The Basic Functionality of any Marketing Automation Platform should allow you to harvest key information on your Customers – Pardot does this really effectively using Custom Fields
Depending on where you are in your Pardot Journey, or even if you are considering adopting Pardot as a Marketing Tool, my 3 key terms when I work with Pardot are Automation, Segmentation and Communication. Custom fields are a really simple way to gain insight into your Prospects, and we can use this information to do the three things I just mentioned.
Standard Pardot Fields:
The Standard Prospect Fields in Pardot allow us to take in information on our prospects, but as the name states they are standard, Pardots baseline is First Name, Last Name, and Email. We can then look to Company, Account Name, Source Campaign, Conversion Point, the list is quite long, we also then have the additional fields section, as per the below image:
What is your Companys Requirement for data?
Having all of this information is really important, as we can use it to Segment our database, for example, looking at the Industry Field on my record, I could really quickly pull a list from Pardot containing every Prospect in my Database whos Industry is Information Technology. Immediately im breaking down my database into smaller sections so that i can be more targeted with my marketing. The days of mass mail are gone, and as marketers we can leverage this key information to let our prospects know that we are interested in them, and we can personalise our content to ensure that what we send is valid relevant and useful to them.
However, what if this isnt enough? Thats when Pardot custom fields come in and really allow us to customise the information we gather for our Prospects, for example:
Product of Interest:
Here I will build a simple custom field to gather “Product of Interest” Information, and run through how we can populate that field.
Step 1: Navigate to Admin – Configure Fields – Prospect Fields
When we navigate to this section we can see all of our Standard Fields and any Custom Fields we have built, we also have a nice blue button, “Add Custom Field”
Once we click on that, we are brought to the below section.
Salesforce Field Name:
As Salesforce and Pardot are connected, we can map these fields between the two, Step 1 is to name the field, tab down to get our ID, and then we can use the drop down “Salesforce.com field name” to lookup to Salesforce and map our new Custom Field to the corresponding field in Salesforce (Should it exist). We can also dictate that should the values differ, that we can use Pardots Value, Salesforces Value, or the most recently updated value.
We can also dictate the type of field we are creating, it can be a standard text field, a checkbox, a dropdown, we can do so much with this field, but as this is a set list of products that im trying to gain insight into, i will use a dropdown.
Simply Click “Create Custom Field” and we are done, this field will now show up in the Custom Fields Section of the Prospect Record.
Populating The Field:
We can do things manually, updating the Prospect Record, we can also use an Automation Rule to update custom fields should a Prospect perform a specific action (Clicking a custom redirect or downloading a file for example) but lets look at how we can build a form and utilise this custom field to populate the record.
From here we just need to add our new Custom Field to a form and it will populate the prospect field when the form is completed, we can use this form in emails, on landing pages and in some cases on websites.
And there we have it, we have created a custom field on the Prospect Record, added it to a Pardot form and use that information on form submission to populate the field. We can then build lists and start to target people whos interest is in Product B, with information specifically on that product. A simple example, but an insight into how we can leverage custom fields to pull in specific information, allowing us to target prospects more accurately.
We hope this helps, and thanks for reading,
The Tether Team.
#marketingautomation #pardot #salesforcepardot #tethertips
