This idea came to me by way of my very own inbox. A few months ago, I got married. During the planning process, I registered on one of the many popular websites out there that require you to create an account to view their articles and resources. That site then took my information and shared it with a plethora of their partners, who sent me dedicated emails advertising their own services.

At that time, many of these offers were actually highly relevant and I wasn’t too annoyed by the influx of messages in my inbox. However now, months later, I’m still getting the occasional offer which I no longer need.

Today I unsubscribed from a particular partner and this was their unsubscribe page:

Bad Unsubscribe Page Example

This page told me a few things. It told me how I got on their list (oops, I forgot to un-check that pesky box about sharing information with valued partners), it told me when they purchased the list (let it be noted that it was actually after my wedding took place) and it had the glaring words “lead list” jumping out at me. This is not a very customer-friendly term, even to someone who works in lead management like me!

What can we learn from this?

• Be careful with public facing lists. In Pardot, you always have the option to create both an internal “name” as well as a prospect-facing “label.” Do a quick audit of your public lists (if you use a public preference center) and also check out your unsubscribe page and make sure you’re using customer-friendly terms that won’t leave the reader with a bad taste in their mouth, even if they are unsubscribing from your list.
• Be timely with your mailings. I distinctly remember that the website I registered for required me to input my wedding date. These companies can prevent themselves from becoming noise (or worse, spam!), by segmenting their mailing lists according to the date of the event.

Here’s a novel idea: Apparently you can boost your SEO by regularly posting videos on your site. A recent Search Engine Land article by Shmulik Weller underscores the importance of using video on a regular basis and across your site–not just on your homepage once in awhile. If you want to stand out from your competitors, using video for SEO can be a great differentiator.

Soon after Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it started indexing video in its search results. Weller mentions a startling statistic: Nearly 40% of Google searches include videos in the search results. More videos on your site equals more pages showing up in search results, which in turn can boost your page ranking and search traffic.

Great idea, right? Most definitely. Just be sure you follow the guidelines Weller suggests:

• Embed the video instead of using pop-ups or frames.
• Properly contextualize the video by working as many keywords as possible into its title and description.
• Include as much video metadata as possible (duration, dimensions, etc.).
• Provide links to related material (either within the site or elsewhere).
• Web syndication (distributing your videos to popular sites such as YouTube and Facebook) will help you get wider exposure.
• Video sitemaps will score additional SEO points.

Pardot partner (and Elevate presenter!) Jep Castelein of LeadSloth is hosting a free webinar next week all about content. You’ve heard us say it again and again, a truly great marketing campaign starts with killer content.

Webinar: How Content Makes Prospects Buy Faster

Content Marketing is popular, but how does it impact your lead flow? In my upcoming webinar I’ll show how you can use content to increase conversion and pipeline velocity. Or in simple words: how more of your leads become sales-ready, faster.

In just 30 minutes, you’ll learn how to:
- create more content than you ever thought possible
- map content to personas and buying stages
- link this all to your marketing automation processes

Register for the Webinar

One of the biggest challenges – whether you’re just getting started with marketing automation or digging in to a new campaign – is coming up with new and compelling content. Social Media Explorer had a helpful post with 30 questions to help you create a content strategy.

The questions are broken up in to three categories: Organizational Questions, Audience Questions and Content Questions. This technique can be used to guide content for many different channels, from Twitter to your company blog. Below are some examples from each category.

Organizational Questions

• What do you want social media to do for your organization?
• How many departments or divisions will be contributing content?

Audience Questions

• How comfortable with technology, the web and social media is your audience?
• What is your audience interested in besides your product?
• What do you ask your audiences to do? Do they do it?

Content Questions

• What general area of knowledge to we have that we can share?
• What kind of expertise or even products can we give away?
• What can we have fun with that isn’t a disconnect from our brand or industry?

Try using these questions, combined with carefully considering the different phases of your prospect’s journey through the buying cycle, to develop a more well-rounded content mix.

See all 30 Questions at Social Media Explorer

AllThingsCRM put together a handy infographic to help visualize the customer experience when it comes to seeking out help or service. Being that Pardot focuses on creating a great client experience, which means access to personalized service from reps who understand the ins and outs of your account, these statistics were interesting.

Especially notable is the fact that 94% of budget is spent on getting customers through the door while only 6% is allocated to handling customer inquiries. One of the core elements of Pardot is that being a month-to-month service, our success is heavily tied to the success of our customers. We really do believe that our product is made better by crowd-sourcing the knowledge and ideas of the innovate marketers who use Pardot (that’s you!). So if you haven’t already, speak up and be heard!

Check out the fun infographic on customer service from AllThingsCRM.

Source:Why Bad CRM Can Kill A Business

You asked for it, and we made it happen. You can now configure drip campaigns to send emails only during regular business hours!  There is now a brand new “Weekday Only” option for drip campaigns that allows you to set blackout times for email correspondence. When you choose this option in Step 1 of the Drip Program Wizard, Pardot will configure your drip campaign to send email only between the hours of 10AM and 4PM, Monday through Friday. Pardot uses the time zone associated with your account by default, but you can change the time zone if desired. This option will be automatically checked for all new drip programs, and you can retroactively enable it for existing drips.

Why would you want to do this? Well, there are a couple of good reasons:

1. Timing is everything. Prospects are far more likely to read emails that are sent during standard working hours. Mid-morning and early afternoon are best. First thing in the morning seems like it would be the best time to send an email, but when you think about all of that early-morning competition in the inbox, it’s clear that first-thing timing is less than ideal. A mid-morning email comes after the prospect has waded through the morning deluge of email, and it most likely will get read immediately. Sending an email in the early afternoon is also a good strategy, as plenty of folks go straight to checking their inbox when they get back from lunch. Probably the worst time to send an email is at the end of the working day (~5PM) or over a weekend, as your message will almost certainly be left to stagnate overnight and then get buried in the morning rush on the next workday. Restricting your drip emails to standard business hours on weekdays is a great way to improve open and read rates.
2. Your communications should seem personal and realistic. How would you feel if you noticed that the email you were reading was sent at 3AM? Either someone has serious insomnia, or the sender is a robot. You don’t want your prospects to get either of these impressions, so restricting your send times to normal working hours is a good way to make email blasts seem more personal and realistic.

With more than 100 votes in our idea exchange, this has been the most asked for functionality among our clients. We’re thrilled to be able to make it possible with this new feature. Enjoy!

Pardot’s new social media integration package, Social Insight, pulls social data from public profiles across dozens of websites to help you learn more about your prospects and customers. Data points such as job title, company, and location are obviously helpful for lead scoring, grading, and classification purposes. But don’t dismiss the wealth of other information that’s literally at your fingertips, in the form of your prospects’ public profiles on various social media sites. Here are some scenarios that illustrate how to get the most out of Social Insight:

Twitter - Look at what your prospect is tweeting about to get some clues as to what’s on their mind. For instance, if they are tweeting feedback about the demo your sales rep just gave them, you’ll want to know about it. If their retweets suggest that they’re a fan of a particular blog, then imagine the impression you’ll make when you send them, seemingly by coincidence, a relevant article by that same blogger.

LinkedIn - Learn which LinkedIn groups your prospect belongs to. This will give you additional insight into what sort of industry niche a prospect occupies and the professional organizations to which they belong. You can also get a good idea of what sort of content s/he finds inspiring. If a prospect seems to like videos, for example, you can respond accordingly by sending video testimonials or animated tutorials.

Facebook - Determine a prospect’s likes and interests from their Facebook profile. This won’t always be strictly professional knowledge, but knowing that a prospect is a French cinema buff or a rabid golfer can give you an edge when you’re trying to make that crucial connection.

Pandora - You can even find out what sort of music your prospect enjoys! Again, while this information is technically outside the professional realm, it still helps you get to know your prospect so that you can make a lasting connection. Plus, you never know what will come up in conversation, and knowing these little tidbits can help you bond.

Being aware of prospect needs allows you to respond accordingly, and discovering what makes them tick will help your sales team build that personal connection that’s so crucial to closing a deal. Your lead nurturing activities will be greatly enhanced when you make use of this actionable social data, and your sales rep’s calls will be far more effective as well.

But use this information wisely. You don’t want to come off as stalkerish to prospects (“I saw on Facebook that you have a new baby. Congratulations! She’s cute.”). There’s a fine line between gaining insight and being invasive. Make sure you use this data responsibly to enhance your communications with prospects.

Pardot has just rolled out its brand new social media integration package, Social Insight. Social Insight utilizes social data analytics collected with the help of our partner Rapleaf, a marketing services provider that helps companies use social media to better understand their customers. Pardot’s Social Insight platform uses Rapleaf to pull public data about prospects from across a wide variety of social media sites. The compiled information is then displayed in the Social Data tab within each lead record. You can also easily access prospect profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter via one-click links.

Social Insight pulls and displays the following information about a given prospect:

• Full name
• Gender
• Location
• Company
• Job Title
• Photo

Social Insight also displays one-click links to that prospect’s public profiles on various social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), bringing together a wealth of data and putting it at your fingertips.

While Social Insight can’t be used for brand monitoring — there are already other specialized tools that do a better job with that — it is a valuable social profiling tool that uses social media data to round out your prospects’ profiles, giving you insight into what customers want.

Social Insight is available to Pardot users with a Professional Package or higher. The Rapleaf connector has been automatically enabled for eligible accounts. This feature is optional. If you no longer wish to see social data displayed, simply delete the Rapleaf connector under the Pardot Administration module.

Last quarter, Pardot was happy to welcome over 50 new clients to our marketing automation community. That marks three straight quarters of over 50 new clients joining us. That translates to a LOT of new users who are just getting started with marketing automation!

Because we have so many new faces, I thought it might be helpful to share some beginner information on marketing automation. When getting started with a new marketing automation system, here are some good ways to begin.

Inventory your website. Think about pages that are valuable to you (for a possible score increase), current forms that you want to recreate and opportunities to add new forms or conversion opportunities.

Inventory your other online assets. What other forms of online marketing and lead generation do you use? Are you currently using Google Adwords, online sponsorships, other landing pages, social media, a seperate email platform? Make a list of all of your current marketing tools so that you can begin to integrate them into one, unified system within Pardot.

Outline your current processes. One of the best parts of marketing automation is that it can automate (naturally!) some of the previously tedious processes in your department. Create an outline or flowchart (for the visual learners) of your current processes like when and how you assign leads to sales. This will help you easily translate those processes in to automation rules and they’ll be out of your hair for good.

Create a wish list. Marketing automation is no silver bullet, but in addition to making your current assets and processes easier to manage, it can also free up time for you to try new things. So once you have a few basic ideas in place, go wild. Dream up new, better ways to streamline your lead generation. Sketch out some new landing page designs and then test them with multivariate testing.