Building More Advanced Campaigns: Do I need Pardot (now known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) with my TargetX CRM?
The answer is…maybe. Which part of the enrollment funnel are you looking to communicate with? Who are you looking to communicate with? What data are you already capturing about your students? The questions could go on and on, but if you’re looking for more advanced marketing automation and top funnel marketing conversion analytics for your inquiries or leads, you’d probably benefit from using Pardot/MCAE. If your focus is to drive enrollment for already existing students in your CRM in a more transactional way or want to communicate with parents or alternative emails, you might be better to stay solely with TargetX. Not sure what the differences are between these tools, check out an article we wrote a while back: Comparing Marketing Cloud, Pardot and TargetX Communication Tools: Which do you need?
If you’re not going to use Pardot with TargetX, your ability to use marketing automation is going to be limited, and you’ll probably have a harder time sending the right message to the right student at the right time. With Pardot, you have landing pages, smart forms, website analytics, lead scoring, and much more than TargetX offers. Pardot’s strengths lie in the areas of marketing and sales alignment, lead management and automated actions, as well as marketing campaigns. TargetX’s Email and Form products are the only things that come close to this. In TargetX, you’re missing out on a lot of the power for lead generation and the ability to make lead nurturing more personalized, timely, and easier to maintain.
Scheduling emails, tasks, and actions automatically is achievable very easily in Pardot/MCAE’s Engagement Studio.
Engagement Studio allows you to send follow-up emails, create a logic-based nurturing campaign, and test out scenarios to see how a prospect could navigate through the path.
TargetX has an easy-to-use email builder and an easy-to-use single message scheduler, but scheduling drip campaigns or completing actions after something else happens isn’t possible in the same click-based user interface as Pardot/MCAE. In TargetX, you’d need to use reports or queries and you are limited to email-based options. Any action you wanted to take that wasn’t related to email would need to be created in Salesforce.
For example, if you want to send an email to a student after they click a link in an email, in Pardot, it can ‘listen’ for that happening and you can easily add another email in your Engagement Program to automate what happens next. In TargetX, you could have a report that looks for an Email Broadcast Member (EBM) record with an interaction of a specific URL, but this wouldn’t be real-time, and would largely rely on how long you keep your EBM data in Salesforce – another topic and/or decision TargetX clients will need to consider.
In Pardot’s/MCAE’s lightning landing page builder, you can easily pick components from a sidebar menu, drag them onto the canvas, and position them how you wish using a pop-up menu to the right.
This allows marketers to easily create responsive landing pages to host and track digital ad campaigns. Once live, Pardot/MCAE captures your visitor and prospect activities and form submissions on your landing page, which can be used to score your prospects or complete other actions.
So, do you need Pardot/MCAE? Both tools have their own strengths, and what works for one school might not be the best solution for another school. So as you consider your options, feel free to connect and discuss with us. We are happy to share our thoughts with you.
Once we know more about you, we can help you ask the right questions to assess how utilizing Pardot/MCAE or other marketing automation platforms could benefit you.