Pardot Warming Automations from Salesforce Contact Record

We have defined a warming campaign for the Quarterly Newsletter in Pardot as well as one for the Prayer Letter. We want to automate the process handling so that when someone adds Email Newsletter (quarterly) and/or Prayer Letter (monthly) to the contact multi-select picklist for Newsletter, they get added to the warming campaign automatically.

We had a single email warming in the past that worked like this for all our newsletters:

  • User modifies Newsletter multi-select picklist to add a new value
  • Process builder adds or updates contact membership to “confirmed” on a Master campaign
  • Workflow rute sends welcome email
  • Workflow rules updates campaign member status from “confirmed” to “completed”
  • Completed status on Master campaign is used to send newsletters later.
  • Any unsubscribed newsletter responses are marked as “Asked to be removed” on the Master campaign to negate sending.
  • Email “Opt out” also negates sending regardless of Master campaign status.

Here is the plan:

  • User modifies Newsletter multi-select picklist to add a new value
  • The Process Builder that already adds them to the Master newsletter campaign to also add to a second Newsletter Welcome campaign specific to the newsletters we support.
  • The (existing) Workflow Rule changes status to completed but we despicable the workflow rule that sends the old welcome email.
  • The Newsletter Welcome Campaign is a Pardot Campaign record type that is synced with Pardot so that contacts gets pushed to Pardot as a new prospect
  • A Pardot automation rule watches for new prospects on the warming campaign and is not yet added to the start list for the engagement studio flow and adds them to the start list.
  • Engagement studio runs its course and adds the prospect to the completed list eventually.
  • Any older contacts who become subscribers are not in Pardot and may not be synced because they predate our Pardot Salesforce Connector. These flagged one a month in a Wall of Zero report and can be synced manually.

I updated the process builder to add contacts with Email Newsletter (quarterly) added to the Quarterly Newsletter Welcome campaign. It is a hard coded campaign ID and the status is connected. The APEX used to add to a campaign allows attempting to add to a campaign even if the contact is already on the campaign. If you do this with a create, you’ll get an error and the Process stops. This is a free add-in. Of course, this entire and long (slow) process should eventually become a flow.

The hard coded newsletter welcome campaign looks like this. The record type is

Similarly, the process builder adds membership to a different campaign for Prayer Letter Welcome:

There were email actions associated with the workflow rules that change the status from confirmed to completed. I left those workflow rules (although they do nothing now but change the status from confirmed to completed) but deleted the email action from each. Removing the email action didn’t change the last modified date.

Here are the two Pardot Engagement Studio programs running:

In Pardot, we use an Automation Rule to add people synched over for either Welcome campaign to the respective start list of the welcome Engagement Studio:

There is a similar automation rule for the prayer letter welcome:

Being on these start lists, begins the Engagement Studio Program. At the end of each program, prospects are added to a completion list. 

We’re new to Pardot and Salesforce integration, so not sure how many of these indirect steps or lists are necessary. We also have many Salesforce contacts which pre-date the start of our Pardot Salesforce Connector. For these contacts it is necessary to manually sync the contacts unfortunately. We build a report to detect contacts on the Pardot Synch Campaign Types that have no Pardot Prospect URL in hopes that we can monitor and manually sync as needed. It has been added to the Wall of Zeros III dashboard to check monthly.

Note that we still have single email welcome automations running in Salesforce using email alerts for our Volunteer Letter and our Partner Letter. We plan to convert these but people often subscribe to several items at once so we want to do suppression of multiple programs at once.

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