…and a few more helpful Pardot tips along the way.
As a digital marketer, it’s important to understand why a prospect chooses to opt out from emails. This information provides valuable insight into where our email marketing efforts are falling short. There could be a number of reasons why they decide they don’t want our emails in their inbox anymore too–maybe they never opted in and were from a purchased list, or maybe they just aren’t interested in your content anymore. No matter what the reason, we want to provide a mechanism where they can tell us why.
Depending on where you do business, there are a number of legal obligations you need to take into account when sending email marketing. In the United States, the CAN SPAM Act first established national standards for the sending of commercial e-mails. In Europe, new GDPR regulations are arguably the world’s most sweeping privacy laws. In any case, a solid rule of thumb is that the client should be able to opt-out in two clicks. One click to get to the preference or unsubscribe page (from within the email), and then another click to actually opt out.
Helpful Tip: For people reading this in European countries, Salesforce has created a page dedicated to understanding how Pardot customers can comply with GDPR.
As an important aside, in any Pardot email, you’re required to link to a unsubscribe page and/or a preference center page. I recommend linking ONLY to the preference page from your marketing emails. Instead of opting out of all communications at once, prospects can visit the email preferences page, see which lists they’re on, and add or remove themselves only from specific lists.
* If you want to store this information within Salesforce, you can create corresponding Lead and Contact fields, then sync with Pardot.
As part of building the form above, you will want to build completion actions that make sense. One important step: a completion action that changes the Opted Out field to ‘Opted Out’ and/or the Do Not Email field to ‘do not email’. This will insure prospects do not receive any emails in the future.
You’ll notice that we applied a layout template with basic CSS styling to make the page look a little nicer and match the client’s branding (fonts and colors). I recommend this approach in every Pardot account I work on. Even if the design is super simple, it will go a long way with the user.
At this point, the unsubscribe page survey is completed. Moving forward, any prospect who opts out of receiving your Pardot emails will be presented with a survey asking why.
Although not necessary to capture the opt-out reason, I put together some additional information as it relates to configuring an email preference center in Pardot.