Designing High-Converting Pardot Landing Pages Templates

Landing pages are a core campaign function in your Pardot instance. Whether you're running paid advertising campaigns, managing event registrations, or offering content downloads, these pages play a crucial role in various lead generation strategies. Creating high-converting Pardot landing pages is essential to maximize your system's value.

While there are many options available for designing Pardot landing pages, native Pardot landing pages often stand out from third-party solutions. Let's explore why these built-in pages deliver such strong results.

Designing Landing Pages That Convert in Pardot

Direct Salesforce Integration Native Pardot landing pages connect directly to your Salesforce instance right out of the box. This integration enables comprehensive tracking of metrics and user journeys without additional setup or configuration.

Performance and Security Advantages

By leveraging the Salesforce CMS for page delivery, you benefit from robust performance capabilities. The platform also includes enhanced security features and built-in compliance tools - advantages that aren't guaranteed with third-party hosting solutions.

Marketing Automation Integration

The real power of Pardot landing pages shines through their seamless integration with your marketing automation platform. Key features include:

• Progressive profiling on form completions
• Advanced engagement tracking
• Direct automation triggers based on page interactions

Built-in Analytics

The integrated analytics and tracking capabilities let you view landing page metrics alongside your pipeline data, email performance, and engagement campaign results - all within a single platform. This consolidated view provides valuable insights into your marketing performance across channels.

Designing & Developing Landing Pages in Pardot

Landing pages are a core campaign function in your Pardot instance. Whether you're running paid advertising campaigns, managing event registrations, or offering content downloads, these pages play a crucial role in various lead generation strategies. Creating high-converting Pardot landing pages is essential to maximize your system's value.

While there are many options available for designing Pardot landing pages, native Pardot landing pages often stand out from third-party solutions. Let's explore why these built-in pages deliver such strong results.

The direct Salesforce integration allows these pages to connect directly to your Salesforce instance right out of the box. This integration enables comprehensive tracking of metrics and user journeys without additional setup or configuration. By leveraging the Salesforce CMS for page delivery, you benefit from robust performance capabilities. The platform also includes enhanced security features and built-in compliance tools - advantages that aren't guaranteed with third-party hosting solutions.

The real power of Pardot landing pages shines through their seamless integration with your marketing automation platform. Key features include progressive profiling on form completions, advanced engagement tracking, and direct automation triggers based on page interactions. The integrated analytics and tracking capabilities let you view landing page metrics alongside your pipeline data, email performance, and engagement campaign results - all within a single platform. This consolidated view provides valuable insights into your marketing performance across channels.

A key consideration in developing landing pages within your marketing operations system is having access to the necessary development and design resources. Pardot provides built-in design options through their drag-and-drop builder, which offers speed and efficiency through pre-built layouts and components. For simple page requirements, this builder can be ideal. However, it does have limitations - there's a 384 kilobyte HTML limit, and it doesn't always support JavaScript or SVG files. The drag-and-drop builder does offer advantages like out-of-the-box mobile responsiveness and easier team collaboration.

For more complex needs, the classic editor supports advanced customization, particularly when you need to inject JavaScript or modify CSS. It's also useful for legacy integration requirements. The trade-off is that your development team will need to handle all pages, requiring someone with coding expertise.

When designing Pardot landing pages, a modular, component-based approach is recommended. Since landing page templates are developed and then cloned and repurposed by marketers for various campaigns, implementing a component-based strategy allows for easy editing, tweaking, and removal of modules from landing pages.

Essential Design Elements for Pardot Landing Page Templates

Landing page templates should be a living, breathing thing that are continually optimized. Launching a landing page can feel like a big step in the journey of your campaign, but over time, these landing pages provide data and insights that can be used to further optimize and improve your marketing ROI. There are many different elements on a landing page to consider and test. Check out our guide to landing page test ideas to get a good sense of the breadth of things you can test.

Your objective with landing page templates is to improve engagement and conversion. This requires an A/B testing strategy and careful monitoring of various landing page metrics. Some ideas to test on your Pardot landing pages include form length optimization - how many fields can a form support before conversion rates drop off? Is there an optimal number of fields, and are there particular fields that seem to be blockers for completion? Remember, we want to remove friction as much as possible while still balancing the need to collect actionable data.

You can't talk about landing page design without mentioning mobile-first design. The principle behind mobile-first design is that you design for mobile devices first and then expand your design to larger screen sizes. This ensures no key information is missing on a mobile experience, but as you expand that experience to larger screen sizes, you can include more elements and use the retail space on your screen to improve engagement.

Playing with the placement of modules and components on the page can help you figure out how to have maximum impact for engagement. For instance, playing with where you put your form on the page or how you place your buttons. Call-to-action buttons can have a big impact on the overall conversion rate of your landing pages. Things like color psychology, using capitalization, and different copywriting techniques can help you tweak and improve your call-to-actions.

Having tracking to see what links on pages are being clicked will allow you to hone in on the most valuable call-to-actions on page and identify which ones to test. Again, a modular approach allows you to design components that go to the page, and that can be pushed out to future landing pages. So if you find that a certain style of CTA works for your landing pages, updating your landing page templates in Pardot means that all new pages going forward can use this new and improved styling.

One of the objectives for improving your conversion rate of landing pages over time is to develop an internal center of excellence, making sure you test, note and refine your landing pages over time.

Building a Scalable Landing Page Template System in Pardot

With the number of campaigns organizations run, having a scalable landing page template development system is critical. Without one, things can get out of control quickly - no one knows which version of the landing page template to use, people use suboptimal landing pages, or fall into bad habits. Too often, landing pages are developed ad hoc or for singular purposes by folks who aren't in Pardot daily, like design team members or third-party agencies.

This is why having a strategy or system is so important. Our recommendation is to have a component-based system for implementing your landing pages. This means using standardized, predefined components for various parts of your landing pages.

An easy win is to have a standardized header and footer. From there, you can develop components that speak to individual parts of the page. What does your hero section look like? Does it always have a form and an image? Do you include a testimonial section? What about the main body? Do you support a two-column layout or a single-column layout that's more optimized for mobile?

These components allow you to rapidly develop landing pages using a standard set of proven modules that have real-world data. If you follow the instructions from the previous section, you'll be looking to develop an internal center of excellence around these modules, understanding what works, what gets clicked, and what drives engagement.

But this is only one part of the process. The other part is having a version control and template management workflow. It's easy in these systems, particularly over time, to develop a multitude of templates that don't have a clear owner or purpose. These may or may not be used by marketing teams when they're looking to quickly develop a landing page to support their campaign. Having a version control system allows people to see which version is the most active and relevant, and having a template management workflow ensures that new pages are approved and reviewed by the proper stakeholders, with post-mortems to review campaign analytics.

Role-based access control can be helpful, making sure that only the right people are editing these templates and following the management workflow. Quality assurance is critical as well, ensuring the right people review each template to verify that modules are approved and follow brand guidelines.

One of the biggest symptoms of a landing page system run amok is brand consistency going out the window. This is particularly true in decentralized teams where individuals operate across multiple regions or product lines who may not be coordinating with the central team at corporate headquarters. This can result in small variations to brand representation, which can compound over time to make major deviations from the brand and require larger effort to fix.

Asset management is also a key component. Making sure you have a good foldering system and a structured approach to your assets in Pardot will ensure that people know which templates are active and improved versus those that have been deprecated but are being maintained for historical purposes.

Leveraging No-Code Tools to Build Pardot Landing Page Templates

Landing page templates are notorious subjects of development and design bottlenecks. This hurts marketing velocity and creativity when speed to market and time to market are essential for launching campaigns. Technical dependencies can slow campaign launches, plus developer resources are often scarce and expensive. Whether you're relying on internal teams to switch their focus from managing your corporate website or using an agency to develop these landing pages, it can be hard to pin down developers and get exactly what you want.

Your marketing team may not have anybody on staff who has solid understanding of HTML and CSS, which limits your overall autonomy. No-code landing page builders like Knak provide several benefits worth considering. First is speed to market - you can create pages in minutes versus taking days or weeks.

Platforms like Knak provide brand compliance and guardrails so you can set up things like your font choices, color choices, and lock down standardized modules like your heading and logo treatment to make sure landing pages are always consistent and on brand.

Because no-code tools put the creation process in the hands of marketing teams, teams can iterate quickly, developing landing pages and experimenting within those brand guardrails. A reduced reliance on technical resources frees up those teams to work on high-value activities while giving your team the flexibility to quickly iterate and develop landing pages for campaigns today versus in a couple weeks.

No-code tools like Knak have integration capabilities with Pardot. This is quite important because it allows you to develop a repository of templates that follow all the best practices of developing a templated process, making sure you have good version control, collaboration and approval workflows, and brand governance all in place.

These template management systems allow you to create this central repository of landing page templates, ship them to where they're needed in Pardot, and enable your marketing team to create landing pages for campaigns very quickly.

No-code tools also come with all the same features you would expect around mobile responsiveness and dark mode compatibility.

Leveling Up Your Pardot Template Process: Implementation Best Practices

Designing high-converting Pardot landing page templates is both an art and a science. Combining these together into a single process is a winning strategy.

To implement an improved process, you want to make sure you have elements like a brand compliance checklist, a mobile responsive testing guide, and performance monitoring. You want to track your insights against landing pages to determine what works best and feed that back into the system to improve conversion rates on campaigns that use landing pages.

This can result in content hierarchy optimization and taking a close look at the modules you have developed for landing pages, perhaps tweaking them or creating new ones.

No-code tools like Knak have built-in processes to ensure quality assurance and brand compliance. When you develop a landing page template in Knak, you can comment on it and get stakeholders to review it quickly in an easy-to-understand platform without having to navigate Pardot's user interface. You can also lock down user permissions to ensure an orderly and structured process for creating landing pages.

If you're interested in leveling up your Pardot landing page templates, you should check out Knak, a no-code landing page builder.