How to use Pardot for event planning

Jul 19, 2022

sales, marketing and service
automotive
chemicals
discrete manufacturing

Planning events for a larger group of attendees isn’t a one-day job. It takes several weeks of organization, planning and follow-up. But there are ways to ease the workload during that process. Find out how Cloud Innovation (now a part of delaware) has integrated Salesforce and more specifically, Pardot, during the planning of Cloud Innovation's 10th anniversary event!

Salesforce Campaigns

The first step of planning an event in Salesforce is to create a Campaign. A Campaign is your starting point since it offers you an overview of your invitees, marketing assets, budget, and much more. Colleagues can add Contacts and Leads in order to collect potential attendees. Once linked, these Contacts or Leads will become a Campaign Member. These members will have an individual status, ranging from 'Invited' to 'Attended', in order to keep track of where they are in your invitation pipeline.

In order to link your Campaign Members to Pardot, lists will come in handy. For our event, we’ve created a Static List in order to populate the Campaign Members from Salesforce to Pardot. To populate this Static List, we created an Automation Rule that uses the following criteria:

Engagement Path

The true strength of Pardot lies in it automation. By using Engagement Path, we automated our invitation process through automated email sends, campaign member status updates and further allocation through Pardot lists.

The static list we’ve created and populated will be used as a starting point in this Engagement Path and will look as follows, taking into account the different building blocks we created priorly.

Building blocks

Block 1: Send Email Invitation

The invitation for Cloud Innovation's 10th anniversary party was the start of our Engagement Path. This email was sent to all prospects on the Static List and therefore all Campaign Members.

Block 2: Register attendance through Pardot Form / Landing Page

After creating the Campaign and designing the invitation, the attendants needed to register. Behind the button ‘Register Here’ on the Email Invitation, there was a link to a Pardot Landing Page with a form to register attendance.

When completing the form on the landing page, the following Completion Actions were set in place:

The invitee receives a registration email
They will be automatically added to the Pardot List ‘Cloud Innovation 10 Years - Registrations’
Campaign Member Status will be changed to ‘Registered’

Below, an example of this Landing Page:

Path Flow

With our building blocks ready for use, we started building our Engagement Path. The set-up was as follows:

Engagement Path started with the Static List containing all Campaign Members, every new member added later on, went through the same process.
They received an invitation by email and got 7 days in order to complete the form on the Landing Page
When the invitee didn’t complete the form, he/she received a reminder email.
When the second reminder was ignored, their Campaign Member Status was set to ‘Not Interested’
A week to the event, we’ve sent an email containing all the practical information which was sent to the ones who registered.

This Engagement Path made sure we could focus on other aspects of planning an event, since every email was already programmed. This means saving time and worrying less about the practical details of the event.

Key takeaways

Create a Salesforce Campaign and add everyone you’d like to invite to that campaign.
Make a link to Pardot by using Lists.
Setup all the building blocks you need for your event, such as Emails, Forms, Landing Pages and make sure that these are linked to your Campaign. This way, it’s possible to get an overview of the metrics in Salesforce.
Build your Engagement Path.
Test and Activate.
Use your time focusing on other important matters.