Pardot Spring 22 Release Overview

Pardot has changed radically over the last few years, with brand new email and landing page editors built in the lightning experience. Not every Pardot customer is using these editors. They're nowhere near as sophisticated as the old editors, missing numerous regularly used features within the classic user interface. Those feature gaps are closing rapidly with each release. This month's Spring 22 release is no exception.

Email Editor

The most notable enhancement in this release comes to the lightning email editor. It's now possible to use the new editor to build emails for auto-responders in automation rules and completion actions. Previously, lightning emails could only be used in batch sends and engagement studio. This is a small change, but an important one as it finally allows the lightning email editor to be used for all email types. Requiring two sets of email templates in different editors was always a non-starter and severely limited adoption of the lightning experience.

Another limitation of the lightning email editor is the lack of customisation. The classic email editor gives users total control of the email HTML, often at the cost of usability. The lightning editor limits users to a standard set of layout and content modules that don't cover every use case. This release introduces custom components, which goes a long way to eliminating this problem.

Custom components aren't a direct replacement for the flexibility of the classic Pardot email editor. Building a custom component for the lightning email editor is far more complicated than coding a traditional email editor. Custom components need to be installed as unmanaged packages in Salesforce, with accompanying XML definitions. As such, they require development skills beyond the capability of the typical Pardot power user.

Still, these changes do make the lightning email editor a viable feature for many more Pardot users than in the past. Admins that haven't tested the feature should take a look to see whether it could help speed up email creation. However, several dependencies need to be configured within both Pardot and Salesforce before the new editor can be activated.

Landing Page Editor

The lightning landing page editor is much newer, only seeing its debut last October. It was a very welcome enhancement, given the severe limitations of the classic landing page editor. However, it's initial iteration needed some more work before it could be used in production. Many of the most pressing issues are resolved in this release. For starters, a couple of UI enhancements mean that it's much easier to build multi-column layouts in the new editor.

The ability to customise form designs was the most pressing issue that has been addressed this month. The new landing page editor introduces styling options for the Pardot form component. This allows users to adjust fonts and colours for forms when they're added to enhanced landing pages. There are also a range of layout options that can be used to tweak margins and label positions, among other settings. The new suite of form styling settings is fairly comprehensive, although it doesn't allow every possible design variation. Still the available options will be good enough for the most common form designs.

A second highly requested change means that it's now possible to add scripts to enhanced landing pages. That means custom scripts and custom styles can be added within the lightning landing page editor. The most common use case for this will be external web analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Hotjar. However, custom javascript also opens up additional customisation options beyond those permitted by the editor UI.

Another new option introduces custom redirects for unpublished landing pages. This is intended for closed registration pages that have been taken offline after the associated campaign has ended. Visitors can be redirected to a replacement page or to a dedicated index page, instead of the main website home page.

Einstein

Einstein introduces a couple of useful AI capabilities that have been seen in competing marketing automation platforms. Einstein Engagement Frequency is an important capability for those marketers sending multiple emails per week. It detects subscribers suffering from email fatigue before they unsubscribe. A new default field identifies prospects that have received too many emails, allowing marketers to exclude them from low priority sends. Sending too many emails is the number one cause of unsubscribes, so leveraging this option will go a long way to reducing list churn.

Anyone using Einstein's ABM features to identify target accounts, will appreciate the other new AI capability in this release. Einstein Account Tier automatically ranks identified target accounts into 4 tiers, based on propensity. Tier A accounts are the top accounts suitable for the 1:1 ABM treatment. The remaining target accounts are split across tier B, C and D, allowing marketers to prioritise the accounts suggested by Einstein for ABM targeting.

Reporting

Finally, a couple of minor security changes should significantly impact overall reporting. Firstly, visitor filters will now be applied retroactively. Typically, visitor filters are used to exclude tests and internal visitors from Pardot reports. However, their usefulness was limited by the fact they only applied to future visits rather than all web activity. That has been fixed, which should improve the accuracy of Pardot reporting.

The other visitor filter change applies to email clicks. Pardot has long tried to exclude clicks by email security filters from campaign metrics. However, this filtering has rarely been comprehensive or effective. As such, the thresholds are being tweaked to catch bursts of multiple opens and clicks from the same IP. Such activity patterns are rarely seen from humans, so they're now excluded from reports on the grounds that such activities are more likely to be bot clicks rather than recipient clicks.

Finally, Pardot is introducing bot protection on forms. Google reCAPTCHA will be used to protect those forms which see an unexpectedly high volume of submissions over a very short period of time. This protection will not be applied to forms seeing typical volumes of submissions, meaning that the Captcha will only be loaded when needed, balancing the security benefits of Captcha with the associated user experience cost. Other form builders should emulate this approach.

As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. Full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official release notes. Contents of the release are subject to change.