Using Pardot Engagement Studio for Deadline Reminder Campaigns
Deadline reminders are a typical business use case where automated email campaigns step in to save the day. Pardot Engagement Studio offers marketers to schedule emails to send on a set date, which adds more value than meets the eye.
In this post, I will show you how to build out an Engagement Program using the email ‘send on date’, which can be applied to for an application deadline, approaching event date, membership expiry, or a limited time offer.
Prospects Entering the Campaign
You will want your deadline campaign flow to have a specific behaviour for prospects entering the campaign. Instead of joining the top of the flow, you will want them to enter at the correct email, according to the date.
Let’s take an example.
Your application deadline is coming in 4 weeks (31st October), and you would like to send a reminder email to prospects every week.
Email 1: 10/10 – “Application Deadline is in 4 Weeks”
Email 2: 17/10
Email 3: 24/10
Email 4 (the application deadline): 31/10/19
Any prospect joining the program on or before 10th October should receive email 1. However, if a prospect joins on 15th October, they should skip email 1, and instead receive email 2 on the correct date scheduled.
This kind of logic is only possible by using ’send on date’.
Engagement Studio ’Send on Date’
When you add a ‘Send Email’ action in Engagement Studio, you can tell Engagement Studio when to send the email in one of 3 ways.
By clicking ’Send on date’, a date field appears for you to insert your send date.
After adding each email, the Engagement Studio will look like this:
Get Clever with Content
Why would you go through all this hassle? You may be asking.
Surely, I could just use wait periods instead? There’s a reason why not.
Marketing Automation is all about being relevant in your messaging, for that specific moment in time; with this in mind, you will want to use different email content for each of the different weeks those emails are sent. Aside from getting specific with the remaining time in the email subject line, you may want to shake up the content to include more urgency as the deadline draws ever closer, or extra temptations, for example, an extra promotion.
Let your creativity run wild.
Summary
I’ve just shown you how to build out an Engagement Program using the email ‘send on date’ feature, which has a special behaviour for prospects entering the flow after the start date, ensuring they don’t receiving irrelevant/out-of-date email content. Send on date is a relatively new feature of Engagement Studio, and I am so glad Pardot bought this out – it’s a great help!
Lydia
How does this feature work when you combine it in an EP with regular emails that don’t have “send on” dates?
Lucy Mazalon
Interesting question – and a tricky one to answer! It will depend on the spacing in between emails. If you have two emails scheduled ‘on date’ 3 days apart (call them email A and C), then it doesn’t make sense to have emails in-between scheduled on a ‘wait’ basis for longer than that, eg. 4 days (call this email B). In that scenario, the prospect would receive email A, wait 4 days and receive email B, but then skip email C because the date would have past. They will show up in reporting as ‘skipped’. You will have to walk through it in the shoes of your prospects and sense check all the timings – hope that helps.
Danielle
How would this work if the date fields are different for each prospect? For instance, I have a use case to send targeted emails based on a date field. I.e. send this email 30 days after [date field], then send this email 100 days after [date field] and so on, but the date field value is different for every prospect in the engagement studio program? Referencing a formula field to calculate a number based on the date does not work because I need a Prospect to be able to pause on a step and wait until the 30 days is reached, or skip it if they join the program after 30 days from that date.