Month: January 2024

About 20 years ago, I made a website with the free hosting service Angelfire for a class project. It wasn’t my first HTML project, but it was the first time the scope went beyond AOL Instant Messenger away message formatting.

Writing that paragraph, by the way, made me feel super old.

The challenge to webwork back then was that everything was hand-coded. You wanted to write a paragraph? Well

<p>Make sure to wrap it in a < p > tag or else your text won't wrap.</p>

If you wanted any of that text to be bold, you had better make sure to put a <b> tag in there. Need your page background to be something other than white? While, that <body> tag is going to need some style declarations.

It was a pain in the butt, and I was glad those days were over. I like to get under the hood every now and then, but if I’m writing HTML, it’s because it’s an output of some javascript or php.

Anyway, fast forward to this week, and I find myself writing this

That’s part of a Pardot landing page. Creating a landing page template in Pardot is a good idea, and it’s something I would have taught my students to do if my classes ever had the time to get into CRM tools. But, creating a template is basically an HTML-only job. There are no page builders or other resources, and it is a ton of fun.

I mean, I’m building this landing page template for a single job right now: a page promoting the company’s booth at an event later this year. But, I hate doing more work than I need to, and creating a fresh page for every event would be mind-numbingly awful. There’s too much room for error, and if I find myself simply copy/pasting what worked in the past and adjusting a few bits of text, then I might as well have a template.

I see enough of these events coming in the future that it’s worth getting the design right the first time.

Templates and Learning

But Matt, you say, “pardot-region” isn’t a standard DOM object property.

That’s right. It’s part of the internal Pardot logic. Pardot supports {{handlebar notation}} for functions, and I’m wondering if I can use those to template out template components. That would really make things easier over time. For now, I’m stuck hand coding everything again and—while it is fun and it’s bringing back warm memories—that’s taking some time.

There is a benefit to hand-coding it, though. I’m new enough to the company that I need to learn a lot of style and branding standards: what colors do we use for different contexts and elements, how should web pages look, do we have standards for different text lengths or formatting, etc.

Back in my teaching days, I’d often teach template writing first in a course where document design and structure was a focus. Before we ever touched content creation, we dealt with the form the content would take. It forced students to explicate every rule they will need to follow when creating a document, which made it a lot easier to offer revision advice when they didn’t format things correctly.

“You said an equation in an IEEE paper has to be formatted following these rules. Your equation looks different. Why?”

I’m feeling the same benefit now. Many communications from METER begin with a bold clause, then transition to that grey, unbold text style. The Pardot region for text doesn’t allow formatting, though, so I can’t wing it whenever I have to fill in a template. I’ve had to define every rule, accounting for every possible bit of formatting I might want in the future, and I’ve had to think ahead to how large text blocks or images might be when they hit the page, since some of the layout rules assume elements of a specific width or maximum height.

Man, I miss Angelfire.

I’ve used professional grade tools like MailChimp and simpler tools like phpList. As a Marketing Writer at SEL, I wrote email content and had some input on marketing email and engagement campaigns run through Salesforce Pardot. This week, I started leading Pardot activity as part of my campaign manager role at METER.

Email Management

Pardot, like other email management, marketing automation, and CRM tools, is just a software that streamlines marketing communication processes. It has tools to manage landing pages, emails, forms, and other content. As someone who used to teach professional writing classes, there are a few email related things I’m focused on as part of this new role.

• Scheduling and sending emails
• Managing recipient lists and audiences
• Creating email templates
• Tracking engagement and responses

I have some starting goals to increase list sizes, and as I’m learning how Pardot has been used in this group, I’m setting some personal goals related to templates.

Inside vs. Outside

From the outside, Pardot seemed pretty simple. I compared the analytics we had on email performance to the construction of emails to identify textual features that tended to perform better. So, it wasn’t just about email length, it was about the rhetorical moves taking place.

From the inside, I’m getting to see a little more complexity. I can set A/B test parameters, and I can get some finer-grained segmentation of how a message performed with its audience. It’s similar to MailChimp and phpList.

---

At the moment, the most daunting aspect of Pardot is learning how it’s been used in the past in this context. It’s one thing to start an email program fresh, and it’s an entirely different task to pick one up that’s developed over several years.

Rhetorical Concerns

So, as a former professional writing teacher, where would I focus for someone learning this tool?

Sending and Scheduling

Setting a send time for emails isn’t very complicated. It’s the last step of the construction process, and I literally choose between two buttons: send now or schedule now. If I schedule it, then I can pick a date and time for the emails to begin rolling out. They don’t all send in one burst, so I’ll be looking to see how long it takes for them to trickle out and whether or not time of day or day of week matter to these audiences.

In a classroom, I’d ask students to pay close attention to kairos and the reader’s likely mindset when they encounter a message. Do I want to be in the batch of emails someone sees when they get to the office on Monday morning? Do I want to catch them before they head out the door on Friday afternoon? Somewhere in the middle?

Granted, the purpose behind an email impacts this as well. If I’m offering a webinar, a tutorial, or some other free learning resource, maybe that’s a good Monday morning thing to help someone ease into their week. If I’m promoting a product, that’s unlikely to be met with the same level of interest as the week starts.

Audience Management

Audiences and lists are another difficult task to manage, so I’m learning how to implement dynamic lists to simplify these things. While Pardot lets me create audience lists according to people who have interacted with specific emails or clicked specific links, that’s not entirely helpful. I don’t always want to consider who went to the mall on Monday, January 1, on Monday, January 8, on Monday, January 15… I want to know who goes to the mall on Mondays. Or, I want to know who is interested in webinars on a specific set of subjects, or who watches webinars as soon as they are available versus on a set schedule.

Researchers and scientists make up a large part of my audience. I also want to know who is watching a webinar multiple times, maybe on regular enough schedule to suggest that they’re showing it to a class or training new graduate students and assistants.

In a classroom, I’d ask students to consider this same point as an audience awareness task. Rhetoricians throughout history have tried to create systems for understanding audiences and responding to their needs. In the last few centuries of written task and asynchronous communication, this problem has become more complex. I am not speaking to an audience that will provide verbal and nonverbal responses to my message, allowing me to calibrate it in real time. All I get is a notification whether someone opened the email, clicked the email, or unsubscribed from the list, so these tools require me to understand my audience extremely well before I craft the message.

Templates

This is less of a rhetorical issue than a communication efficiency and error reduction issue. Email templates are great for ensuring that all of the necessary components are included in every message: unsubscribe links, branding, contact information, etc.

They are also useful for people who know they will receive regular communication from some source. If I know that emails with some subject line structure or some visual structure of the content tend to be for a specific purpose, then I can make it easier for my audience to take the action I want them to. The more time someone has to spend figuring out whether an email is here to sell them something or give them something, the more opportunity they have to close it and come back later (or never).

As a reader, I know I appreciate templated marketing emails for exactly this reason.

Engagement Tracking

This final piece is what I’m really excited about.

I spent a lot of time doing corpus analysis of large sets of text, both as a graduate student and as a faculty member. Now, I can compare marketing text and engagement metrics (view, click, unsubscribe) more directly and fine tune things as a result. I can also align this effort with the points above: do textual features succeed better at specific times, with specific audiences, or in specific visual structures? Do some textual features generally succeed more often than others?

---

This post is more questions than answers, but it’s where I’m starting the year. I’ve got a few weeks before I can start pulling data in response to my work, but old content is ready for more analysis. Fun week ahead!