The IdeaExchange is an open feedback platform that uses a points-based system to rank ideas for Salesforce product enhancements. From 2007 (the launch of the IdeaExchange) to now, 98k+ ideas were submitted to the IdeaExchange, 5.4k of which have been delivered by Salesforce’s development teams.
The Account Engagement (Pardot) category of the IdeaExchange is brimming with ideas, ready for you to upvote. Looking at the past, some of the most sought after features came from the platform, including conditional completion actions, external actions, and one-hour Engagement Studio wait times. Let’s take a look at the five most popular, current open ideas that fellow users have requested.
1. Customize Notification Email Subject/Content
Points: 15,730 (Idea Link)
Notifications can be sent to other users when a prospect takes a notable action, for example, submitting a key webform, or visiting your company’s pricing page. However, these “all-or-nothing” notifications can make it hard to interpret at a glance (by all-or-nothing, we mean that every standard and custom prospect field is included in the email).
Though this idea has been knocking around since 2010, Salesforce haven’t totally ignored this need of ours. We got a glimpse a few years back into what customizable notifications could look like with the Slack connector for Account Engagement. Using completion actions, Notify Slack channel allows you to craft your own notification message. It’s your choice to insert certain merge fields to include up to date data points that are most important to your users.

When something like this will be worked on for email notifications is not confirmed.
2. A/B Testing in Engagement Studio Programs
Points: 9,840 (Idea Link)
Engagement Studio improves the automated campaign sequence-building experience, especially as the branching logic (yes/no paths) are made visual with the canvas.
This idea is old enough to refer to Engagement Studio’s predecessor, the retired drip campaigns feature. Even as time has passed, and Engagement Studio has brought many benefits, A/B testing is still one functionality that’s missing.
I remember being asked to do this by a client in the past, so I documented my solution. While this works, it requires some set up and manual monitoring. A/B testing is available for classic list emails, where the winning version is selected on your behalf and automatically sent to the remainder of prospects who were not in the sample group. Hopefully, one day, we will be able to use something out-of-the-box in Engagement Studio.

3. Support Multiple Email Addresses for Prospects
Points: 7,450 (Idea Link)
Many years ago, Salesforce changed what Account Engagement considers a unique identifier for prospect records from email address, to CRM ID. This is known as AMPSEA, and as a result, individuals could exist in your Account Engagement database with more than one prospect record. At the time, this seemed controversial (personally, I was relieved as it came just in time to meet one client’s use case!).
Adding another layer of flexibility in how we represent individuals as prospects would be to allow one prospect record to have multiple email fields. This is a requirement I faced for a different client, with no decent workaround (admittedly, the solution that went live wasn’t without its flaws).
Some industries store different emails for different purposes. In the comment thread, there are several mentions of the non-profit space. If this speaks volumes to you, go upvote.
4. Identify and Merge Duplicates
Points: 6,500 (Idea Link)
As mentioned, AMPSEA gives more flexibility to how individuals could be represented in your Account Engagement database (as one or more prospect records). I mentioned that this was controversial at the time, as it exacerbated any poor data quality in Salesforce – your Salesforce org is riddled with duplicates? Now you have those syncing to Account Engagement!
Duplicate records and deduplication is my least favorite topic – the mention of it makes me shudder. It’s a process that starts with defining what a duplicate means to your organization, and there will likely be different definitions from one object to the next.
AMPSEA comes with built-in ‘rules’ that match an activity to a prospect record where the exact ID can’t be determined. For example, if a prospect submits a form (you have their email address), the activity will be related to the most recent active prospect record.
The situation gets more complicated where external tools and middlewares are inserting prospect records into Account Engagement, and could be creating unintentional duplicates.
Currently, merging prospects is an ad-hoc and time-consuming process. It’s also one where you pretty much have to spot the duplicates yourself, with no warning or match rules like we have on the Salesforce side.
I really like this idea, however, I’m not naive at how much consideration would go into developing something like this (i.e. giving users the power to merge prospects in Account Engagement would cause havoc on the Salesforce side). With Account Engagement continually moving closer to the Salesforce core platform, hopefully we will soon be able to have a centralized way to identify and merge duplicates using the tools Salesforce already has in-situ.
5. Remove Prospects From Engagement Studio Program Upon Reply
Points: 5,760 (Idea Link)
Another recurring request I’ve heard time again. The premise is simple, and the business need is obvious. Sending a sequence of marketing emails via Engagement Studio, if a prospect was to reply at any point – therefore, taking an explicit call to action – how can they be removed from the email sequence so that the conversation becomes one-to-one instead of one-to-many? Additionally, how could they be sent down a different path of the program if that’s how you’d like to design your programs?
From my memory, there was a reply-mail tracking app, which I can’t confirm still works well with Account Engagement. There are likely other vendors out there, however, with Account Engagement designed for B2B marketing, shouldn’t this be part of the product, as standard? Let’s keep watching how this unfolds over time.
Bonus: Rebrand “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement” Back to “Pardot”
Points: 5,780 (Idea Link)
Pardot was renamed “Account Engagement” back in April 2022. Since then, the new name has been rolled out across the user interface, official documentation, and training resources. Adoption from the Salesforce community has been slower, with habits hard to break.
There were several questions raised about the name change. The impact on the UI was immediately felt, like when having to add Account Engagement fields to Salesforce page layouts (you’d be hovering for a while, as shown below):

Other grumbles have included: signing up for Marketing Cloud Engagement webinars (not Account Engagement), trying to search for information when these are generic terms used by other vendors, and how to hire professionals.
Aside from this, there are many reasons why the name will stay, and I don’t believe any amount of upvoting will reverse the change.
Summary
While the IdeaExchange can bring out people’s frustrations, it’s a great asset to have your voice heard by product managers.
You may criticize the platform for its entries that have been knocking around for years, however, there are many dependencies that make bringing some features to reality – not to mention that with Account Engagement moving ever-closer to the Salesforce core platform/Data Cloud, the long term intention may be to leverage the wider platform’s functionality.

Whether you like it, or simply tolerate it, I have found the IdeaExchange has been especially useful for confirming what’s not possible (i.e. gaps in functionality) while researching solutions.
Let us know in the comments what feature you’d most like to be implemented in Account Engagement…
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