Pardot Conditional Completion Action Ideas

Pardot Conditional Completion Actions aren’t actually available at the time of writing this blog but at MarCloud we’re pretty excited that it’s coming.

So excited in fact, that we want to write down some ideas here to prepare you for how you can actually use this feature when it’s out! 

For the record, Pardot is now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement but we're still using the term ‘Pardot' interchangeably as we know our audience are still using and searching the old name online (and out of habit!).

What is a Conditional Completion Action & why is it important? 

Okay, so the Pardot community has wanted this feature for years. Currently, we can apply Completion Actions when a prospect takes an action. Think about page views, file downloads, form completions, link clicks, email opens, and so on. 

But what happens when you want to treat prospects differently? That’s what marketing automation is about, right? 

Not all prospects are created equally, so a Conditional Completion Action will allow us to have basic criteria like if prospect is opted-in, send them an email’ but if they aren’t opted-in, notify sales to give them a call instead’. 

That’s a super basic example, I’m going to explain more below but the crux of why this is important is because it’s going to allow different automated paths off the back of the same activity. 

Here’s how it looks: 

Source: Salesforce documentation

This will be available for all editions: 

• Pardot Standard
• Pardot Pro
• Pardot Ultimate 
• Pardot Enterprise
• Pardot Growth 
• Pardot Plus 
• Pardot Advanced
• Pardot Premium

Or for those who didn't know Pardot changed its name: 

• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Growth 
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Plus 
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Advanced
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Premium

Net new vs returning customers

My favourite use case for this feature is by far the net new prospect vs returning customer scenario. 

This has been a bit of a bugbear for clients because we all know that Pardot cannot reassign prospects! 

Current day, if an existing customer (Contact) completes a Pardot form with automation to assign to user’, essentially nothing will happen. So some clients add a task to say get in touch with this Lead’ - which is a good thing but the terminology Lead’ doesn’t make sense.

Now the team is confused… What is a Lead? Is a Lead anyone who fills in the contact form? Surely not. 

And they’re right. 

With Pardot Conditional Completion Actions (I should really be calling it Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Conditional Completion Actions or MCAECCA but let’s not go there) we can split out this entire scenario so it looks like this: 

• If prospect completes a contact form and is not assigned (aka net new):
  • assign via active assignment rule
  • notify people
  • send autoresponder - with content specific to being a new Lead! 
  • increase score by e.g 10

• If prospect completes a contact form and is assigned (aka returning Lead or Contact): 
  • create a task for the assigned user
  • notify assigned user
  • send autoresponder - dynamically change it to match the assigned user's contact details
  • increase score by e.g 25

Now, if you have data in Pardot that tells you if a person is part of a Key account, then it could be really cool:

• If prospect completes a contact form and is not a key account:
  • assign to user
  • send autoresponder

• If prospect completes a contact form and is a key account: 
  • assign
  • create a task 
  • notify marketing
  • notify sales
  • TELL EVERYONE AND DROP EVERYTHING!!!!!! 

You get the gist.

Language preferences

This is an interesting one for global companies. You could ask what language preference someone has on a form and then on the Completion Action, you could build: 

• If English: 
  • send autoresponder in English
  • add to English newsletter list

• If Spanish: 
  • send autoresponder in Spanish 
  • add to Spanish newsletter list

VIP notifications

I’ve always really liked Page Actions because of the way the feature works with Scoring Categories. 

As you can use Pardot Completion Actions on page actions, it only makes sense that Conditional Completion Actions will apply here too. 

So, similar to the above, you might want to be notified any time a Key account starts to look at your contact us page or maybe a specific service page so you can upsell. 

The idea is very similar: 

• If a prospect views the contact us page:
  • do nothing

• If a prospect views the contact us page and is a Key account:
  • notify assigned user
  • create a task to follow up

Competitors

It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that I change all of our emails for any subscribers who work at a consultancy selling Pardot services. I will dynamically change the content of our emails so you cannot receive the original content.

Why do I do this? Literally, because I think it’s quite funny. And it’s a cool example to show clients in meetings. 

However, for some companies in very competitive industries, there are instances where a piece of content shouldn’t be shared with industry peers. 

In these scenarios, we could simply look at adding logic like: 

• If email contains @competitordomainname.com’: 
  • do nothing

• Otherwise, send the download as normal.

Events

Maybe there’s an exclusive event where you only want potential clients to attend, rather than filling the space up with people you already know.

In-person events often have a limited number of seats so you could be cheeky and have logic along the lines of the below: 

• If company size is 500+ employees: 
  • send autoresponder with calendar invite details and thank you for signing up, we will be in touch!

• If company size is less than 500+ employees: 
  • send autoresponder saying sorry, the event is full. 

Pardot Einstein

A final thought from me, it would be really cool to see the Conditional Completion Actions looking at data from Einstein, like Key account tiers or even behaviour score. 

This would really start leaning into artificial intelligence and create a really new way of approaching Lead management. 

Just a thought!

At MarCloud, we specialise in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement powered by Pardot, and Marketing Cloud Engagement, yet our knowledge extends to other Salesforce products and how these work from a marketing and sales perspective. Want to chat about your automation setup? Send us a message for a no-obligation chat!