Salesforce Pardot opens up Engagement Studio for general release

Salesforce Pardot’s Engagement Studio, which has been available to selected customers in a closed beta, offers a streamlined and more integrated way to plan, implement and test B2B customer journeys.

Today, the company is putting Engagement Studio into general release and unveiling several new features. It’s available to all Pardot customers at no extra charge.

The central idea behind Studio, wrote Pardot VP of Marketing Shannon Duffy in a blog post announcement, is to provide “a solution that is powerful enough to deliver unified experiences, yet simple enough for both [the marketing] team and sales to use.” Studio, Duffy said, makes creating a B2B customer journey “as easy as building a Spotify playlist.”

Here’s a screen showing a customer journey for Salesforce customer company Valpak, which works with businesses to provide packs of consumer coupons:

This B2B command center tracks lead generation, lead nurturing and reporting on one screen that visually represents automated rules, actions and triggers based on Salesforce customer data. It is designed so that a marketer can quickly build a nurturing campaign for a given customer and re-use it for others.

In its announcement, Salesforce pointed to New York City luxury real estate brokerage firm Elegran, which handles various stages of marketing and sales efforts with buyers, sellers and renters. Elegran employs Pardot’s Engagement Studio to direct personalized experiences toward each customer type, with triggers along each part of the customer journey.

The new features include the addition of several dozen pre-built triggers, actions and rules — such as “on this trigger, adjust prospect score and send email” — raising the total to 50+ from 15.

Also, sales reps utilizing the Salesforce Engage mobile app, which has connected mobile field efforts to Engagement Studio, can now add new prospects to Studio from the app. Previously, that addition could only be done from the desktop version, assumedly by someone in marketing.

The enhanced interface also includes new capabilities to drill down inside an item to find in-context reports or the engagement trail of a given prospect, so you don’t have to jump to another screen.

And there is now the ability to run a test with yourself as the user. Adam Blitzer, EVP/GM of Sales Cloud and Pardot’s founder, pointed out that testing in Engagement Studio now shows the built-in logic behind a given step or result, which the previous simulator didn’t offer.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.