Snippets are a type of Marketing Asset that you can create and edit through any connected campaign (the snippet becomes associated with that specific campaign). But you can only access them through the new ‘Snippets’ tab on the Pardot Lightning App.
When used correctly, snippets go a long way toward managing email content across Engagement Studio campaigns. This is due to the fact that Engagement Studio campaigns can only utilise email templates, so the number of email templates that users needed to create in their Pardot accounts has skyrocketed. Keeping track of content across a number of separate templates has been quite time-consuming for many teams.
Diving In
Snippets are an available feature for all editions of Pardot that are using the Pardot Lightning App, Connected Campaigns, and HML.
In order to get the most out of Snippets right off the bat, you’ll just need to complete the steps outlined here.
When the Snippets are made available on the Campaign page layout and through the tab in the Pardot Lightning App, the next steps will involve creating Snippets to use across Pardot Emails and Email Templates. You can either create Snippets for existing campaigns or opt to build out an entirely new campaign.
Create Your Snippets
As an example, let’s say a company named Resonant Software Solutions has hosted their annual customer conference, which just concluded. Their marketing team is working on a follow-up campaign to keep their brand fresh in the minds of prospects who attended the keynote and concert events.
Here are the steps their marketing team will need to undertake:
- Create the Campaign
- Create the Snippets and Assignments
- Create the Email Templates
- Create the Engagement Studio program for follow-up purposes
- After creating the “Annual Customer Conference – Follow Up Campaign,” create Snippets directly from the Snippet Assignments related list on the Campaign record.
Upon completing the Snippets, the marketing team decides to take a break, while awaiting approval of the actual content of their emails. When they return from their break, they can begin working on the follow-up emails with approved content.
Use Your Snippets In An Email
Email Templates are automatically associated to the same Campaign that the Snippets are assigned to. Bear in mind that your Campaign relationship is crucial, as this is what determines which Snippets are available for you to use in the Pardot Email and Email Templates.
If it so happens that one Snippet is associated with more than one Campaign, as in this example (Conference Date, Keynote Speaker, Conference Location), it is quite possible to have one Snippet assigned to several Campaigns.
When the marketing team starts the process of creating the email, opening the Merge Field selector will display Snippets when Snippets are assigned to the same Campaign as their Email Template. At this point, the marketing team can begin pulling Snippets into the body portion and subject line of their email.
Before drafting the rest of the emails for their follow-up campaign, the marketing team checks out a preview of the email to get a general idea of how their email will look from a recipient’s perspective. They’ll also be able to see that the “Annual Customer Conference – CTA” Snippet pulls in a personalisation HML tag (i.e. industry), so that Snippets can be personalised as much as other aspects of their email. In addition to that, the call-to-action link, which is embedded within the Snippet, is tracked and will factor into the reporting metrics.
Update Your Content With Snippets
The Marketing team finishes drafting the rest of their follow-up emails and builds the campaign, which is met with much success. In the following year, the Corporate Marketing team requests the same follow-up effort after the event. So the marketing team quickly navigates to their Snippets tab, and filters the view by their ‘Annual Event’ list view.
Instead of needing to manually edit each and every one of these values across a number of emails, the marketing team simply makes one change to each of them. Then each Snippet is updated, and the resulting changes automatically cascade everywhere that particular Snippet is used. Additionally, they use Chatter to keep track of what, why, who, and when a value has been changed to keep everyone on the same page.
By implementing Snippets in this manner, the marketing team has saved themselves hours of boring, repetitive tasks and have increased their overall efficiency as a team. This enables them to allocate more time to more important tasks and minimise manual overhead from their daily operations.
