4 Reasons You’re Hitting Your Account Engagement (Pardot) Limits

A limit of 10,000 Mailable Prospects on Account Engagement (Pardot) might seem like a lot. And it is…until you see a bright red banner that says “Warning! You have exceeded your Database limit of Mailable Prospects”. 

Let’s look at four reasons why your number of Prospects might increase exponentially in Account Engagement, and how you could mitigate this problem.

Account Engagement (Pardot) Prospect Limits

Before we dive into why you may have received this warning, we’ll first establish what you need to know about your Prospect limits.

• Mailable Prospects count toward your database limit. All accounts start with a limit of 10,000 Mailable Prospects, but you could purchase additional Prospects in blocks of 10,000 from your Account Executive.
• Your Mailable Prospect limit is shared across all your business units (documentation read more on Salesforce Help).
• Items in the recycle bin don’t count toward usage limits (read more on Salesforce Help).

Any Prospect who is eligible to receive marketing and operational emails is considered a Mailable Prospect. So, any Prospect who has had one hard bounce or five soft bounces, opted out, marked as “Do Not Email”, or has a mailable status of “Operational Emails Only” will not count towards this limit.

1. Prospects Are Automatically Being Created from All Leads or Contacts on Salesforce 

If you’re suddenly hitting your Prospect limits, the first thing you’d want to check is if any settings have been changed on your org, specifically this one under the Salesforce Connector, “Automatically create Prospects in Pardot if they’re created as a Lead or Contact in Salesforce”. 

As its name suggests, when enabled, each time a Lead or Contact with an email address is created (either manually, by data load/Import Wizard, or via integration), it then creates a Prospect in Account Engagement (Pardot).

Note: This setting isn’t retroactive, which means that Leads and Contacts created before this setting has been enabled will not create new Prospect records.

Solution

If this setting of automatically creating Prospects in Account Engagement on Lead or Contact creation in Salesforce does not suit your needs, you could consider turning it off entirely.

After all, bringing in Contacts or Leads into Account Engagement does not need to be an automated process. You could export these records from Salesforce and manually bring them into Account Engagement through the Import tool, Marketing Data Sharing settings, or through a middleware.

2. Users Are Performing Prospect Imports With No Control

Prospect Import is a useful tool, especially if you’ve got prospect information sitting outside of Account Engagement. Not only can you create Prospect records that don’t yet exist but you could also use it to update existing records and enrich the information which you already have.

However, the downside is that it’s quite easy to bring in ‘junk’ or less-than-useful Prospects into Account Engagement with this tool since the only required field here is the prospect’s email address, especially if this feature is open to most (or all) users. 

Solution

Account Engagement grants this permission to users with the administrator and marketing user roles by default. Also, if your instance of Account Engagement has custom roles, you will need to check which other role has access to importing Prospects as well. 

That said, not every user needs permission to import Prospects into Account Engagement. So, you should limit who has access to this feature and train these users to maintain data integrity.

There should also be guardrails in place to ensure that this import activity is validated, such as through a CSV template or an internal review process, to ensure that the Prospects being imported into Account Engagement have useful information brought in with them.

3. Account Engagement Is Creating New Prospects Instead of Updating Existing Ones

Allow Multiple Prospects with Same Email Address (AMPSEA) is an Account Engagement setting that’s been enabled by default for all business units created after June 14, 2016. This means that the email address is not used as a unique identifier for Prospects and again, as the name suggests, multiple Prospect records could exist with the same email address.

Sometimes, Account Engagement ends up creating new Prospects instead of looking for and subsequently updating existing Prospects with the same email address. Here are some examples:

• When multiple Salesforce Leads or Contacts exist with the same email address and they’re synced to Account Engagement. (Note that with AMPSEA, CRM IDs become the unique identifier.)
• When users manually create individual Prospects in Account Engagement, even when a Prospect with that same email address already exists.
• When you’re using an API or third-party connector to create Prospects in Pardot and the Prospect Create resource is used (instead of upsert).

Solution

Firstly, you should consider some user training on creating Prospects from scratch if this scenario applies to your org. If a user chooses to manually create individual Prospects in Account Engagement without validating that the Prospect already exists, then the problem will continue to persist.

Secondly, we’ll need to look at how else Prospects are being created, because Account Engagement forms or form handlers would typically use email addresses from the form submissions to match existing Prospects. 

If it’s through the Account Engagement API or third-party connector, you must ensure that the Account Engagement API uses the upsert resource. The power of this upsert functionality is that it will either “update” an existing Prospect (if it already exists) or “insert” a new Prospect (if one is not found with the same email address).

4. You’re Too Afraid to Clean Up Prospects!

Okay, this might be a hot take, but if you’re too afraid of cleaning up the number of mailable prospects in Account Engagement, it’s no surprise that you’re hitting your limits.

To put it bluntly, the number of Prospects you have in your system is not a full indicator of how effective your marketing or lead generation is, especially if these Prospects do not engage with you.

Clearing out your list of Prospects (and adjacently, Leads on Salesforce) regularly can make it easier to identify your top Prospects so you can devote more resources towards closing business with them.

Plus, if it’s not likely that they will do business with your company, why are you “paying” to keep them on the system? Remember that each mailable Prospect record counts towards your database limits, so the more Prospects you have, the more it costs to house them on Account Engagement.

Here are some examples of Prospects you can consider reviewing:

• Prospects that are already disqualified as Leads on Salesforce.
• Prospects that have not opened any emails from you in the last 6-12 months, even after you attempted to re-engage them.
• Prospects who have never engaged with any of your content.

Solution

After reviewing the Prospects that are unlikely to result in a closed business, you can consider steps like creating a re-engagement program for your stale Prospects and evaluating the results. 

Here, if the Prospect opens the email, then they no longer meet the criteria above and are safe to keep on Account Engagement. However, if they still do not engage in your emails, it’s safe to assume that they’re not interested in what you have to offer at this moment.

Then, it’ll be safe to put them in the recycle bin in Account Engagement, which is beneficial for a few reasons:

• Prospects in the Recycle Bin are not considered Mailable Prospects and as such, do not count towards your limits.
• They will not be deleted or removed forever. If they’re manually retrieved by an internal user or if they engage with a link from a previous email or submit a form, they will automatically rejoin your database.

Summary

The base limit of 10,000 Mailable Prospects may seem like a lot, but you can hit your limit in no time if you don’t keep an eye on the Prospects you want to keep in the system. 

Yes, generating new Leads who are interested in your business is a key activity in any company’s inbound marketing strategy, but, when it comes to Account Engagement, more is not always better – the quality of your Leads will always be more important than having a large number of Prospects in the system.