Webinar: Mastering Pardot (MCAE) Email Effectiveness Reporting

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the first markloud webinar of 2025. My name is Triana Jarman. I'm going to be emceeing today's session and I am joined by the wonderful Mark Reed who is going to be taking us through today's topic. And before we get into the actual presentation, we're just going to give people a few extra minutes to join the call, hop off from their last meeting. I everyone's dashing to get to this one and while we're waiting, yep, feel free to kind of say hello to the rest of the group. It's really nice. I get the privilege of being able to spy and see who's already joined. And I can see a few familiar names in the crowd. Jeff and Marion. Nice to see you guys. Or see you can't see anybody in these things, but it's great to see your names on the list and if people feel like it, give a little shout out to, you know, where you're all kind of dialing in from and if you feel comfortable, favorite animal. It's been a topic of discussion in the office today, so just curious to see what, what other people would say on that point. Cats and otters. I like that. I mean, it wasn't just cats. We had to actually add otters in there as well. Oh, a red panda. Do you love a red panda? Goats, Jeff. That's. I like it. Goats. See, I'm going to be curious now. We got to see like all kind of like unique stuff. I do personally also love a cat. I'm going to be a bit standard there, but I love, love all animals, but I do have two cats so I should big them up. And Sarah got dog on the list, of course. Bianca. A sloth.

Excellent.

Cats and penguins. Excellent. Cool. We will just wait maybe one more moment and then we will get started. And it's great to see so many people coming in from kind of all over. Quite a few people over from the States, which is great, but also people from Europe. So it's great to have such a broad audience. And thank you all for taking time out of your day, whether it is the afternoon or the morning to join us. Right. I think we're, I think we're in a good place to get started. Mark, if you want to, I'm going to pass you the virtual mic.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Triana. And thanks everyone for joining. Okay, we're going to go through some simple and really, really useful reporting that we would kind of rely heavily on with clients Week in, week out here at Cloud, essentially what we're going to do, we're going to run through email effectiveness reporting. Right. So just to give you a little bit of an introduction about me, I've been working as an account engagement slash part of consultant since 2020. I'm not going to jump into that argument about whether it's part of or account engagement or mcae. So don't get confused if I use three different terms. I'm trying to play by the rulebook, but in my heart it will always be part of. So again, a little bit more background, very enthusiastic about sales and market alignment and I kind of love being in that conversation with customers where you're saying, okay, we have this disconnect. You know, I kind of make the joke of Janet Jackson and what have you done for me lately? Trying to align those two groups is something really, really interests me. And I guess that's a little bit of a nod to my background. So I came from a sales background, worked in retail management for years and keen interest in digital marketing and then management as well. So happily joined Markle in March of 2024. So coming up on my year anniversary, little bit of a fun fact about me and a fun GIF here as well. I've both flown and jumped out small aircraft, so thankfully not at the same time. Somebody was actually in charge of the aircraft at the time I jumped out of it. But yeah, certainly a keen aviation enthusiast. There's a QR code there on the screen. That's my LinkedIn. If anybody wants to scan it, follow me. You're more than welcome. Okay, so moving forward, I'll actually pass back to Triana for a second just to talk a little bit about Markle and who we are as a company.

Yeah, thanks, Mark. So for anybody who is not familiar, Mark, Cloud are a leading marketing automation consultancy and Salesforce partner since 2018 and we very much specialize in marketing Cloud, but equally any clouds that kind of very much connect directly to it. But certainly our kind of main focus and I think the passion for a lot of us on the team is very much the marketing side of things. We have worked on hundreds of projects from kind of your basic, you know, quick start implementations to really kind of complex customized things, ongoing support, a huge variety. Our customers seem to like us. We think we have a 4.8 out of 5 CSAT rating from people. So, you know, we're very proud of that. And again, our clients, they tend to be B2C and B2B. They're global. So we're based primarily in the UK, but we work with clients in Europe, UK, the States as well. And again, we support them on sales cloud, marketing cloud and data cloud. And one of the things that we're just really kind of proud of and that we try to bring to all of our projects is our marketing cloud methodology called Marketing Nirvana, which is just us kind of following a set of principles and guidance to allow clients to build, enable and deliver best practice through their use of the marketing cloud tools. So that's a bit about us. And if you are interested in following the company on LinkedIn, this QR code is for the Mark Cloud LinkedIn company page. And the last thing I will just say before passing back to Mark, because I've forgotten the beginning, is that throughout the presentation, please do ask questions. There is either the chat, which you can add your questions to, or there is a very specific questions icon that you'll see down in the right hand corner of your screen. Use either one of those. That's fine. I will be doing my best to monitor those questions and where appropriate, I might interrupt Mark during his presentation and just ask him kind of the questions as they are relevant. Otherwise we'll have time to answer them at the end. Right, that's me. Back to you, Mark.

Thanks, Ren. Okay, perfect. So our agenda, what we're going to run through today, I'll go through a brief introduction to email reporting, what way we kind of see our clients using each group of reports that we're going to talk about. We're going to look at account engagement, reporting for email metrics and kind of where their real benefits are. We're going to look also at utilizing sales cloud reports. So when we're looking at custom report types and actually building like more kind of overall strategy reports. When we look at marketing effectiveness as a whole. So we're going to look at leveraging sales cloud reporting for email effectiveness as well. The last thing we'll look at, which is probably one of my favorite parts of the reporting suite, is looking at the email effectiveness dashboard. Right again, a marketing effectiveness dashboard, something we should all pride ourselves in. We all have to stand in those meetings and showcase how effective our efforts have been. So curating a really nice dashboard, something I take a lot of pride in with clients. You can get really good outcomes from stuff like that just to go through the basics. Email reporting, email marketing is still the core of everything we do. Obviously any of the clouds we use, they're far more comprehensive. There's a lot more to them. But the core of what we do is really based around email and email effectiveness. Really what we want to know from all of these reports is are we actually doing it right? And this is always a part of the project or a part of the, you know, the functionality that I like to think about at the immediate start of any project or any campaign we're taking care of. So just one thing to note here, I do have here. We will not use B2BMA but we won't be jumping into B2BMA today. Couple of reasons around that. I think it's a really comprehensive tool, it's really, really powerful. But I do think it deserves its own session. So we'll be kind of focusing on BTPMA at a later date because there's no way I could cover it even in the 40 minutes that we have. So we will do a session on B2BMA another time. So we're going to focus on two primary areas today. One is email reports and account engagement. Again I'm going with mca but really the strength in this kind of lies in drilling down into individual records. We're drilling into individual assets, looking at an email on its own after send and getting really good feedback. So where does our heat map look? Where we're getting most click throughs and individual metrics on bounces opens everything like that. I just see there is a poll down at the bottom of the slide here. So there will be a poll put into the chat here. So again it's just a little question to kind of get a gauge of how people are using reporting at the moment. So again, really, really useful. But when we look at sales cloud reports and we get a nice gif, you must choose but choose wisely. Really when we look at these groups of reports we can kind of use them all in conjunction with one another because they do have their own swim and they do have their own use case sales cloud. Because we use the campaign record for reporting salescloud it kind of gives you a more high level view of email effectiveness. So we're not looking at an individual email that was sent to group of people. We're kind of looking at an individual level or at a campaign level to see how effective our email strategy is being. So look at the differentiation between the two. The sales cloud reports allow us to paint kind of the bigger picture. Right? So we're looking at how effective our email strategy is as part of our overall marketing strategy. So again, really kind of nice to build. You can drill down a little bit more into them. The one thing about the email reports and account engagement is they're out of the box, right? We have very little in terms of customization with sales cloud reports and of course with BTPMA as well. We're able to customize them and kind of get a little bit more out of them.

Okay, before you continue just yet to remind people there is a poll that has been posted live and it's just asking very quickly which of the kind of the three tools, reporting tools that Mark mentioned are you using currently? Is it the MCAE reports, sales cloud reports or B2BMA or all of them? I believe the poll should be multi select so whichever ones you are using, feel free to tell us and be interesting to see.

Just hope everyone doesn't click BTBMA and then leave the call. We're going to look first at account engagement reporting for email metrics. Really really simple because as I say they're out of the box and we do get those questions from clients around. On my navigation bar I see reports and I see account engagement reports side by side. What are the differences? As I say, the kind of core reporting within account engagement? Let's call the part up for once we can get into these out of the box reports and they do give us really, really useful information. Down at the bottom here I've just put if you navigate to account engagement reports, marketing assets, emails and list emails, we can see each individual sent email and we can click onto each one. Drill down into the metrics on it. It's really nice actually get four tabs on a report because we can jump into different variations of the metrics. When you click on the email it will open up this page. We kind of get some really high level metrics on that individual asset. So what's our delivery rate? What's our HTML open rate? We can see our ratio of clicks to opens and bounces as well and then we can kind of look at our total hard and soft bounces. Now again this is just for this individual email, but we'll run through each tab and kind of give us the strengths of each one. Really, really nice to kind of get an overall view of an email asset, but actually when we look at the likes of the click through rate here we can get really nice information back on, well what's our heat map look like? Where are we getting most of our clicks and interactions from? Really nice to just be able to read a sent email look at the heat map. This may offer us questions that we ask our internal team in terms of, well, is our email too long Is it too short? Do we have enough prominence in CTAs? What's our best performing CTA? So if we have an email that's, you know, you've got a nice big CTA at the top and a lot of really important information down underneath it, are people clicking the CTA not getting the information? So again, the click through allows us to strategize a little bit more on the actual email and just see what is kind of giving us our best interaction. So again, the insight into the drivers behind conversions and clicks, really, really important and it's all about content optimization. So we do see emails where we're getting really strange click throughs, we're getting a lack of information or lack of interaction below fold. This can be just a nice driver to give us a bit of feedback and give us a bit of an insight into where our clicks and conversions are coming from. So again, really, really strong in terms of individual email strategy. Our interaction tab, really useful as well. Just to showcase out of all the emails that were opened, how long were people spending on them? Now there is always a little bit of a, you know, a pinch of salt to be taken with this because obviously open rates can be affected by different email clients, it can be firewalls, we can have different things that impact on our email output. But it's definitely worth looking at and saying, okay, well if we've got a lot of people who are technically spending more than 10, 10 seconds on our emails, we can kind of get a good idea that our subject line is working in 11 you promoting click throughs and actually opening the email. So again, really useful to kind of look at.

Mark. Yes, yes. Before you just hop into the next tab here, one really good question that's come through from Karen is about how do we account for spam filter clicks or bot clicks within these reports?

Yeah, again that's where we're saying a little bit of pinch of salt with this. It's definitely. And again we look at the individual records and you can look at your opens and clicks, you can look at the timings of them as well. I've seen that where you see a mass amount of clicks and opens at exactly the same time. So it is definitely something to factor into your conversation when you're thinking about that interaction. But definitely using this in conjunction with the clicks is definitely something we will promote. So yeah, as I say, it's definitely something that we're very aware of. So yeah, it's just something we kind of have to factor into our decision.

Making on Those opens I believe as well. And we might have to just go away and recent check this but I'm pretty sure that within par. Sorry I am calling it par. It does have a built in functionality to do its best to kind of filter out engagement where it does believe that it is spam or bots clicking. So I think there's in fact like a time period where if it detects a high amount of clicks in a short amount of time and again I'll have to just sense check exactly what those kind of figures are, it will negate all of the clicks and it would only count it once. I'll make a little note. We can just go away and double check that and kind of. And come back to people on it.

Definitely. Absolutely.

Yeah. And just. Sorry Kelly. Tips on kind of getting around bots. One thing that we sometimes suggest to clients if they're really struggling because there are some industries where maybe you know, either the people you're emailing, it just seems to be a bit prolific kind of bots or kind of very trigger happy firewalls. You can actually use like a hidden custom redirect in your email template that literally would only ever be clicked by a bot because the human would not know that it is there. It's like almost hidden within the code, but it is there within the email. And you would set that to then flag that particular prostate prospect as a potential, you know, bot or kind of coming from like a spam IP address. And then you could add them to a list and make a decision about whether you actually want to get rid of that prospect entirely. Mark them as do not email or any kind of subsequent action like that is. Is one suggestion.

Yeah, it's a. It's very funny and it's really interesting to actually be able to read those as well. It's something we get asked quite a lot is okay, this is quite strange behavior we're noticing within our org. What's your best advice on it? So it is definitely something that we do solve and we always come up with different. We're always challenged with different scenarios such as things being read after unsubscribe and all kinds of weird stuff. So it is good to kind of know the narrative there and be able to read it. Thanks Trienne. The last piece, which is kind of key for us when we look at our account engagement reports and individual emails is the email client breakdown. Now again this is something that we rely heavily on for a couple of reasons. So this gives us a nice breakdown in terms of what email Clients our users are using and when we're actually opening the emails, you'll see a lot of stuff where depending on the business, it's primarily Outlook, we get a lot of breakdown there. But the key thing for this is obviously when we're looking at how our email templates respond to different clients. We've got a really good development team here and a lot of what they would do would be in terms of building out email templates. And a lot of their concern is, well, how does the email actually render on specific clients? So if we're looking at, okay, you know, let's call it Outlook, for example, if that was the most problematic client that we have to deal with, the developers will write code that's specific to the email's behavior on Outlook. You can also factor in really important things like dark mode and so ensuring that your emails display correctly across dark mode, if it's primarily dark mode that your end users have. So definitely vital when we look at that overall strategy piece, how do we build our email templates? How do we make sure they're effective for each and every client that we have to deal with? So, yeah, really, really crucial when you're looking at that email template inception. Very, very good in terms of giving us that feedback.

Mark, got another question for you that just come through, which is a good one. Is there a way that we can see how many people would have seen the text version of an email that has been sent compared to the HTML?

I'm fairly sure we can actually. That's a good question because I've never been asked that by a client. So, yes, I'd be fairly sure we can get that breakdown. But again, that's something I will sense. Check. Unless, Triana, you can prove me right or wrong.

No, equally, it's the one that I'm kind of like, oh, I don't think I've ever actually been asked the question before. And so I can actually think that off the top of my head that there is a way of knowing whether someone saw the text version or not. So, yeah, go away, Joanne, and take a look at that.

Yeah, it's definitely something I. Yeah, and that's, I guess part of the best thing about being a consultant is you're always challenged.

Right.

So, yeah, I'll look into that because it's something that's definitely valid for us. So we're going to kind of move on because we do have one last piece. We kind of report, as we said, and we're focusing on the template. The template that's Built within account engagement. Now the thing to say here, and the really important thing to note is your email template reports. Your email templates are used in multiple sends. This will give you a roll up of statistics based on every email send. You've used that template for overall effectiveness. If we have one master template that we're using for every send, again it's good to be able to read this and say, okay, well we're using this template, are we getting a really high degree of opt outs? Are we getting a really high degree of hard bounce or spam complaints, anything like that? Because at a template level you can see down at the bottom of this report total spam complaints and our spam complaint rates. So if you are noticing that this template has too much in it, it could be too many URLs, click throughs, it could have too many images even, for example, that can lead to spams or spam traps and spam complaints. The metrics here quite similar to that individual email report. But as I say, it just rolls everything up on the template. But again, it doesn't give you the breakdown per specific use. So again, definitely worth looking at as an overall strategic piece. But it doesn't give you the same level of insight because obviously we use a template as a base and then we send list emails like postcards off the back of it. So that's our, that's our account engagement emails. And again, what I always like to think about is well, where are these emails most important for or what role Individual marketers who are creating emails, sending them, doing all that kind of stuff, they're more focused on the individual athletes. Whereas when we transition to the sales cloud reports, yes, it's very, very important for marketers, it's very, very important for that overall piece. But I think what we look at when we talk about the sales cloud reports is far more of a strategic piece. How are our emails performing as a whole? How are we looking at email as part of our overall strategy and how does that all fit together? So again, when we talk about execution of campaigns, I always think, okay, we go from kind of ideation to execution and then when we get to the reporting stage, do we have everything set up to catch all the data that we're going to get back? And the big thing I always talk about with clients is can we make this actionable, right? So when we build out reports, we get the metrics back. It's all well and good to look at that and go, that looks great on paper, brilliant. We got a really good Click through rate. But what are we going to do with it? And that's where that idea of email effectiveness or marketing effectiveness as a whole comes into play. And that's where these reports become really, really valuable tools. Looking at account engagement data in sales cloud reports, really, really powerful. Because what we use within sales cloud is kind of almost a junction object, is your campaign record. So the campaign, I always talk about its effectiveness as a unit within the campaign. You have all of your assets, whether they be emails, forms, landing pages, any custom redirects that we build. We also have the people, so your campaign members within there as well. So we can kind of look at that level of engagement. We've got the likes of investment and return on investment. So you can kind of get a lot more information out of the campaign object. So because we've got, we now use connected campaigns, the campaign object becomes so powerful and actually the reporting steps up in line with that. So the campaign reporting really becomes a hero when we talk about this. So again, because we can group this by campaign, we can group it by email or by email name, we can put a lot of grouping in there. It allows us to leverage the likes of a campaign hierarchy and see how well our emails are performing across multiple campaigns rolled up into a parent, et cetera. Again, we're getting into customization here. The marketing cloud account engagement reports out of the box, brilliant. Gives us really good feedback. But here we're able to just do some customization. Again, if we need to build custom fields or anything like that out custom formulas, anything we need to do to make our reporting suite a little bit more sleek, absolutely fantastic. When we're using sales cloud reports, we're going to look at the marketing effect or sorry, the email effectiveness report as the example. But as I said, because we're utilizing the campaign object, we can build out custom report types. And this does take a little bit of doing. It's not the most arduous task in the world. But setting up custom report types means we can leverage the mix of campaigns with emails, campaigns with forms, campaigns with landing pages and also with marketing links. Again, these are the things we build within Pardot I said at Bardot and we attribute to a campaign. Again, that's why this campaign strategy, campaign hierarchy all comes in so important because we're linking all of our assets to the campaign and we're leveraging the reports at the end to kind of make sure that what we're doing is effectiveness. As I say, NB in red. They do need to be set up. They don't come out of the box. But it's not too big of a job if you do have a sales cloud admin. So we're kind of looking at a bit of customization here. Why should we use them? I've kind of covered over that already. Right. So we talked about the account engagement reports on the individual level. We're looking at the heat map. We're doing all that kind of stuff to see what's performing well for us in that regard. But alongside that, if we use our sales cloud reports, we get just more of a high level view. So again, feeding into that overall strategy idea, far more focused on campaign grouping. KPI's looking at our, you know, total sent, total delivered. When I'm building out these reports, I like to think of that natural flow of an email from our outbox to the person's inbox and then what happens afterwards. So I would kind of rifle through it like total sent, total delivered, total opens, unique opens, and then all the way through to click throughs. And you can even work on unsubscribes, hard banks, et cetera. So we can get a lot of information back. As I said, the nicest thing about this is curating all of that information into a dashboard. So for presentation purposes, we can stand on a really nicely built dashboard. We can change out metrics and put different looks and feels to components, so we can do a lot of stuff there as well. And as I say, this should all feed into your overall campaign strategy. Email marketing, how is it performing as its own channel? How is it looking? What's the interaction like? Is it actually pulling its weight? So definitely kind of.