• by Jess Nelson , July 1, 2016

Salesforce recently made Pardot Engagement Studio, an upgrade to its B2B marketing automation service, generally available to marketers.

Pardot Engagement Studio acts as a hub for B2B marketers where they can build, track and manage digital customer journeys.

Salesforce first unveiled Pardot Engagement Studio to a closed beta of select customers, but the new marketing automation platform is now available at no additional charge to all Pardot users.

Marketers can dictate trigger-based marketing rules and actions based on customer data, and customer analytics are displayed alongside campaign success metrics for a comprehensive overall view of every marketing campaign.

In addition, the updated now integrates with Salesforce Engage and the Salesforce Sales Cloud to improve communication between business units such as marketing, customer service and sales. A library of email templates now available within Salesforce Engage allows users to run marketing campaigns from Salesforce CRM, the Salesforce Mobile App and/or Gmail. In addition, Engage also now offers real-time analytics feeds and interactive dashboards.

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud was recently named as a leader in the Q2 2016 Forrester Wave of Cross-Channel Campaign Management alongside Adobe, SAS and Oracle, and Forrester even recommended Salesforce for email-driven SaaS-based marketing in the report. Forrester did, however, point out specific critiques on Salesforce's high pricing and its lack of integration with third-party tools.

Siloed data can obstruct a marketer's view of customers or accounts, and the digital actions those potential clients are taking. Data integration is a challenge, but it is also a necessary component of effective digital marketing, according to a SAP report. 

Some 21% of digital marketers report their data to still be confined within organizational silos according to a June study by SAP and the CMO Council, while 20% acknowledged too much data to leverage effectively and 12% responded data was messy and difficult to glean insights from. 

Yet the benefits of integrated data are tremendous and include the ability to measure and track campaigns, programs and increased customer engagement at a lower cost, according to the SAP report.