Pardot summer update:
Prospect Mailability
Starting Summer 2021 Salesforce has introduced a new update for Pardot that upgrades the model for qualifying prospects to receive marketing messages. Moving forward, you'll have the ability to look deeper into prospect's mailability status, their Do Not Email and Opted Out settings, and bounce information; it also provides more options for editing mailability data via Pardot automations.
- Currently it is an optional upgrade, but Salesforce has advised that by the end of 2021, the upgrade will be automatic to all Pardot accounts. By 2022, this feature will be permanent on all Pardot editions
- The upgrade is instant and irreversible, and a “Mailability” section will appear on all prospects’ records immediately.
The purpose of the Prospect mailability feature is to give Pardot users more visibility of their prospects' mailability status.
It comes with 6 fields:
- Status: clear and practical for all users in Pardot, this shows the prospect’s status due to their values in the fields: Do Not Email, Opted Out, and any email bounces. There are 4 statuses available:
- Mailable, All Emails: prospect can receive all types of emails e.g. marketing, transactional, or operational
- Mailable, Transactional Emails Only: prospect can only receive transactional and non-promotional emails
- Undeliverable: prospect cannot receive any emails due to a hard bounce or 5x soft bounce
- Unmailable, Prospect is in the Recycle Bin: the prospect has been archived and can’t receive any emails
- Email Uniqueness: This feature helps users identify whether the Prospect’s email address is the only one in your Pardot Instance. This helps users identify duplicates
- Note! At the moment, we can only view this information on the prospect record and can’t include it as a Pardot criteria.
- Opted Out: Displays “True” for unsubscribed prospects and “false” for mailable prospects, this field is controlled by the Prospects via their preference
- Do Not Email: The values are either true or false, this field is controlled by the Pardot users
- Soft Bounce Detected: “Yes” or “No”, Pardot Admins have the option to remove the “Yes” value from this field, but should proceed with caution, and only do so once the prospect’s email address has been confirmed valid in order to not affect your domain’s sending reputation.
- Hard Bounce Detected: If a prospect hard bounces or has 5x soft bounces, the field will display “Yes” and the fields Bounce Date and Bounce Reason will populate respectively.
Dynamic List and Automation Rule Options
Now you can also create dynamic lists based off of a Prospect’s email status:
Same with Automations:
Caution:
Once enabled, users with automation ability can bulk opt-in Pardot Prospects. We can’t give legal advice, but we caution against using this feature.
Note! You can’t include the Bounce Date and Bounce Reason fields in any Pardot automation criteria, at least not for now. As an alternative solution, connect those fields to Salesforce and build your report there.
The upgrade separates “Do Not Email” and “Opt Out”. The “Do Not Email” field no longer affects a prospect’s opt-out status when syncing between Pardot and Salesforce. After enabling the upgrade, this doesn’t change a prospect’s current value for “Opted Out” or “Do Not Email”. It changes how those fields determine a prospect’s mailability status.
