REVIEWSWhat’s new in the Salesforce New Release Notes Winter 24 for Account Engagement (Pardot), you wonder ? We’ve the answer for you here!
Is it just me or do these Salesforce New Release Notes come around faster than ever? I’m savouring every bit of summer sun rays as we had such a poor weather start of it. And you all may still be chewing on our Pardot release notes summer 23 highlights. But, like it or not: the Salesforce New Release Notes Winter 24 for Account Engagement (Pardot) are here! They’re still in preview mode, but we an nonetheless have a peek to prepare. And that’s what we did at CloudAnalysts.
Pardot, or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for new clients, will have the following new features. We’ve placed them in order of our excitement about them:
Design Engagement Programs with More Precise Wait Times
Prospects can now wait in Engagement Studio Program steps from 2 to 8 hours. Previously, wait times were limited to increments of days.
How you could be using this new feature depends on your business, but it means a whole lot to us.
Our view: We’ve needed this for a long time for our clients, so we’re very excited about it. A worthwhile, welcome improvement for all customers and it’s free! 10/10: everyone benefits!
Chart Historical Prospect Changes by Feature
The Account Engagement Optimizer that was introduced a few releases ago is coming ‘alive’! It will have a new Prospect Change Monitor Histogram, so you can review prospect changes at a glance. What’s that all about?
How does it work: in the Optimizer, you’ll see a Prospect Change Monitor By Feature pie chart. You will be able to click it and see which features resulted in the most changes over the past 24 hour, or other time frame. And there are other filter too. You can see what drives change, and trends over time.
Our view: This helps customers understand which features and automations are causing the most prospect changes in your BU or Pardot org. Could be of use in a wide range of use cases, e.g. use the info to adjust e.g. your automations, import habits or API integrations. 6/10: many could benefit. We’ll need to work with this more to see full potential. Was not our highest priority….
The other new features are either further security restrictions or clean up:
Restrict Which Domains Can Display your Account Engagement Assets
This adds data security. Can be used for forms and landing pages. For new org, restrictions are automatic, while existing customer have the option of leaving things unrestricted.
Restore a Paused Prospect by Deleting Their Visitor Records
Did you know that most of the time, a high level of visitor activity is actually not a prospect at all! It’s the result of a bot, or you testing! In both cases, it’s best to delete the prospect. At least, once as a while do a clean up, as their visitor data would be huge and unnecessarily slowing down your Pardot org.
What’s new? Prospects will now actually be paused, when their activity levels are high enough to impact Account Engagement’s performance. But you can undo the pause and restore your important prospects.
How do it work? Choose a date in the past and Account Engagement removes the prospect’s activity records before that date. When you remove enough activity records, Account Engagement restores tracking for that prospect. If the prospect exceeds the activity threshold in the future, they’re paused again.
Our view: If you/your consultant has set up your spam filtering automations properly, bots should already be filtered out for you to archive.
Help in ensuring your sender addresses are validated
Email deliverability is key to your success, which is why we’ve written an entire blog post on this topic: Adopt our email delivery best practices, so your email will hit the inbox!
With release Winter 24, you can now review templates with invalid senders on the Email Templates page, and change the sender or validate the sending domain, so that you can use it.
Our view: ensuring sender email addresses are validated is a normal part of RMM – a prerequisite for good sender reputation and deliverability.
Option to remove Unconverted Visitor Activity Records
Salesforce gives you the chance to free up some system bandwidth by removing old visitor records that didn’t convert to prospects. You’ll be able to automatically remove unconverted records older than 365 days.
How does it work: there is a new option to remove ‘Stale Unconverted Visitors’ in your Account Engagement Settings.
Our view: This may be suitable to some but it’s not suitable for everyone. Pardot is a B2B marketing tool and sales cycles are notoriously long. Particularly in economically challenged times. Also, prospects would like to not reveal themselves as potential buyers until they are about 70% in the sales cycle. So, if you consider both these factors and still feel you want to get rid of your year-old visitors, then you now have that option.
Roundup
There are a few other updates, particularly around the API for Pardot developers. This could be of use for users of sandboxes and the higher-end packages of Pardot: you’ll be able to use the Pardot API v5 and Salesforce Flow, to move Pardot Sandbox configuration to Pardot Production. That does great, but not everyone has purchased sandboxes. Regardless, we may write more about it when the release notes for Winter 24 will have finalised and we’ll update this article.
With that said, this rounds it up. Interested to learn what’s new in the other clouds, and marketing cloud overall. Stay tuned for follow-up posts.
If you have any questions, and would like some support in implementing, configuring, auditing, troubleshooting, and upgrading your Pardot setup, we would be delighted to help you.
Last Updated on August 23, 2023
