Pardot, a leading marketing automation tool, is a popular solution for marketers looking to build efficient, personalized, and impactful automated newsletters.
Many marketers use Pardot since it’s part of the Salesforce suite of products, offering a native integration and more robust capabilities than you might get with another tool. However, it also comes standard with some common challenges: a somewhat complicated UI and setup process—and accompanying steep learning curve—as well as some limitations when it comes to automating and customizing your emails.
In this post, we’ll explore how to overcome these challenges and leverage Pardot to build efficient, personalized, and impactful automated Pardot newsletters…as well as share one of the industry’s best-kept-secrets when it comes to scaling your email creation process.
Pardot is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses create meaningful connections, generate more leads, and support sales teams to close key deals. It also offers a range of features for sending out marketing email campaigns and newsletters.
In the fast-paced world of content publishing and marketing, keeping your audience engaged with fresh and up-to-date content is a time-consuming task that can quickly lead to burnout for you and your team.
This is where automated newsletters become key to scaling your email strategy without sacrificing high-quality, relevant content.
Automated newsletters are particularly beneficial for high-volume content publishers who need to keep their audience informed with the latest news, articles, and insights.
How do you automate and scale a newsletter with Pardot? First, take the time to formulate a strategy, goals, and tactical approach, so that you can measure your results against any relevant company KPIs/OKRs.
The first step: defining your content strategy. What content sources are you going to use for your newsletter emails? The more you can rely on content that’s already being produced across company channels (blog, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), the easier it will be to automate.
Curate and organize content that resonates with your audience. Ensure your newsletters align with their interests and behaviors. For high-volume publishers, consider creating a robust content calendar to keep track of what you’re sending and when (and who’s working on it).
What approach are you going to take for newsletter frequency? There are a wide variety of options, ranging from a Substack-like automation that sends as soon as new content is detected to a daily or weekly roundup of newsletters that focus on various content segments.
Use Pardot’s dynamic content feature to personalize newsletters for each segment, whether your segments are based on demographics, behavior, and engagement levels. Personalized content increases engagement and fosters a stronger connection with your audience.
There are two main ways to set up an automated newsletter through your Pardot account.
Unfortunately, Pardot does not offer RSS-triggered emails. Fortunately, you can bypass this limitation using an integrated tool called FeedOtter.
With FeedOtter, simply designate your RSS feed (or more than one), set a sending schedule, and it will send the emails automatically through your Pardot account.
Sending daily? Weekly? Monthly? Just decide the date and time you want your newsletter to go out, and hit publish. FeedOtter will follow your schedule. It will even double check that new content has been published…so if you miss a week on the blog, your users won’t receive the same content twice (unless you want them to).
If you are working with more than just RSS feeds, there will likely be some manual work still involved.
But using the FeedOtter integration for Pardot can still alleviate hours of work for every email, through the curation suite of tools that will automatically update with all of your content sources and allow you to add them to your newsletter—perfectly formatted—with a single click.
FeedOtter lets you bypass the Pardot email builder entirely, and offers 30+ templates that are designed to work perfectly with Pardot users. Use the visual editor to quickly add and tweak content sources to your email—and watch as FeedOtter takes care of all the formatting, image insertion, and text previews.
Personalization is such a key contributing factor to higher email engagement metrics. Go ahead Incorporate dynamic content blocks to tailor your messages to different audience segments. For example, you can show different product recommendations based on past purchases or display varying content based on user location. https://www.feedotter.com/blog/pardot-personalization-feedotter/
Automation rules in Pardot let you set up triggers and actions. For instance, you can create a rule to send a welcome email when someone subscribes to your newsletter or send a follow-up email if a recipient clicks on a specific link.
Even though you create and send your emails from FeedOtter’s clean, easy-to-use interface, the email itself actually sends through your Pardot account. This allows you to track key performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Pardot’s reporting tools provide insights into how your newsletters are performing. Use this data to refine your strategy and improve future campaigns.
What does this strategy look like at scale? Here are some examples of other companies that leverage FeedOtter’s automation and curation features to publish a high volume of emails, efficiently.
