Why Custom Code Your Pardot Landing Page Templates

In fact, once you realise the potential of custom-coded Pardot landing page templates, it opens a new world of opportunities and potentially saves budget that might otherwise be spent on unnecessary third-party tools.

A quick note about using Pardot to host your landing pages rather than third-party tools. The biggest benefit is having page views immediately recorded in a prospect’s profile without any connector or time-consuming integrations needed.

This also means having the ability to instantly include prospects in specific nurture activities and automations or scoring categories based on the pages they view.

However, you should also take into account that it's easy to upload and add media to landing pages because your assets are stored within Pardot and are even personalised with your tracker domain.

Plus, with one less platform to monitor in terms of data security and governance, the risks are reduced too.

So, assuming you're sold on the idea of creating landing page templates in Pardot. The next decision is, how? There are a number of things to consider:

• The drag-and-drop builder, while user-friendly, doesn't enable the same level of customisation as the classic editor. It also limits what you can include on the page from a tracking script/javascript perspective.

• The classic editor enables you to build custom modules using HTML as Pardot repeatable regions, so a non-coder can simply go in and clone/edit regions to make their own page template.

• The ease of use of the classic editor also makes it a great rapid prototyping tool, as other landing page builders aren't as intuitive or may carry greater barriers to entry from a permissions perspective.

• The classic editor makes it simple to take advantage of Pardot's great personalisation features such as Dynamic Content, Snippets, native embedded forms, and using HTML you have the flexibility to place these wherever you want on the page. 

• As the whole landing page is available in a HTML view in the classic editor, it's super simple to add tracking scripts to the head, the body, and wherever else is required.

Needless to say, we’re big fans of the classic editor and custom coding in general!

The beauty being that custom coded pages can be purposefully built to meet bespoke marketing and brand requirements. Whether you need embedded videos, sliding forms, visual effects, dynamic content, personalisation… all of these can be included without limitation.

Here’s an example of a custom landing page we use for the MarCloud Scoring & Grading eBook.

Once a prospect views this landing page, we know about it. If they don’t convert, then we can use an automation to follow up with an email a few days later with a link to a shorter, more concise version of the landing page to try and push for that conversion. If we hosted landing pages elsewhere, this might not be so easy to pull off.

Granted, what puts many users off coding their own landing page templates is the need for experience in HTML. That’s why I advocate for having a developer - and ideally a Salesforce certified one - create the initial template.

Once you have a template you love, you can go ahead and create as many landing pages as you like with ease, using the WYSIWYG editor. There’s no long-term reliance on development resources.

Here’s how our custom coded landing page for the eBook looks in the WYSIWYG editor:

I'm sure you’ll agree that this looks incredibly easy to amend, and it is. All you need to do is click the areas that need changing and input whatever you like, including images, video etc.

With a best practice template in your arsenal, you can go ahead and make the most of multivariate testing, where you can test multiple landing pages and use the highest converting page! 

To have a beautiful responsive landing page template custom coded for you, simply send us a message with an outline of what you need and we’ll provide you with a quote.