Exporting Emails to Account Engagement (Pardot)

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Level up your emails in Account Engagement (Pardot)

You can easily design your emails in the RGE Studio builder and then push them to Account Engagement for sending. Our connector allows you to export an email to Pardot with only one click.

Here are 2 ways that you can connect your Account Engagement account in RGE Studio:

1. From the Workspace Settings section: connect your Account Engagement account before you start designing.
2. From the Export options of your email.

Follow the steps below or check the RGE Studio Academy tutorial on how to connect Salesforce Marketing Engagement (Pardot) to RGE Studio.

1. Connect from Workspace Settings

Go to Settings > Connectors.

 Click the Connect button for Account Engagement (Pardot).

Fill out the information in the modal to begin setting up the connector. You can find your Business ID inside the Account Engagement platform. Navigate to Setup > Platform tools > Account Engagement > Business Unit Setup > Business Unit ID. The sender name and email are passed along to Account Engagement as well, but you can edit this data from within Pardot at any time.

After you provide this data and click Connect, a popup window will open. Sign into your Account Engagement account to complete the connector setup. Please note that your Account Engagement credentials are not stored in RGE Studio. They are just used to connect your accounts.

2. Connect from Export

When your email is ready, click on the Export button on the Email Details page. This option is also available from the actions menu for your email.

Click on the Integrations icon for Account Engagement (Pardot). If you don’t see it from this screen, click More to see all the connectors.

In the Integrations screen, scroll or search for Account Engagement (Pardot). Click on the icon and follow the steps to connect your accounts. If you have already connected, you will not be asked to do so again.

If you are exporting to your Account Engagement (Pardot) account for the first time from RGE Studio, you will notice that when you select the Account Engagement (Pardot) connector, you are prompted to a screen that asks you to input your Business Unit ID. You can find this Business Unit ID in your Account Engagement (Pardot) Setup. For a visual example on how to locate your Business Unit ID, watch the video at the beginning of this article. Once you insert your Business Unit ID, you'll be able to complete the Campaign information outlined in the next section.

Complete Campaign Information to Export

Account Engagement requires some additional information to complete your export. This information determines where exactly your design will be exported to in Pardot.

• Campaign Name - Select the campaign to associate with your email. This dropdown shows all Current and Planned campaigns in your Account Engagement account.
• Folder - This is the folder where your design will be stored. All your Account Engagement folders will populate.
• Tracker domain - You can use the default tracker domain (https://pi.pardot.com/) or any validated custom tracker domain. 

You can also modify the sender name or sender email again from this modal. 

After export, you can find your email in the "Published email Templates" section of Account Engagement (Pardot).

Update Your RGE Studio Email Designs in Account Engagement

The Account Engagement (Pardot) connector now allows you to update existing RGE Studio email designs in Pardot.

Update Your Emails in Account Engagement

Once you've edited an email in RGE Studio, you can export the design and utilize the Update Existing option to update the design within Account Engagement. This allows you to push changes to an existing email design without creating an entirely new version of it.

Steps For Updating your Emails

To update an email design in RGE Studio and export it to Account Engagement, follow these steps:

1. Log in to RGE Studio.
2. Open the email design you want to update.
3. Make the necessary content changes to the email.
4. Click Export on the upper right-hand side of the screen.
5. Select the Push to your sending system option.
6. Choose Account Engagement (Pardot) from the list of options.
7. Select the Update existing option to apply your changes.

The RGE Studio will then update the email with the latest version and send it to Account Engagement without creating a new version. After export, you can find your email in the "Published email Templates" section of Account Engagement (Pardot).
 

Updated Elements

When using the Update Existing option, the following elements will be updated in Account Engagement (Pardot):

• HTML
• Email name
• Subject
• Preheader
• UTMs

Account Engagement Required Content 

Account Engagement requires an unsubscribe link to complete the export. You can use either {{Unsubscribe}} or {{EmailPreferenceCenter}} to fulfill this requirement.

We added an Account Engagement (Pardot) special links category option to make this as convenient as possible; you can see it in Settings, in the General Settings tab, and in the Special Links section.

You see the Account Engagement special links automatically if you've never edited the workspace settings or when you create a new workspace (Enterprise plan only). Why? Because we don’t want to change your settings.

You will receive an error from Account Engagement (Pardot) if your design doesn't include one of these special links. If you see an error related to unsubscribe tags during export, it may be because your Account Engagement instance uses an older merge tag syntax (%%unsubscribe%%). This was changed by Pardot in 2020 to the new HML format {{Unsubscribe}}.

To resolve this:

• Update your Account Engagement instance to use the new HML format ( {{Unsubscribe}} ). Please note that this change requires converting existing designs in Pardot. This setting adjustment is handled within your Account Engagement account and not within RGE Studio.
• Or, manually update the default special link settings for Pardot within RGE Studio from {{Unsubscribe}} to (%%unsubscribe%%).

Export Plain Text

By including a plain text version of your email, you ensure that recipients using older email clients or those with accessibility needs can still read your message clearly. It also improves email deliverability, as spam filters often favor emails with both plain text and HTML versions.

When you export your email design from RGE Studio to your Account Engagement (Pardot) account, you will also get the a plain text version of your email within Account Engagement (Pardot). The plain text version of your email will be located in the Text tab of your exported email.

The following GIF displays a visual example of where you can locate the Text tab and the plain text after exporting your email.

Example Plain Text

The following image shows a portion of an email design. You can see the corresponding plain text for this portion of the email in the following section.

The following text displays an example of what the plain text will look like in Account Engagement (Pardot).

[Logo]

# [Blog](example.com)
---------------------

# [About Us](example.com)
-------------------------

# [New Vlog!](example.com)
--------------------------

[Image]

# A World with Kindness
-----------------------

For those that value kindness, **Random Acts of Kindness Week** encourages people out there to be loud about how easy it is to give to others. This holiday centers around making kindness a standard for others to follow to **make society a better place to live in.**

Learn More

Notes

There are some limitations with the Account Engagement (Pardot) connector. If you're experiencing any issues, please refer to the workarounds below.

Videos

Currently, our video content block is not compatible with Account Engagement. We're investigating to see if we can find a solution for this. In the meantime, if you want to use a video in your design, we recommend inserting an image that links to your video URL. 

Fonts

Account Engagement counts the links to web font stylesheets as clicks. There are two potential workarounds for this:

1. Use a font that won't generate a stylesheet and won't count towards your click-through rate. We recommend the following fonts:
   • Arial
   • Courier
   • Georgia
   • Helvetica
   • Lucida Sans
   • Tahoma
   • Times New Roman
   • Trebuchet MS
   • Verdana
   • ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3
   • メイリオ
2. If you want to use a web font, you must manually modify the HTML for your exported design. Please refer to Font links are counted as clicks in Pardot! for information on how to do this.

Outlook Buttons

Our builder creates two different HTML outputs, hence you will see two versions of the button. One is specifically for Outlook.

Sometimes, buttons in Outlook may break when sending emails through Account Engagement. This happens because Account Engagement modifies our button HTML to force a line break in the source code. In most cases, this doesn't cause any issues, but you may encounter problems if using very long links.

When this happens, you may see empty button containers. Other customers report button text in the margins of the design. Our tests indicate that this happens with links of about 500+ characters, but some customers have reported this happening with 100+ characters as well.

Shortening the URL (try TinyURL) should resolve this problem. Our developers are also investigating this to see if we can mitigate the behavior. We also recommend reporting the issue to Pardot.

If you make changes to the button within Account Engagement, the Outlook-specific version won't be updated. To avoid this, we recommend editing the button directly in our builder and then exporting it to the third-party tool.

If you've already created a campaign in Pardot, you can use the 'Export existing' feature on RGE Studio to update only the new changes.

Multiple Workspaces / Customers

Do you work with multiple brands or clients and need to easily manage all your emails and templates?

No problem! The Enterprise Version of RGE Studio allows you to set up different workspaces so you can better organize your email creation workflow. Enterprise allows you to specify different connectors for each workspace so you never need to switch accounts.

For example, say you are a digital marketing enterprise with 10 clients that use Account Engagement. With Enterprise, you will be able to create 10 workspaces in RGE Studio and connect each of them to their specific Account Engagement account.

Looking for a different sending platform? You can check our complete list of connectors — or request a new one!