Pardot is known for marketing. It’s a marketing automation tool, after all. Its name is Latvian for “to market” or “to sell”. But, that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable in other ways, and many businesses benefit from using Pardot throughout their operations.
At its core, Pardot is a tool that automatically segments an audience to engage individuals in a relevant and valuable way. Sometimes this is a dynamically generated email. Other times it’s tasking a salesperson to reach out personally. This kind of automation is known to have massive impact on pre-sales efforts, but it can also be used in these three non-marketing ways.
Web App Tracking
Pardot tracks the webpages a prospect visits. This activity increases a prospect’s score and indicates how interested they are in a business’ offerings. The more pages they visit, the higher their score goes.
What many don’t realize is that you can set up a similar process for web apps. As long as your app uses a consistent URL structure, Pardot can be used to measure activity on your web app’s pages. For applications with multiple sections or feature areas, you can set up custom fields to add to a different score for each section. Imagine an application with a list page and a report page. At a glance you could see how much of a user’s activity was spend working on a list verses a report.
Product managers can then use this data to measure the success of new features, and account managers can use these scores to reach out to customers that might need extra training or to identify churn risk.
Customer Service
You probably have a support site full of helpful articles for learning how to use your product or troubleshoot problems. With Pardot you can track customer activity on this help site. You can see what pages they’ve been to or trigger a custom set of emails based on their industry or title when they fill out a form to submit a case.
For your most important customers, automatically create a task for your customer service reps to proactively reach out if you see them looking at your troubleshooting guides. The best customer service is the kind you don’t have to ask for.
Recruiting
Recruiting for top talent has never been more competitive. Use Pardot email nurturing to stay engaged with candidates that have expressed interest in your company. Segment those candidates based on role or experience level and quickly put together a list and email when you have a new position opening up.
Improve your recruiting efforts by staying top of mind and connecting the best candidates to open positions before they accept a competing offer.
These few examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Each area could have its own post detailing the many ways you could implement Pardot to improve operations, but I’ll save that for another day.