Create your Pardot email templates

Pardot offers you great functionality to easily create mobile-friendly email templates with several design options that you can tailor to your specific needs.

Follow these easy steps to create your first Pardot email template:

1. Choose your template
   Whether you need a simple thank you email, a weekly newsletter with several articles or a content-led email within a drip program, choose the template that best suits the information you want to send.
2. Edit your content
   Start editing your content by clicking on the sections of the email you want to amend. It will be brought up into the editor where you can add text, upload images, add hyperlinks and more.
3. Change the layout
   Pardot makes it easy to add or remove sections and move them up or down within the template so you can customise the template to suit exactly what you need.
4. Sync your text version
   Go to the text tab and ‘Sync From HTML’ to create a text version of your email.

Get personal

Personalisation has long been proven to result in higher engagement from readers with one survey claiming personalised emails have a 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates. Pardot offers a few easy ways to give your emails a more personal touch:

• Personalise your subject line or salutation
  Add a variable tag in your subject line or within the body copy of your email to bring in data that you know about your audience such as their first name or company name. Top tip: Remember to amend the prospect field settings to include a default value should a recipient not have any data for the field you want to personalise.
• Personalise your sign-off with the name and contact details of specific sales reps
  Similar to using variable tags to personalise emails with your audience’s data, you can also use them to create personalised sign-offs from your sales team, dynamically created depending on which sales rep is the assigned user (lead or contact owner in Salesforce) for that prospect. Top tip: Your sales reps must be set up as users in Pardot and make sure that their contact details are up-to-date before you start including them in your emails.
• Create personalised sections using advanced dynamic content
  Advanced dynamic content enables you to personalise entire sections depending on your recipients’ data. For example, you might want to send one weekly email with 4 different content areas specific to your recipient’s industry. You can add dynamic content to your email templates rather than creating 4 different emails and segmentation lists every time.
• Send your email from the sales rep
  Along with creating a personalised sign-off with the name and contact details of specific sales reps, your marketing emails can appear to come from them too. Use flexible sending options to send your emails from the sales rep to give it even more of a personal touch. Top tip: Engage with your sales team to get the tone of your email right, ensuring it works with the sales process and more importantly so they know that emails are going out that appear to be from them!

Testing, testing, testing

Before you send to your recipient list, you’ll want to see what your email will actually look like for your audience. Pardot email templates are a great starting point for building your email, but once you put in your own content you still want to be sure it renders well across multiple devices.

Quick proof:
If you aren’t using any kind of personalisation, then you can send a proof to an individual email address to quickly see what the email will look like in your inbox.

Set up a test list:
To test any personalisation or dynamic content, we recommend setting up a Test List that includes a number of test prospects across all variations of your dynamic content (so if you’ve set it up to show different content depending on industry, set up prospects that sit in each of your industry sectors). When you send to a test list, it will pull in all of the relevant data from the variable tag or dynamic content so you can see multiple versions of your email that your audience will receive.

Render test:
If you have advanced email analytics on your Pardot account, you can run render tests on your email template. This will show you what your email looks like across popular email clients, devices and browsers so you can be sure in one glance that your emails will look great for your audience. If you haven’t got this feature, then we recommend sending a test email to several email clients and viewing across a number of popular browsers or devices to be confident that your email looks as you expect it to.

Not sure what template will work best for your email? Read our next blog post Our guide to the best Pardot email templates for some suggestions.