I get this question a lot.
Let me start by painting a picture.
Marketing and sales often live in two different worlds.
Marketing teams will launch campaigns, report on metrics, and share with executive leadership – but sales isn’t always involved and is unable to see any direct correlation between campaigns, leads, and opportunities.
Sales teams will network, gather contacts, and move leads through the sales cycle – but marketing has no idea who, what, or how sales is finding, qualifying, and communicating with leads.
This disconnect is present in far too many businesses and results in wasted effort on both sides of the business.
If only there was some way for marketing and sales to work together to share information on campaigns, prospects, lead generation, ROI, and reporting.
Fortunately, there’s a solution.
That solution is Account Engagement.
In this letter, we’re going to begin our exploration into Account Engagement.
What is Account Engagement?
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, is a B2B marketing automation tool, most commonly used by enterprise-level organizations.
Account Engagement helps you generate more high-quality leads while bridging the gap between marketing and sales.
You’re probably familiar with Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM software provider.
Account Engagement is the marketing automation tool from Salesforce that directly integrates with Salesforce CRM.
Sales will use Salesforce to collect information on leads, contacts, organizations, and opportunities, while marketing will use Account Engagement to generate leads, segment lists, communicate with prospects, and report on campaign data.
Account Engagement integrates directly with Salesforce CRM allowing information to flow across both platforms.
This means that sales gets a peek into where leads are coming from, and marketing can see how the leads they provide perform during the sales cycle.
This integration is critical as it allows both teams to understand the core of the business and adapt and make data-driven decisions on both ends of the cycle.
What makes Account Engagement such a special tool is the robust set of capabilities that come out of the box.
Some of the features within the tool:
Email
Lead capture
Automation rules
Segmentation lists
Scoring and grading
Website visitor tracking
Content personalization
Integrates with Salesforce CRM
Custom landing pages and vanity URLs
The Engagement studio (a custom journey builder for drip campaigns).
While Account Engagement is most often used by B2B enterprise-level businesses doing 1M-10M in annual revenue, the tool is extremely versatile and can be leveraged for B2C and even non-profit organizations.
Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the main capabilities and benefits of the tool:
In my time working with Account Engagement, I’ve worked in both the B2B and non-profit industries. The email functionality within Account Engagement is always the biggest value add to an organization.
You’ll start by building email templates, these can be elegantly designed or intentionally minimalistic, based on your use case.
The new email builder within Account Engagement makes customizing templates and emails easy and even a bit of fun.
Within the email builder, you’re able to drag and drop content components to build a custom layout, and tailor colors to match your brand guidelines.
Creating email templates for different communication types helps save your marketing team time as well as even creating pre-approved templates for sales to send directly from salesforce.
You can send list emails on the spot, or schedule them in advance.
Account Engagement makes it easy to build, test, schedule, and send email communications that look professional, and best of all, all the engagement is trackable.
We’ll touch more on engagement reporting in a future letter.
Segmentation Lists
Now that you’ve built out an email you’re going to need a mailing list.
Account Engagement gives you a few options on how to import contacts, build segmentation lists, and leverage prospect data to segment for more personalized communication.
Within the tool, you’re able to create the following:
Static lists
Dynamic lists
Suppression lists
Public lists
Email test lists
CRM visible lists
More on these in my forthcoming letter on understanding segmentation lists.
What you need to know at this point is that you’re able to segment prospects, and thus communicate with said segments in a fashion that allows you to get more personal.
You wouldn’t want to speak to all of your customers in the same way.
Some are interested in service A, while others are interested in service B.
Some customers are loyal supporters, and some are still in the nurturing phase.
At a high level segmentation lists allow you to group prospects in an intelligent way to send personalized communication that will ultimately provide more value for your audience.
However, you can’t segment contacts if you don’t have any.
Next up we’ll take a look at Account Engagement’s lead capture capabilities.
Lead capture
Lead capture can arguably be said to be the most important part of your marketing funnel.
If this is a new term for you, lead capture refers to the forms on your website or landing page that allow website visitors to share their contact information with you.
In Account Engagement this process is called conversion.
When an unidentified website visitor submits their information via a form, they convert and become an identified prospect.
The most common types of lead capture forms are “subscribe” and “contact us” forms.Both are simple in nature but are often confused.
Subscribe forms are for contacts who want to sign up to receive your communications.
Contact us forms are for contacts who have questions about some aspect of your business.
Not everyone who submits a contact us form wants to receive your newsletter, so be careful about opting these folks in, unless they have explicitly requested to be added to your mailing list.
Within Account Engagement, you have two ways to capture leads:
- Account Engagement native forms
- Account Engagement form handlers
Account Engagement form (iframe) forms:
The standard forms available to be built within Account Engagement are deployed as an iframe.
They need to be placed within a container, either on your website or on an Account Engagement landing page.
These forms are customizable, but a headache to style.
If you’re on WordPress, I would suggest staying away from this option as the forms provided are not that visually appealing and require heavy HTML coding to style.
Account Engagement form handlers
Form handlers are where the magic happens. I would always recommend a form handler over the standard iframe-type forms.
Form handlers allow you to pull data from forms being submitted on your website.
Rather than pulling your hair out trying to style the form via HTML, you can use form builders native to your website which are 10X easier to style and customize.
You’ll need to map the fields on the form handler to match the fields on your form, but once you’re done, data will flow directly from your website over to Account Engagement.
Now that your forms are set up, we need to consider what we want to happen on the backend when they get submitted.
One of the most elegant capabilities within all Account Engagement forms is called “completion actions”
Completion actions allow you to add, manipulate, and leverage prospect data upon submission.
This means we can tailor automations to trigger each time a prospect fills out a form.
From sending autoresponder emails to adding scoring points based on prospect interests, forms are a massive piece of the marketing automation puzzle.
The final core element we’ll talk about today is Account Engagement’s automation rules.
Automation Rules
As your customers engage with your marketing materials and make their way through the sales funnel, they are learning and developing a better understanding of the value you can provide them.
As marketers, it’s our job to not only know where they are in this process but to tailor communications based on their needs, interests, and personal preferences.
With the robust reporting available for marking assets, list emails, forms, etc. you could go and manually check if John Smith opened the newest newsletter. You could see if Jane Doe filled out a form for your newest white paper.
But you’re a busy marketer…
You don’t have time for that.
Instead, we’re able to have Account Engagement automation rules do the tedious work for us.
Similar to the completion actions mentioned above, automation rules will allow you to set logic-based rules to affect prospect data.
For example, we can set an automation rule to add any prospect who came into our system from an event to our event-specific nurture campaign.
Another example would be to add all prospects who have a score of 500 or higher into our “Superfan” segmentation group that gets access to exclusive content.
All of this is done continuously in the background.
Set the rules and forget about them, while they segment, manipulate, and move prospects according to the strategy you built.
This letter is getting a bit long but here are some of the other capabilities we’ll touch on in the future:
Scoring and grading
Reporting
A/B testing
Custom landing pages
The Engagement studio
Content personalization
Campaign management
Overall Account Engagement is a MASSIVE tool.
Learning each section of the tool takes time, but the payoff is well worth it.
Whether it’s building emails, segmenting your audience, automating pesky processes, or reporting on campaigns, Account Engagement allows you to upgrade your workflow, deliver sophisticated communication, grow your audience, and ultimately maximize your ROI.
If you’ve gotten this far I appreciate you and hope this was of value.
I’ll see you next Tuesday.
– Vincent
