Why you need the Lightning Email Builder in your life
Winter ’21 is here and with it, a humdinger of a feature (yes, I did type humdinger).
Prepare yourselves…the Lightning Email Builder is here!
Building an Email 2.0
The legacy experience of creating an email in Pardot does require some degree of HTML knowledge for styling purposes. If you were creating buttons or rows / columns for content, the answer laid in the HTML…and your ability to find and edit the code.
With the new Email Builder in lightning, you can create awesome looking emails with little HTML experience. It’s all done via a drag and drop interface.
The pardot classic way of email building doesn’t provide you with a mobile view in the build phase of the email. Your options were HTML or text.
But most people (well…all?) look at emails on their phone first, laptop second. The mobile interface is the primary way an email is viewed so it makes sense to be able to see how your email will look as you’re building it.
For example, you might think your text looks better aligned to the left on desktop, centred on a mobile. You can edit both in the interface and not affect the other.
With the email builder, you can switch to a mobile view and alter the layout for a mobile screen that won’t affect the layout of the desktop view…two layouts depending on the screen being viewed.
Now THAT is cool!
Very much like building a lightning component, there are 5 components to use in constructing your email.
Button
HTML
Rich Text
Image
Row
With each component, you can change the colour, borders, all the HTML-ey type stuff with text boxes and sliders.
Emails can be built as one offs too and not as a template. Gone is the need to create a template for every email if it’s only going to be used once.
You might have a process in place where emails need sign off or approvals before being given the go ahead to reach your prospects inboxes. So wouldn’t it be awesome if we could discuss the content and layout in chatter, on the email?
Well, now you can!
Because this is totally built in lightning, much like any other record in salesforce, the discussion can happen right on the email so if changes do need to be made, it’s there in chatter.
The first steps to making this happen
There are some prerequisites you need to have in place if you are going to take advantage of this feature.
Pardot lightning app needs to be enabled
Connected Campaigns set up
Handlebars Merge Language (HML) enabled
Salesforce CMS
If you want my advice, regardless of whether you want to use the new email builder or not, make sure that the lightning app and connected campaigns are your next Pardot priorities if you haven’t done this already.
More and more features are requiring these steps to be in place as Salesforce look to tighten the integration between the two systems. So don’t fall behind by not making these changes now.
Ok...what’s the catch?
But this is the first release of email builders and some of the suggestions being taken onboard from the community point to an exciting future for email builders. So look at these as temporary drawbacks rather than set-in-stone limitations.
It’s only a tool for list emails at the moment…this means a no to using this for engagement studio and auto responder emails.
It’s not available in Pardot classic, I’m afraid (did I mention you should move to the lightning app as one of your next priorities?…)
It doesn’t take advantage of dynamic content
At the moment, you can’t pre build reusable components, such as a branded header. However, this is a popular request from the community so I would expect to see this in future releases
The sender of the email has to be from a specific user
As time goes on, more and more features in Pardot are leveraging the user experience of lightning. With building emails, this is the perfect use case for such a UI. Now, you’re in total control of the end user experience and how your content is consumed.
Wanting an easy way to build the perfect email? You’ve just found it!
