by Sophie Daniline 
Halloween is fast approaching, and with Halloween comes both tricks… and treats. So to celebrate, here are some of Pardot’s features tricks and treats.
Engagement Studio
The Treat
Pardot launched a new piece of functionality within Engagement Studio in the last couple of years, which allows you to copy and paste steps. This really was a huge treat for those of us who spend our lives in Engagement Studio building our complex programs, as it made building programs with repetitive steps so much faster.
The Trick
If you’re anything like me, then one of the other things you may have tried doing is selecting multiple steps and then trying to delete them. You can’t. I was tricked into a false sense of security.
Automation rules
The Treat
There’s nothing worse than having bad data, am I right?! Luckily, Pardot have treated us to a piece of functionality that allows us to rectify our data woes. Imagine a scenario where you have been collecting country data, and some prospects have been been writing ‘UK’, ‘United Kingdom’, and various other things that make your life hell when you want to pull a list of everyone in the UK.
Automation rules are here to help. You can set up an automation rule to look for anyone with those values, and then adjust that field to equal one consistent value. Dream come true. It will even do it every time it finds an instance of this occurring.
The Trick
The trick here is to not absolutely destroy your data. Automation rules are powerful but, as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. You need to make sure you’re being super specific about who the prospects are that should have their data fields changed. Make sure you use the preview functionality to ensure you’re not irreversibly changing your entire database without realising.
Dynamic content
The Treat
Dynamic content allows you to personalise the emails you’re sending to prospects based on data you hold about them. It’s a really clever way of making your prospects feel special, and not like they are being mass-emailed. Setting this up in Pardot is easy, and there are lots of use cases for it.
The Trick
You can only have up to 25 variations in each piece of dynamic content, and even trickier is that you can only segment by one variable for each piece of dynamic content. So the trick here is to pick the variable that you think will have the most impact… and hope that Pardot develop the platform to include multiple variations at some stage.
A/B testing
The Treat
A/B testing is a must have for your email marketing strategy. It allows you to test different versions of your email, to segments of your audience, before rolling out the winning version to the remainder. A/B testing in Pardot is most certainly a treat. The set up is straight forward, and the reporting is really easy to evaluate. (You can find out more about how to do all of this here).
The Trick
When you’re at step one of A/B testing and you decide you want to test two content variations, Pardot provides you with an A/B test checkbox. Ticking this box at stage one means Pardot immediately creates a second version of your email! That’s right, you have to create both versions of your email separately – meaning double the creation time for a test.
The trick to this one is to create the first version of your email, then go back into the basic settings tab and tick the ‘A/B’ testing checkbox. This will then create a second version of your email, allowing you to make the changes you need for your test, without having to create the second version from scratch.
Up for some spooky Pardot fun? We’re hosting the Pardot meet-up here at Nebula this month. You can register here. Costumes encouraged.