Delivering campaigns in Salesforce Pardot (MCAE)

Context

Self-service is what a marketing automation platform sells: templates in, campaigns out, no code required. On day one, there isn’t a single template. Self-service only becomes true once someone builds them, in a tool that assumes they are already there.

The objective

The templates that made that true later didn’t start as templates. They started as real campaigns with a real job to do: filling seats for a global webinar, qualifying who got to download a white paper, keeping a prospect list warm between quarters, or reactivating contacts who had shown interest once and then gone quiet. Whatever became a template afterward had to work as a campaign first, for a real audience, with no second attempt.

The platform also had a second job, alongside the company’s main website. That site belongs to every business unit at once, so anything new on it needs alignment across all of them, and its own architecture turns even a small change into hours of manual work. This platform gave campaigns and pages a way to exist and prove themselves fast, without needing that sign-off and without disturbing the balance of the main site while they did. What worked here became the case for what deserved a permanent home there.

What I did

I built the range of things a campaign needs to reach someone and get them to act: registration pages for global events, gated landing pages for white papers and checklists with real qualifying fields, a capacity-launch page for a new trade lane pointed straight at a quote request, the recurring emails that kept the division visible between campaigns, and the automated programs that send a series of messages on a schedule or a trigger.

None of it came out of the box. The platform had no native support for the brand’s own fonts, so I built a workaround: fonts encoded and embedded directly in a page’s HTML and CSS, letting every landing page use the brand’s real typefaces, weights, and styles instead of the tool’s defaults. That became part of a template framework other builds relied on afterward. Getting assets to behave for a mobile-first audience took the same kind of fighting with a builder that wasn’t quite designed for it.

The technical side was plain: a no-code tool that still needed code. The other side was less visible. None of this was built with training in mind, but the best of what shipped got picked up afterward and adapted or used directly as the template other countries would follow. That raised the bar for every build, unasked: whatever went out first is what everyone else would copy, so nothing merely good enough could go out first.

The outcome

• 15campaign types
  run again and again
• 42individual skill videos
• Base64custom fonts

Open rates went up, and so did the number of prospects actually reached: contacts who had gone quiet came back into active campaigns, and some who had shown interest once were approached for the first time in a while, or for the first time at all. The pages, gated content, and automated programs built this way became the reference material behind the platform’s training library and the templates every country used afterward. Some of it is still live years later: webinars built a year or two apart still host their recordings and slide downloads on the same pages, gated behind the same forms.

Skills and tools

Platform

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)

Builds

• Landing pages
• Gated content and forms
• Email templates
• Automation and triggered programs

Code

• HTML and CSS in no-code builders
• Custom font embedding (Base64)
• Mobile-first asset optimization