Best Practices for Collecting Leads at Events and Nurturing Them

When your organization attends multiple events per year, capturing leads and entering them into your CRM can be time-consuming and inefficient. Sometimes, it takes weeks for your leads to receive follow-ups and nurturing emails from you. Here comes Pardot, a powerful marketing automation software that integrates with Salesforce. Pardot offers capabilities such as forms and engagement program to help your organization to collect leads and nurture them efficiently and effectively. We came up with a scenario where an organization can best utilize Pardot.

Pardot helps Higher Ed reduce administrative work and expedite prospect follow-ups

An Oregon university focuses a lot of their recruitment efforts at college recruitment fairs. Their process was simple. Representatives will hand a pen and piece of paper to interested applicants for their contact information. The admissions counselors would receive a stack of paper with the applicants' information for follow-up. While each student eventually received an email, the information was broad and subsequent follow-ups were a few and inconsistent. In comes Pardot.

With Pardot, the only thing the staff needs is an iPad. A Pardot form captures prospect information right at the event booth.

Through Completion Actions, interested applicants are automatically dropped into an engagement program where they will receive a series of customized emails at predefined intervals based on sets of criteria and their interaction with the content. With Pardot’s Engagement Studio, you design criteria-driven journeys for prospects in a user-friendly canvas. Programs are built with 3 primary step types: Triggers, Actions, Rules. With Triggers, the system “listens” for specific prospect actions, such as an email click or a file download. The Action step tells the system to “do” something, like notify the assigned user or create a task for the user. Rules are a great way to send prospects down different paths. It tells the system to check for something, such as a field on the prospect record, then the system will take actions based on those results.

In the form, Sally indicated she is interested in a Nurse-midwifery Graduate Program. Her journey consists of a welcome message followed by a series of educational emails about the university’s nursing program. Each message contains a call to action – a “Request a Call” link. And Jamie has questions, so she clicks the link. Within several minutes, Jamie receives a call from an admissions counselor. Cool, right?

Pardot can reduce manual work and automate lead nurturing processes

The scenario described is a common one and not limited to Higher Ed. Any organization that collects leads at events can take advantage of Pardot forms to effectively reduce manual work and automate lead nurturing efforts. And with Form Handlers, businesses can keep their existing forms while still taking advantage of Pardot’s suite of automation tools. Almost all businesses can benefit from providing a personalized journey to their prospects. Take full control of when, how, and why you interact with your prospects to ensure they are well on their way to becoming marketing-qualified.

Helpful Tips:
  1. First, enable “kiosk mode” in the form’s Advanced Settings when you collect prospect information at events. This will prevent Pardot from dropping a cookie and associating your device with the prospect.
  2. Use form field validations and make at least one contact method required. This way, you don’t end up with 50 submissions and no way of contacting any of them.
  3. You can add prospects to an active engagement program anytime. All new prospects start at the beginning of the program, and prospects already in the program will continue down their existing path.

Stay tuned for next time as we look at how one of Southern California’s leading solar manufacturers uses Pardot’s automation power to maintain a 75% referral rate year after year.

Need help implementing Pardot or revamping existing setup?

FMT’s team of certified Salesforce and Pardot consultants is here to help your organization to assist your Salesforce or Pardot implementation. Our experts will help you avoid hiccups and provide recommendations for best practices. Click here to request a free consultation or give us a call at 833 – 827 – 4275.

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