In 2018, 80.3 percent of adults in the United States accessed the internet through their mobile phone. This figure is projected to grow to 84.8 percent in 2023.(source:Statista.com).
This is just a proof of mobile being the most dominant thing in the lives of users across the globe and therefore if you want to keep your customers close, you have to go mobile and reach them.
Even after the origin of varied messaging apps, text remains one of the most prominent applications which works on all kinds of mobile phones.
According to a research done on text messages in the US, it was found that:
On average:
- 99% of texts are read
- Texts are read within 5 seconds of being sent
- 45% of marketing texts get responses
- Links in texts have a 36% click through rate
- 9/10 would rather get a text than a call
Source: Statistic Brain Research Institute, Text Request
This makes an interesting case for a business to engage their leads using text messages and include this medium of communication in all their marketing strategies.
With the marketing automation tool at the center in this digital era, it makes sense to communicate with people who are interested in your business and have visited your website to either see your offering or inquire about your services.
Further to this research, we tried to find out which is one of the most popular marketing automation tools available and how could they be conjoined with text messaging to engage leads.
Pardot is one of the most popular marketing automation tools used by businesses across the world. It provides abundant features to target, acquire and nurture the leads so as to increase your revenue as easily as possible.
In the article below, we will cover how to conjoin Pardot and text messaging and explore how to send text messages to leads that reside in your Pardot system.
Popular Business Use Cases
Use Case 1- Reminder messages or bulk SMS for a feature:
The most prominent case being reminding your old leads about the relationship you have had or letting them know about a new feature or offering you just introduced.
All the leads which have been captured in Pardot and segmented by lists, could be sent a reminder SMS with the text samples as follows:
- Hope you remember us. Let me know if we can get in touch again. You can get in touch with us here: <link to contact company>
- It might interest you that we just introduced *this feature* for our customers and we think this could improve your business to a significant extent. Would you like to take a look here?
The leads could be requested to navigate to the company contact us page or any specific landing page that mentions the details about the new feature and its benefits to the lead type.
It could further be refined by sending different messages and different landing page URLs to different set of lead lists in Pardot.
Use Case 2: SMS campaigns using workflow
The second most important use case that can keep your lead engaged throughout is by creating an SMS campaign that works basis workflows and a set of rules or parameters.
This involves a set of 5-6 text messages that would be sent one after another after some specific time interval and could be triggered based on some user action.
This way SMS can be generated off of workflow rules in the system to automatically trigger messages.
The only caveat is to keep in mind the approval of customers and include the unsubscribe link in each of your text messages.
There could be different workflows which can work depending on the set objective.
- Welcome Workflow: This is an example of the workflow where you could welcome the blog/content subscriber who opts to receive marketing campaigns through SMS messages.
Trigger
This is used by brands to welcome their subscribers using a warm welcome email once theydownload any gated content on the website or subscribe to the blog.
Overview
By automating the welcome campaign through text messaging, one can increase conversions by including the links of landing pages for products, services, or special offers in the text messages when one already has the contact’s attention.
Objective
The Goal with this SMS workflow could be to send a Welcome SMS to New Subscribers as soon as they sign up or fill out a subscription form, then keep them in a list for easy identification.
Process
Ongoing promotions workflow: This SMS workflow could be initiated for customers who have made a purchase from the website and could be pitched or upsold other offerings.
This requires constant promotion of different products over a period of time.
This workflow will promote all available products to a prospect. It will happen gradually, exposing a prospect to all available products offered.
This is used as an opportunity to upgrade or upsell your existing customers, or sell them complementary products and services depending on what they have already purchased.
Abandoned cart reminder workflow(for ecommerce companies): For ecommerce websites where users frequently see products and either buy them or abandon them in the cart, an SMS workflow could be initiated to remind the users about the abandoned products, send relevant offers and bring them onboard.
Acknowledgement and recurring payment reminder workflow(specially for nonprofits who accept donation): This is an important workflow for nonprofits who accept donation and is very relevant for the ones who accept recurring donations.
As per this workflow, all the donors would be sent acknowledgement SMS as soon as they make any donation if they wish to receive SMS updates.
If there is a recurring donor, they could be sent a reminder SMS 1 day before his donation date every month
Use Case 3: Reminder SMS to marketing event attendees
This use case is important for companies which organize as well as host seminars, conferences and any other marketing events.
If the events and the attendees details are already there in Pardot, they could be sent a reminder SMS one hour before the event starts.
This makes sure the attendees are updated with the event details and no one is left out.
Solution
To accomplish the use cases mentioned above, it is required to integrate both SMS messaging using a popular provider i.e. Twilio and Pardot.
This has been achieved by SMS Drift which provides a seamless mechanism to send text messages and the workflow to your Pardot leads without any hassle.
- Overview
SMS Drift is a business text messaging software provider. Using our software, businesses can send and receive thousands of text messages directly from their desktop computer.
The SMS Drift software is a web-based program, and is optimized for desktop and laptop computers.
The idea behind the concept is to send and receive SMS with thousands of contacts,Create campaigns, templates and automation.
- Features
- Lightning features supported and provide you interactive design with a brilliant user interface
- All of your messages can be viewed in one location, and you can add unlimited team members.
- It’s easily understandable and affordable by any organization.
- Easy register and Payment security by stripe.
- Connect it with your Pardot account in 10 secs.
- Secure and safe Data with us.
- Check all your message logs any time.
- BroadCast messages to Any of your Pardot List in matters of seconds.
- Create Campaign on rule Bases and Always connect with your users.
- Easy to Create A template message for all the users we will change it for that for them.
- Fully based on REST API using version 4.0 of Pardot to provide easy, fast and secure set-up for the user
- Pre-Configuration Settings
- Before you start sending SMS you should have these things configured.
- You should have a Pardot Active account.
- You holds the rights to access and change the data in pardot.
- Collect your API UserKey form your Pardot account. You can find Your User API Key by going to Settings>My Profile>API User Key in your Pardot.
- How to Configure
Go to https://app.smsdrift.com/amember/login
If You are a new user then click on “Signup here”
Select the plan from “Membership Type” DropDown.
Fill The remaining details of the registration Form and Press “Next” button.
Fill the card Details For Payment.
And Press “Subscribe And Pay” Button.
You will see a thankyou page like this and can go to dashboard by clicking the “here”link in the line “Please click here to access your member’s area”.
Your DashBoard Will look like this with active Resource “SMS Drift”.
After Clicking on SMS Drift you will see Dashboard of SMS Drift.
What it tells you
- Total message shows that the number of messages you can send.
- Sent Message shows how many messages you have sent.
- Remaining Message shows how many messages you can still send.
Let’s talk about the header we have
On the top Right corner of Dashboard you can see to things
- Icon you can see is help section where you can read the setup documentation.
- Settings you can change
- User settings
- Create Connection with Pardot
- Logout
If you don’t have a connection you will see a red dot in parallel to connection in settings and can make the connection by clicking on the connection.
You will see a form like this
Here you need to fill the details
- Email that you use to login in Pardot account.
- Password that you use to login in Pardot account.
- UserAPI key that we collected from Pre-Configuration in step3.
- Hit save button.
You can’t use the same email to make connection for another account every account you have should have a different email.
Now let’s talk about sidebar, we have four buttons there
- Dashboard
We already discussed about that. - Logs
Here you can see all the messages that you sent to your contact.
You can see who Sent the message, whom it was sent, what is the status of your message sent to someone, on which date it was created.
- Broadcast SMS
You can see there are two fields- First is the list of all the list that is in your Pardot account. (It will only show any list if you have a connection with Pardot).
- Second you see a textarea where you can write any message that is going to be sent to all the prospects in any particular list that was selected by you.
- SMS Workflow
Here you can create your own campaign based on some rules for some particular Prospects in you Pardot account.
Lets create a new campaign
- You need to click on Add New Campaign button.
- You will see this type of interface.
- Let’s start by giving name to the campaign for example-campaign1
- Next we have to select a particular date from which we want to start our campaign lets select a date.
- Now add time for resending our message to our Prospects. Lets say we want to send it by every 5 days.
- Now add a Rule for Prospects by clicking on Add Rule Button. you will see 3 new fields.
- Rule Field – here you can select the prospect fields.
- Rule Operator- here you can select the operator that will work on that field and value that we will select.
- Rule value – here you have to write down the value with which you want that rule to be set.
Like above, I want to send a message to those who have been in the list with 10 years in business. I created a rule for that , also you can add more rules in any campaign.
- Next you have to choose the field from “To” where you added the mobile or phone numbers of Prospects like in my case I have added them in “phone” field.
- Next you see a checkbox you if you checked this then your message will only be sent to those who are new after that specified date.
- Next you can write your message and if you want to specify each members name in the message you can simply select the name field from side dropdown align to message input field.
- And press the save button to create that campaign and this will send you to the page where you can see all your campaigns and where you can edit and delete th
