As known, Pardot comes with automation rules which allow you to perform certain marketing and sales actions based on criteria that you specify. It allows you to perform specific tasks to help you achieve your marketing goals. Automation rules make your job easier in a variety of ways like Lead qualification, assignment, task creation, assign to your sales representatives, applying tags, adding to campaigns, etc.

Today I am going to share with you 3 ways to use automation which might be helpful for you to understand the power of Pardot Automation.

1. IMPROVE YOUR LEAD QUALIFICATION MODEL

“Automation rules are a powerful way to customize your scoring and grading models. Consider customizing your global, baseline scoring rules, while using automation rules as an additional layer of measuring and responding to customer engagement and intent. You might look at prospects who meet a certain scoring threshold in addition to specific, tracked activities to do things like:

Increment score even higher. The combination of certain activities maybe even more valuable and indicative of buying intent, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Create a task in Salesforce for the assigned rep. Sales will find great value in real-time alerts through Salesforce Engage. Up the ante by automating task creation for sales users when their Leads or Contacts are especially engaged and ready to buy.
Alert a member of the marketing team. This is a way to proactively alert marketing to affirm the effectiveness of their lead qualification model, or to encourage them to revisit their model to regularly improve and iterate.”

2. CUSTOMIZE AUTORESPONDER EMAILS

Autoresponder Emails are emails that are triggered automatically whenever the prospect engages with your marketing assets.

“Increase personalization and content engagement by sending custom autoresponder emails to prospects who complete forms. Automation rules can be configured to assess field criteria in combination with form submission data to push specific autoresponder emails to prospects who complete forms.”

Autoresponder emails can be used:

After prospects submit a form on your website, prospects receive an autoresponder Welcome Email.
prospect submits a form to download a file on your website, receives an autoresponder email with a link for downloading the file.
A confirmation email for event registration.
and last but not the least, a simple follow up email.

3. WELCOME SERIES FOR NEWLY PROSPECTS

“When new prospects are created, you could create an automation rule that adds them to a list that feeds a Welcome Series Engagement Program.”

For example, when a prospect signs up for a blog newsletter, the action of signing up triggers a welcome email and after that, you can start a journey program with them.

Follow these steps to create a Welcome Journey program for new prospects.

Step 1, add a competition action on form, choose action add to List, and select a list for the subscriber which you want to add after fill-up the form.

Here you can check the Screenshot of Completion Action

Note, this process will add prospects to the list when they fill-up the form.

Step 2, Now, create an Engagement Program and select that list as a Recipient list in the program.

Note:

Suppression List: This will allow you to add those prospects list which you do not want to include in your journey.
Send email during business hours allows you to send emails at specific times or you can skip that part.
Allow prospects to enter the program more, this option will allow prospects to re-enter into that program if they exist by clicking on the unsubscribe link.

Here you can check the screenshot of the Welcome Journey Program