Summer’22 Pre-Release – Pardot

It’s officially ice cream weather! Let’s be honest, when isn’t it ice cream weather? This means that the summer release is almost here. I’ve been looking through the Summer’22 release notes and have summarised my thoughts on the two key Marketing Cloud Account Engagement updates below.

Streamline Automation

Anyone who has been using Pardot for a while has felt the pain of needing to use conditional logic on one form submission. For example, you are using one form to capture registrations for a  webinar with multiple session times? You’ll need to integrate your form with a form handler per webinar or use other automation tools in Pardot to achieve this. We even wrote a blog for this hack. Thanks to the Summer’22 release, you won’t need to hack your way through this anymore. Introducing…Conditional Completion Actions!

What this update does is reduce the need for workarounds, and allows you to simply use “if this then that” logic on your Pardot forms. So a prospect registering for multiple webinar sessions can be automatically registered for each one directly from the Completion Actions. From what I’ve seen so far, this looks really similar to the multiple completion actions available on a list email, but with the ability to set multiple different triggers:

I see some great uses cases for this feature in addition to registering prospects to more than one webinar from one form. You can use this to:

• Assign Prospects to regional queues based on the country value
• Immediately filter out students or competitors by decreasing scores or adding them to a list based on job title or company
• Notify different Slack channels based on the enquiry type, product interest or service selected

Review Email Bounces from Pardot

You may have seen the availability improvements that were released in Summer ’21. This was a great enhancement that gave more control and visibility to Pardot users over the mailability of their data. This update seems like a logical follow up for increased visibility for users. Currently, to view bounced data, you have a few options:

1. Manually go through each and every sent email in Pardot, to review the bounced prospects reasons
2. Create a list of prospects with hard of soft bounce, export the data to a csv file for review
3. Create a Salesforce report

But what if you have a load of bounces because of a technical issue, such as your email sending domain becoming unauthenticated? The easiest option here is to create a Salesforce report, but what if not all of your prospects are in Salesforce? Then you’ll need to revert to some of option 2 above, which can be tedious and frustrating. Fortunately, a new report is bringing more bounce visibility to Pardot.

The Email Bounce Report will be available straight from the Pardot interface. I’m hoping that more email reporting will become unlocked in Pardot following Apple Mail Privacy Policy (AMPP) changes from last year. We got a new Open Rules Audit recently, and I’d love to see the Email Client Report which shows the % of AMPP recipients on a list email available for account-wide reporting.

The release is still in preview, so more may come out of this update yet! For now, these are the two main changes I think are particularly noteworthy. The key dates for the Summer’22 release can be found here.

A note on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

I’m still referring to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement as Pardot in any blogs that relate to platform features for now. I’ve seen in the release notes that “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement” has been used a few times, so it looks like the name is being rolled out to Salesforce Help pages now. If you aren’t sure what any of this means, check out my blog on the recent name change.

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