The New Pardot Lightning Landing Page Experience: What to Expect

This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.

The Salesforce Winter 22 release includes many exciting features but perhaps the most highly anticipated is the new Pardot Lightning Landing Page Experience. 

Putting the power to quickly create beautiful landing pages directly in the hands of Pardot Marketing users, without relying on developers and code, the Lightning Page Builder is a game changer.

Why are we so excited about this particular feature?

Well, there are many benefits! Ultimately, the more we can enable Pardot users to self-serve when it comes to creating marketing assets, the better and more efficiently we are able to roll out marketing activity.

For a long time now, building landing pages in Pardot has relied on HTML & CSS technical coding skills for responsive layouts. While these teams aren’t being made completely redundant (the builder does come with a HTML block that will allow for custom coding where required), it empowers all Pardot users to build beautiful, responsive landing pages end-to-end completely independently.

Here’s how the builder will impact the life of a typical Pardot marketing user:

Mary oversees the launch of seasonal campaigns in Pardot that include custom landing pages. Using the classic landing page feature, Mary’s process for launching an original landing page for her upcoming campaign is to:

• Wireframe the design
• Share the wireframe with her in-house web design team
• Wait for the design team to respond with a custom page design
• Share the design and copy with their web development provider
• Wait for the development team to build the landing page using HTML
• Provide feedback and revisions
• Wait for the edits to be made
• Import and publish the new landing page

The back-and-forth process can take anywhere from weeks to months, and generally Mary finds herself exasperated when a landing page is delayed or has formatting issues across devices.

Fast forward to October 2021 and Mary has learned about the new Pardot Lightning Landing Page Builder! Suddenly, Mary has complete control over each step in the process; from creating the design to launching the page. It saves her time and the costs of outsourcing to developers, while allowing her the flexibility of editing her new page based on user behaviour.

This is just one example though! Let’s take a look at the host of advantages the new builder will give to Pardot users.

Benefits of the new Landing Page Experience

No code

The Lightning Landing Page Experience is drag-and-drop and responsive, just like the Lightning Email Builder. This means we are able to create entire pages simply by selecting the components we’d like to include, such as images, buttons and forms, and dropping these onto the page builder.  When published the pages look great on desktop, tablet and mobile.

No longer will marketers need to rely heavily on developers to make changes to page layouts, font styling or switching images. In our experience, enterprise businesses especially have limitations around access to their website CMS and developer resources - the Lightning Landing Page Builder is a solution to this.

Saves time

With less reliance on web design and development teams, there is less back-and-forth, which ultimately means hours saved coordinating the launch of landing pages. Even more so, once the pages are live, if changes are required this is also a much faster task for users with the right permissions. 

Tip: Permissions can be set to allow users to build and edit landing pages but restrict them from being able to publish.

Any feature that gives time back to Pardot users is hugely valuable!

Beautiful designs built by marketers to fit the purpose

In the classic builder, relying on developers to code designs can often mean restrictions around what’s possible. Lower budgets can mean more simplistic designs and having to re-purpose landing page templates for a variety of pages with different objectives.

With the new Lightning Page Builder, marketers can create pages that are designed for individual campaigns and objectives; be it signing up for an event, downloading a gated resource, or a bespoke Account-Based Marketing offer for a target account.

Get to market and make updates faster

The ability to quickly set up and amend campaign pages in hours, not days, is a huge advantage for businesses. How quickly we are able to get to market, particularly for urgent, reactive campaigns such as those we saw launched in the early days of the global pandemic, can be a huge factor in how successful those campaigns are.

To give you an idea of just how quickly you can build and update Pardot landing pages using the new Lightning Builder, here’s a video from Salesforce showing how some quick and easy page edits:

As you can see, the builder is really intuitive and user-friendly!

Customise list views for marketing teams

Another advantage of the new Lightning Landing Page experience is that it allows you to organise a custom list view for marketing teams and quickly filter these to find particular pages and information.

For example, you can:

• Create custom views for different teams or business units
• Filter landing pages by; 
  • Source - to hone in on pages you may want to recreate in the new builder experience.
  • Status - to identify if the pages are published.

You can also customise the fields that are displayed in these list views.

Sounds great, how do I get access?

The Pardot Lightning Landing Page Experience is set for release in early October 2021 but there are a number of steps you’ll need to take before you can jump in and start using the feature. Just like the Lightning Email Builder, you’ll need to meet certain prerequisites, and configure and test the tool before rolling it out to the wider team.

To learn more about the prerequisites and ensure you're ready to use the new feature once it's live, head to our next blog: How to Prepare for the Pardot Lightning Landing Page Builder.