Completion Actions on Custom Redirects and what to use instead.
TL;DR version:
No cookie = No Completion Actions for Custom Redirects 👎
Engagement Programs take too long and aren’t scalable 👎
Use a Form Handler in place of a Custom Redirect 👍
Important Note
This solution involves sending data to a form handler via a URL parameter, which could be at risk of bot submissions or mailicious activity. If you have any concerns about this, please consult with your IT team before implementing the solution.
If you want to prepare for a cookie-free future, get in touch with our Pardot experts today and see how we can help you.
Manage Record Types with SFDX
Have you ever faced the task of updating profile assignments of record types? This can be a time-consuming and complex task. Let’s see how we can manage record types with SFDX.
Let’s talk about Pardot Sandboxes
Pardot sandboxes have been available to accounts using Advanced or Premium since the Summer ’20 release. This seemed to herald a shift towards better development best practices when using Pardot. It came alongside other features to more closely align administration of Pardot and Salesforce.