Pardot Connected Campaigns: 5 Easy Steps

Harsh Varshney • Last Modified: September 7th, 2023

Do you want to know about Salesforce and Pardot online Marketing Campaigns? Do you want to know what are the benefits of integrating Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns? Are you looking for a guide that could help you to set up Pardot Connected Campaigns? All your questions will be answered if you’ve reached here! This article will guide you through the step-by-step process to create Pardot Connected Campaigns.

Upon a complete walkthrough of the article, you will gain a decent understanding of online Marketing Campaigns, Connected Campaigns in Pardot, their benefits, and you’ll be able to set up Pardot Connected Campaigns easily without going anywhere else.    

Table of Contents

Introduction to Salesforce

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Salesforce.com, Inc. is an American Cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services and a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, Marketing Automation, analytics, and application development.

Key Features of Salesforce

Here are few of the many features offered by Salesforce:

  • Feature-Packed: It is a full-featured Marketing, Sales, service, partner management, and community management solution.
  • High Availability: Salesforce data is stored in the Cloud, allowing your team to access it from any location with an Internet connection.
  • Scalable: It is designed to meet the demands of small, medium, and big businesses.
  • Flexible Pricing: Salesforce is a pay-as-you-go service, so there are no upfront charges.

For further information on Salesforce, you can check the official website here.

Introduction to Pardot

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For B2B sales and Marketing businesses, Pardot operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS) Marketing Automation platform from Salesforce that includes Email Automation, Targeted Email Campaigns, and Lead Management. Pardot automates typical marketing operations like consumer behaviour tracking, Digital Marketing, etc. Creating Digital Marketing Campaigns is a job that requires a lot of creativity which is automated in Pardot.

Key Features of Pardot

Here are few of the many features offered by Salesforce Pardot:

  • Visitor Tracking: You can easily track anyone who is visiting your home page, pricing page, kind of content the visitor is interested in, etc. 
  • Real-Time Sales Alert: This feature helps in Marketing Automation and sends real-time alerts to Sales representatives based on their set parameters.
  • Lead Scoring and Grading: To reach the ideal lead prospectus, lead scoring and grading are done for aligning Marketing and Sales teams. Lead scoring and grading depend on factors such as activity levels, stay time, etc. The lead grade tells how fit they are for your product or service. 
  • Automated Lead Assignment: The lead will be assigned automatically to the Sales representative based on the minimum score and grade threshold decided by you.

For further information on Salesforce Pardot, you can check the official website here.

Understanding Marketing Campaigns

Marketing Campaigns use a variety of media across numerous platforms to advertise items, including television, radio, print, and online platforms. The purpose of a campaign usually determines how much Marketing is required and which media platform is the most effective in reaching a given target niche.

In general, all Marketing Campaigns, whether powered by Salesforce, Pardot or another platform, share some common characteristics. They’re made to advertise a product or service across various channels; there’s an end objective to attain, and whether or not that goal is met is determined by monitoring/tracking predefined Metrics.

Now, let’s understand Salesforce Campaigns and Pardot Campaigns.

1) Salesforce Campaigns

Numerous links exist between Salesforce Campaigns and leads/contacts. I.e. A single lead can be associated with a diverse set of Campaigns and similarly, a particular Campaign can generate a variety of leads. At any stage in their lifecycle, these Campaigns can be linked to your leads or contacts. 

Association rules or Salesforce Pardot’s completion actions, Automation, and Engagement Studio activities are used to link Campaigns in Salesforce with leads or contacts. Salesforce Campaigns are integrated directly into the Sales Funnel, allowing for seamless reporting, tracking of Campaign participation and status, and even determining how effective your Campaigns are at closing deals.

2) Pardot Campaigns

Campaigns in Salesforce Pardot capture your prospect’s first point of contact, such as identifying a landing page or webpage with Salesforce Pardot tracking code, clicking on a tracked link, or completing a Salesforce Pardot form. All of Salesforce Pardot’s Marketing assets are linked to Campaigns, so when a prospect engages with one of them, their Campaign is automatically created.

Each Salesforce Pardot prospect can only participate in one Salesforce Pardot Campaign at a time. In other words, a prospect has a one-to-many relationship with the Campaign. Multiple prospects can be paired with a Salesforce Pardot Campaign. Campaigns can be thought of as a prospect’s “Initial Touchpoint” with any of your Marketing assets.

3) Pardot Connected Campaigns

Pardot Connected Campaigns refers to the integration of Salesforce Campaigns and Pardot Campaigns. They both are managed as one and help in ease of analyzing Marketing performance with the help of more Metrics and visualizations.

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Benefits of Pardot Connected Campaigns

Pardot Connected Campaigns are hybrid of Salesforce Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns. Therefore, Pardot Connected Campaigns have few key benefits:

  • The foremost is that Pardot Connected Campaigns’ concept helps eradicate the confusion between two different Campaign setups, namely, Salesforce Campaigns and Pardot Campaigns.
  • The Marketing performance can be seen at a glance and studied by the Sales and Marketing team easily as there are a lot of in-built analytical tools available and the data can be visualized seamlessly. The image below is a sample report of Pardot Connected Campaigns.  
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  • More Marketing Metrics can be seen on Salesforce Campaigns when Pardot Connected Campaigns are established. A large variety of reportable statistical functions are readily available. The Metrics and numbers are easily understandable. The following image shows some Engagement Metrics.
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It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. It allows you to focus on key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools such as Tableau and many more. 

Check out what makes Hevo amazing:

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  • Minimal Learning: Hevo with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
  • Hevo Is Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
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  • Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.

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Prerequisites

  • Working knowledge of Salesforce Campaigns.
  • Working knowledge of Salesforce Pardot Campaigns.
  • A decent understanding of Excel/Spreadsheets.

Steps to Set up Pardot Connected Campaigns

Pardot Connected Campaigns can be set up using the following steps:

Step 1: Logging into a Pardot Account

To begin setting up Pardot Connected Campaigns, you first need to log in to your Salesforce Pardot account. To do so, you can go to the official website of Salesforce Pardot and log in using your credentials such as username and password. The link to the official login page is: https://pi.pardot.com/

Step 2: Creating a New Campaign File

In case you need to set-up new Pardot Connected Campaigns, you need to go to Salesforce Pardot and make a new email and simply select the relevant Salesforce Campaign instead of the Pardot Campaign. In the case of an existing Pardot Campaign, you can simply enter the existing credentials. All of this is done in the Lightning App supported by Salesforce Pardot.

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Step 3: Navigating Campaign Set up Page

You now need to match your Pardot Campaigns with Salesforce Campaigns. This process is called Campaign Alignment. Now, you won’t confuse the concepts of Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns, it’s just one concept of Pardot Connected Campaigns. To begin Campaign Alignment, you will have the following options on the Campaign setup page:

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Step 4: Campaign Alignment

To align the existing Campaigns, you will have to choose the Unconnected Campaigns option in the above step. Now you have three options to align:

Option 1: Connect Individual Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns

This is simply a one-by-one mapping. To do so, select the Pardot Campaign you want to connect. Now simply click Connect to CRM Campaign and select associate Salesforce Campaign with it. You have successfully created Pardot Connected Campaigns by connecting individual Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns.

Option 2: Using Excel, Connect Several Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns

Firstly, click Connect Campaigns with Excel and download the workbook. Once the file is downloaded, copy the values from the Name column of the Pardot Worksheet and paste it into the Connect Worksheet. In the Salesforce Worksheet, copy the corresponding values from the Salesforce Campaign and paste them into the Connect Worksheet with respect to the corresponding Salesforce Name field. Now, delete the unaligned rows from the Excel file and upload it. 

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Option 3: Using Workbench, Connect Existing Pardot Campaigns to New Salesforce Campaigns

To begin, click Bulk Connect Campaigns to New Salesforce Campaigns. This will export a CSV file containing a list of unconnected Pardot Campaigns. You may have to add some fields or columns for Campaigns depending on your organization. You need to log in using your Salesforce account credentials for using the Workbench. The login link for Workbench is:

https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php

Now, you will need to navigate to the Data tab, select Insert action with the object as Campaign and it leads to choosing a CSV file. After selecting the CSV file, you can also map custom fields along with the default mappings and then you simply need to click Map Fields. A confirmation page will appear and then click Confirm Insert.

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Step 5: Use Salesforce to Manage Pardot Campaigns

Now finally, you have to go back to the Campaign set-up page. Click the Pardon Settings tab and select Connectors. Click the Salesforce Connector, and select the Campaigns tab, and click “Use Salesforce to Manage all Campaigns”.

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Bingo! You have now successfully integrated Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns and established Pardot Connection Campaigns.

Conclusion

This article teaches you how to establish Pardot Connected Campaigns. It provides in-depth knowledge about the concepts behind every step to help you understand and implement the same efficiently. You can integrate many such platforms using Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline, which helps you transfer data from a source of your choice in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly. Hevo, with its strong integration with 100+ sources & BI tools, allows you to not only export & load data but also transform & enrich your data & make it analysis-ready in a jiff.

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