Account Engagement (Pardot) Snippets: A Complete Tutorial

Snippets can be used across Salesforce Campaigns or Account Engagement (Pardot) Business Units, allowing you to share information quickly, which can be updated in a central place and shared across assets. 

There are some limitations and they aren’t as customised as Advanced Dynamic Content, but there is still a lot you can do with them! As Snippets are available to all Account Engagement (Pardot) users, this is a great feature to have in your toolkit.

How to Use Snippets

Snippets work really well for information that will need updating regularly and will be used across multiple communications. They are useful for organizations of any size, but they are especially handy for larger organizations with multiple teams working across marketing and communications. A central team can update the Snippets that are used across emails by the wider team, ensuring everyone is up to date quickly and accurately. 

Examples of how you could use Snippets:

• The date or registration link of your next webinar.
• The latest offer or discount code available.
• The latest video you’ve posted on YouTube.
• The total amount raised to date for a Fundraising Campaign.

A key benefit of Snippets is that they are a Salesforce object and can therefore be populated using automations, such as Flow. This could be incredibly useful if you would like to use information from sources outside of your standard or custom object mappings in Account Engagement (Pardot). It’s a useful workaround for pulling information from custom objects into Account Engagement emails, especially if only certain snapshots of these are needed. 

Flow Example: The Date of Your Next Volunteer Training Day

In this example, we are looking for all Campaign records with a start date in the future, of the type “Volunteer”. There is a general assumption that the Start Date is the date of the event, though the same principle could apply to another date field also.

1. Select Campaign object, then choose the trigger “A record is created or updated”. The type should be “Volunteer Day”.

2. Get all active Campaigns where the type equals volunteer day and start date is in the future.

3. Get the Snippet that will be updated.

4. Stamp Snippet titled “Next Volunteer Date” with the date of Campaign.

When a new Campaign is created or the start date is changed, the Flow will then check the start dates of future, active Campaigns and stamp the date in the Snippet. 

If your organization is creating lots of Campaigns, you may want to add a decision split before the update to reduce the time the Snippet is updated. It could check if the Campaign found is the same as the starting record and only update if they are.

This is just one example, but the principle could apply anywhere in Salesforce, but it is worth discussing with your Salesforce Admin before creating them. Snippets are a Salesforce object, so this flow process can be tested in a Sandbox even if you don’t have an Account Engagement (Pardot) Sandbox.

Currently, Snippets are not available in the Lightning Email Builder in the same way as in the Classic Builder (by selecting Snippets from the Merge Field Picker) – but I hope this will change in time. For now, you can use them in the Lightning Email builder by selecting the merge field manually within the Classic Builder and then copying it over. 

While this is a little cumbersome, keeping a log of Snippets and their corresponding merge field could speed up this process. You could even use Salesforce itself as a way to store and view them.

Setup Prerequisites: Before You Start

There are three features you need to enable in Account Engagement (Pardot) first before jumping into Snippets. If you have kept on top of each release, you should be fine to continue:

• Pardot Lightning App
• Connected Campaigns
• HML (Handlebars Merge Language)

Step 1: Add to Campaign Page Layout

You can edit your Campaign page layouts by going to Salesforce Setup and searching for “Campaigns” in the Object Manager.

Then go to Page Layouts and ‘drag and drop’ the “Snippet Assignment” related list onto the layout.

Step 2: Give Users Tab Access

Now you’ve added the place where Snippets will be managed from Campaigns. However, Snippets are also accessible through the “Snippets” tab in the Pardot Lightning App, so you need to give visibility to that tab to users.

In Salesforce Setup, search for Profiles. You may recognize some of yours in the list below:

First, check the Tab settings – this should be set to “Default On”. I find that the best way to navigate is to use CTRL+F to find what I’m looking for.

Because of the default, the System Admin will have both Tab visibility and CRED (create, read, edit, delete). For other profiles, check their “Object Settings”.

You or your admin may find that the most efficient way could be to create a Permission Set. If so, it will look like this:

Note: Always check with your admin first, and consider maintenance above all else.  

To take it a step further, you can head to the Lightning App Builder and rearrange your Navigation Items however you like (add, remove, move up, move down), as I’ve done below:

Summary

In summary, Snippets are a great tool for Account Engagement (Pardot) users on any plan. They are a great example of how combining a feature with Salesforce platform technology can streamline your marketing and save time.