Getting personal with Pardot: How to boost your business with empathy and personalization

Custom marketing is successful marketing, yet many companies take a generic approach to their email campaigns. Learn how to market with empathy and authentic humanity to drive better results. Simplify your Pardot process to accelerate sales cycles and transform prospects into customers.

“Hello, sir or madam. How are you today?”

You’ve never started a phone call or a face-to-face sales interaction with this greeting. We’re sure of it. After all, it’s an impersonal way to begin what should be a personal interaction. It’s also a good way to eliminate any future interactions.

So why are such stale and uninteresting greetings so prevalent in your inbox? It’s unfortunate, but with email, “Dear sir or madam” often makes an appearance. It doesn’t have to.

Personalizing your approach

Research from Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer” shows that “84 percent of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.” If your email marketing is going to successfully navigate its way to being discovered instead of discarded, you want to put your best foot forward. With that in mind, here’s our guide to the ways in which you can make the most of Pardot to do just that.

Attach a name with a face … and an email

It really starts with empathy. There’s another human on the other side of that marketing email, product announcement or event invitation. So start with recognizing the other’s humanity and start using people’s names.

Brain science backs this up. According to Brain Research Journal in 2006, “There are several regions in the left hemisphere that show greater activation to one’s own name…These findings provide evidence that hearing one’s own name has unique brain functioning activation…”(Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/).

When you use someone’s name, whether in conversation or in email as they read it and “hear” it mentally, you literally light up their brain.

There’s simply no reason to continue with “sir or madam”, or worse, some malformed introduction like or ________ or Testy McTestface.

Attach a name — properly capitalized — to every email you send. Remember that Pardot will automate the name based on how you entered the contact’s name into the system, so be sure to check spelling and capitalization upon entering.

Personalization Goes Beyond Names

People are more than their names and personalized marketing sees them as multi-faceted. People want to know you’re paying attention to them. If we are going to market with authenticity, we must take time to learn about our prospects. What’s going on in their world? What is happening in their business? Have they been in the news?

Once you’ve finalized your naming convention, don’t be afraid to personalize the rest of your messaging as well. Offering a niche product or targeting a narrow audience will make personalizing your messaging easier, but even a solution with more universal appeal can benefit from Pardot’s efficient targeting tools.

Enrich your personalization capabilities in Pardot by ensuring that the contact information is complete:

• Title
• Company
• Perceived need
• Location
• Buying period
• Any other unique considerations applicable to your business

This collection of information allows you to search contacts based on any of the above criteria before personalizing your messaging, narrow your segments and then — of course — greeting them by name in your email.

By using Title you can write about what other people in similar job functions are interested in.
…Other regional sales managers in the North East have been asking us about how to accelerate deals, I thought you might like to hear about it too…

By using company, you can inject recent news from their company into a highly personalized note.
…I saw the news that your company just filed to IPO! Congrats! I know it’s a huge undertaking. You might like to hear how we can help keep your customers notified and the market interested…

By using the need they identified you can tailor your solution to their desire.
…I see that you’re investigating CPQ solutions. Take a look at this success story of how we helped install and configure Salesforce CPQ for a customer in your industry…

By using location you can personalize your greeting based on regional happenings or even the weather.
…I hope you’re staying warm and digging out after that blizzard in your area!…

By using their buying period or budget cycle you can empathize and identify with them.
…I understand that the end of your fiscal year is a time when budgets can be tight, that’s why I thought you might like to hear about this special we’re running…

Clean up your prospect data

These focused capabilities are only as strong as the data they pull from, so before you send your email list, take the time to clean up your data.

This process of cleansing your collected data includes the elimination of duplicate data and excess records, updating prospect information – including spelling and capitalization, purging your database of prospects that are no longer with their company — or no longer fit your target — and abandoning corrupted files. Ideally cleansing should be an ongoing process that ties to your Salesforce CRM system. The task can be boring but it is one you shouldn’t put off — it won’t go away on its own.

Instead, take the time to ensure the integrity of your prospect data and you’ll be left with a target audience that reflects your goals.

Timing is, well, everything

You’ve got the right email, the right audience and the right data. Now you just need the right timing.

Research from Salesforce shows that high performers are more than eight times as likely to deliver the right message at the right time when compared to underperformers.

The Canadian Opera, for example, achieved an email open rate of 67% by requiring an email address of every customer who purchased opera tickets and then sending them an email with future discounts during intermission of the current performance. This is expert timing. The potential customers are there. They’re enjoying the show. There is a natural break in the action. Email to mobile phones is the perfect time to engage a ripe audience.

What’s the best time to send your email?

Run tests and experiments.
Is it before or after a big event at their company?

Is it before, during or after a big event in their industry?

Is it before, during or after local news affecting their location happens?

The key in all of these scenarios is to be focused on them; not you.

Identify the best time to engage your audience, set it in Pardot and deliver on it.

Trust Redpath to partner with you for personalization

The best marketing plans will never reach their full potential if you’re not hitting your perfect audience with ideal messaging. Personalization is about empathy. Personalization is about your audience. Personalization counts, and Redpath can help you with your personalization goals as well as your Pardot strategy. Ask us how we can work with you to personalize your company’s goals.