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Marketers

It’s Here: New Zoom for Pardot Plugin

By Lucy Mazalon

June 25, 2019

Zoom for Pardot is a new plugin that will bridge the gap between powerful marketing automation and this wildly popular webinar tool.

Webinars are a popular tactic throughout the B2B customer lifecycle – from lead generation, to prospect education, and beyond to customer onboarding. With a wide range of uses, it’s worthwhile investing in a webinar platform that’s and frictionless for your team to adopt. A tool that is well-integrated with your CRM is a big bonus that will pay in dividends.

Pardot have plugins for other key webinar players, that have been listed for some time: GoToWebinar, WebEx, ReadyTalk (those of you who have taken the Pardot Specialist exam will have memorised these!).

Zoom’s growth (I speculate) was fuelled by its scaled-down, intuitive interface – which will be further reflected in the new plugin, available now for Zoom users to download directly from the Zoom App Marketplace at no additional cost.

What Does Zoom for Pardot Replace? From Fussy Form Handlers to Seamless Sync

What’s getting replaced? Previously, you could ‘integrate’ Zoom with Pardot by using form handlers behind the Zoom webinar registration forms. I have set it up on a handful of occasions; it was not the easiest process, involving switching back-and-forth between the two tools multiple times.

Zoom’s new Pardot integration simplifies the setup for capturing prospects into Pardot lists. Now, with the new Zoom for Pardot plug-in, a slicker setup process will be in play:

  • Create your (connected) Campaign in Salesforce
  • Create Pardot static lists to capture:
    • Registered prospects
    • Attendees
    • Absentees (AKA. No-shows)
  • From the Zoom webinar configuration page (Integration Tab → Configure), select your Pardot lists:

The inner workings of the Zoom connector will take care of the rest!

Get Started with Switching – Important!

If you’ve been using the previous method to connect your Zoom webinars with Pardot, then you’ll be relieved to cut out the form handler hassle. The switch will be very easy for you to take on.

An important step I highly recommend, is automating the Pardot to Salesforce campaign push. Yes, connected campaigns will sync from Salesforce to Pardot, but you will still need to leverage automation rules and completion actions to push prospects into Salesforce Campaigns, as Campaign Members.

General Tips for Working with Webinars and Pardot

The key to integrating your webinar tool with your Pardot email flows, is understanding that there are some ‘transactional’ touchpoints that the webinar tool will handle vs. Pardot.

I’ve dived into THE DRIP’s archives to find a timelessly popular post on Webinar setup by Marisa Meyers – although this post is about GoToWebinar, many of the principles are transferable to other tools.

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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Comments:

    Linda
    July 02, 2019 6:10 pm
    Hi, We have multiple people setting up webinars w/their own Zoom accounts. We also have one person who is working in Pardot but does not create the webinars. Is there a way to make this work with this scenario? Thank you.
    Reply
    Alex
    August 06, 2019 10:58 pm
    Just a heads up here - if you HAVE been using form handlers up until this point for Zoom webinar registrations, there's a few differences to consider that may seem obvious but I didn't think about until I tried out the list-based feature: - By default Form handlers appear on a prospect's activity history (updating the prospect's last/first activity default fields), and also increase a prospect's score (value depends on your scoring model). - I used the form completion actions to push prospects into an SF campaign with an appropriate status (registered vs attended for each respective form handler) along with a few other field updates. While most of the form handler completion actions can instead be taken care of with an automation rule based on list membership in the list-based setup, the fact that form handler appears on a prospect's activity history, and updates their default first/last activity fields cannot, as far as I know. Also if you have different Salesforce campaign statuses (ie registered, attended), you'll need one automation rule for each. Given that activity updates are critical for some of our reporting, we'll be sticking with form handlers for the time being.
    Reply
    AJ
    April 10, 2020 6:21 pm
    I read in the announcements that this integration is bi-directional, but in testing, the data only syncs from Zoom to Pardot. What data syncs bi-directionally? What am I missing?
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    April 13, 2020 2:24 pm
    Hi Alicia, to be honest, I'm not quite sure! Do you have a representative over at Zoom that could help?
    Reply
    Ana Laura
    April 22, 2020 10:24 am
    Hey Lucy, thanks for this post, quite helpful! I cannot get ahold of the lists! Apparently this is supposed to be done in Zoom --> From the Zoom webinar configuration page (Integration Tab → Configure), select your Pardot lists. But when I talked to Zoom they told me this is done in Pardot. I'm confused and I cannot find this part of the process. When I follow your instructions I don't see that screenshot in Zoom, and the Zoom team told me that's somehting that should be set up in Pardot. So confusing!
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    April 23, 2020 11:56 am
    Hi Ana Laura, I am not too sure, sorry - this information was correct at the time the connector was launched. If the Zoom team are advising you to do it from Pardot, then follow their lead. Let me know what the outcome is! (and I will update the post)
    Reply
    Anthony Brebion
    April 24, 2020 9:24 am
    Hey, with this setup, is the registration page on the Zoom side? Is there a way to keep a Pardot form that we can integrate on our site. I don’t want to direct people only to the zoom registration page
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    May 02, 2020 7:35 am
    Hi Antony, I don't think that's possible (to my knowledge). The landing page that's generated by Zoom for the registration is pretty 'what you see is what you get'. The primary challenge would be to send people who have registered to the Zoom platform, to generate their unique ID/link. I think the best thing to do would be to reach out to Zoom and see how they suggest using 3rd party form/landing pages, there might be a way you can embed the registration form in a landing page. Sorry I couldn't provide you with a more solid answer here!
    Reply

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