How to Mass Update Pardot Email Templates

Is there a way to mass update Pardot email templates? The answer to that is yes, and no.

There comes a time in every marketer’s life where they need to make a change to email content – header images, privacy policy, the name of a product – there are many examples. There is no way to extract email content, or update multiple in one view, so you are left to edit and publish every individual email template.

There is a better way. By investing time in setting up Snippets for email content blocks, you will thank your future self when you are able to update content in one place, and changes cascade down immediately.

Note: Snippets also apply to mass updating forms and landing pages.

How to Update Pardot Email Templates – The Old-school Way

This guide is referring to the content within the email – the text, images, or links – not the email information – like name, folder, tags – that you find under the ‘Basic Information’ button (the metadata).

It’s likely that your Pardot org has many email templates. As Engagement Studio requires email templates, there has been a wave of duplicated email templates, disparate/unlinked from one another.

I already broke the bad news that there is no way to extract email content, edit and reimport, nor can you update multiple templates in one view. You must spend time editing each individual email template, running a render (as is good practice), and republish.

How many templates do you have in this list? Don’t forget to count the ‘Draft’ templates too!

You can speed this up by using the email HTML. Grab the HTML you need to change, CTRL+F to find what you want to replace in the email HTML, then paste the new HTML in. This is a technique I used in the pre-Snippet days. Below is an example of a font change I had to make across all email templates for one organisation:

How to Mass Update Pardot Email Templates – Snippets

Snippets are reusable blocks of text, images, dates, or links that can be pulled into multiple Pardot emails, forms and landing pages. Snippets offer a great opportunity to centralise content management.

Create and edit Snippets in the Snippet Editor. Insert Snippets into email templates using the merge picker from within the Email Builder:

Then, any updates to content you make from the Snippet Editor will be applied to every template using that Snippet – quick and consistent!

Snippets are tied to:

• Campaigns, ‘Campaign Snippets’: you can use a Snippet in any email template associated with that specific campaign (connected campaign)
• Pardot Business units, ‘Business Snippets’: you can use a Snippet in any email template stored in that specific business unit.

Summary

My advice is to invest the time upfront to create, organise, and embed snippets into your email templates. As they say, a stitch in time, saves nine!

It’s likely that your Pardot org has many email templates. As Engagement Studio requires email templates, there has been a wave of duplicated email templates, disparate/unlinked from one another. If this is the case for your team, start thinking how you can future-proof your templates before the number of templates continues to grow!

Remember that Snippets also apply to mass updating forms and landing pages.

Find out more about Snippets, including how to get set up and more use cases.