Pardot Grading Simplified: Fewer Rules, More Power
When Conditional Completion Actions were released in 2022, we knew it was going to mean big things for MCAE (Pardot) accounts. The new feature has enabled us to improve the setup of client accounts but there’s one use case that we’re particularly happy about. Thanks to Conditional Completion Actions, we’re able to greatly reduce the number of Pardot Automation Rules required for Grading.
For the record, Pardot is now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement but we’re still using the term ‘Pardot’ interchangeably as we know our audience is still using and searching the old name online (and out of habit!).
What is an Automation Rules?
Automation Rules are simply criteria that find matching prospects and apply the specified action.
Previously, in Pardot Standard accounts, an excessive number of Automation Rules were required for Grading.
We needed many Automation Rules to find prospects who matched our ideal customer profile and then apply a grade. For example, one rule for prospects with the job title ‘Managing Director’ is to increase their grade score by 2, and another rule for prospects with the industry ‘Executive President’ is to increase their grade score by 1, and so on.
The problem is, having so many Automation Rules can become tricky to manage, or update.
Depending on Automation Rules for Grading has been a bit of a pain… until Conditional Completion Actions came along.
What are Conditional Completion Actions?
Simply Conditional Completion Action allows us to perform different actions for prospects based on their demographics or behaviours when they fill out a form.
In short, Conditional Completion Action means when two prospects submit the same form but with different regions, we can automatically assign them to different sales reps depending on their location.
How do Conditional Completion Actions affect Grading?
The Conditional Completion Actions don’t replace or make Automation Rules redundant, they mean we can significantly reduce the number of rules we need. This makes our Grading easier to manage and to keep up-to-date.
Instead of using Automation Rules to independently assign the correct Grade to new prospects, we can use one single Conditional Completion Action that does all of the allocations for you.
For example:
If a prospect fills in the form with the State “Washington” then those prospects will have an increased score by ‘10’ and so on.
If you’re a Pardot Standard user who set your instance up before Conditional Completion Actions were available to you, I suggest you review and refresh but of course, take due diligence and map out the changes you’ll make on paper first before you update anything in the system!
Summary :
Conditional Completion Actions fire only when the prospect making the activity meets certain field criteria. You can think of it like taking a Completion Action and merging it with an Automation Rule – which would be beneficial in multiple use cases such as routing form submissions (eg. by country), segmenting prospects on the fly, or invite-only forms – to name just a small number!
This feature has been a long time coming, and all of us who have eagerly awaited the ability to drive a conditional action on a submission are delighted with the ways that this functionality has expanded the capabilities of Pardot/MCAE.