Get Your Email to the Right Prospects in Account Engagement (Pardot)

So, you’ve got your email campaign ready and a long list of prospects to reach out to. If you think that all that’s left to do is for you to start your Engagement Studio Program, you may want to think again. As marketers, the goal would be to get the emails we’ve so carefully crafted to our target prospects in the right conditions so they engage with it – all while paying respect to data protection laws and the customer’s contact preferences.

As they say, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. Are you wondering how you can better reach your desired prospects in Account Engagement (Pardot)? Let’s look at five steps you can work on today.

Step 1: Get Your Domain Verified and Warmed up

First things first, we want to make sure that the email has the best chance of landing in your prospect’s inbox.

One of the key steps that needs to be completed when you first implement Account Engagement is the verification of the email domain from which you will be sending emails. After all, email deliverability is influenced by your domain’s “reputation”.

Additionally, using email authentication protocols, like the ones below, adds layers of security to safeguard your positive sender reputation:

• ​​SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This lets domain owners specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of their domain.
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): This helps verify the integrity and authenticity of the email’s sender.
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): This builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols, allowing senders and receivers to protect and monitor the fraudulent use of a domain.

Note: Account Engagement cannot supply DMARC authentication. The official recommendation is that you use an IT professional or your hosting provider to help you configure your policy. Other than that, you could also consider using a Dedicated IP address.

With the default shared IP on Account Engagement, your sender reputation hinges on the behavior of everyone on the same IP address.

But, with a dedicated IP address, your deliverability will be dependent on your actions alone. For instance, you’ll need to warm up your dedicated IP to prevent email clients from blocking your email, since ‘cold’ or new IP addresses are often treated as spam.

You’ll need a dedicated IP address if:

• You are sending more than 100,000 emails per month.
• You work in an industry with heightened security like banking and defense (where a dedicated sending IP address is more likely to be allowed).

With that said, for most instances, the Account Engagement default of using a Shared IP should be sufficient.

Step 2: Clean Up Your Mailable Prospects List

With the goal of 100% email deliverability, the next step you need to take is to reconsider which prospects to keep in your mailable prospects list.

Here is a recommendation on prospects you should remove from your mailing lists:

1. General or shared email addresses like those starting with ‘info@’, ‘general@’, and support@’.
2. Spam email addresses.
3. Competitor email addresses.
4. Prospects you haven’t emailed in more than 6 months. They may be impacted by Google’s announcement that accounts with more than two years of inactivity will be purged starting December 2023. Emailing these prospects could cause increased bounce rates. 
5. Email addresses purchased from a third party often result in a high bounce rate anyway, as they may contain errors or email addresses that are no longer valid because the employee has left the company since this list was first created. Sure, you may be able to verify emails using an external service to avoid ruining your sender reputation, but most countries have stringent laws against sending unsolicited bulk emails. Do you really want to (potentially) annoy customers who didn’t even sign up for your emails in the first place?

The prospects in the above categories are likely not in a position to influence buying decisions and could increase your bounce rates unnecessarily, which in turn negatively impacts your sending reputation.

Step 3: Keep Your Mailing Lists Small and Engaged

A common goal for many marketing campaigns is to get as many eyeballs on it as possible, but keeping the focus on engaged subscribers who are interested in your brand means you are spending time, energy, and money where it counts: on your prospects who are most likely to do business with you!

For this, you could use a two-pronged approach: targeted recipient lists, coupled with suppression lists.

For the recipient list, you could use segmentation lists and group your customers based on regions or countries, specific industries, or certain product interests indicated from the last trade fair you participated in. This will form the basis of who the target audience is for your latest email.

Now, let’s look at people who should NOT be receiving these marketing emails, such as customers who have already been contacted at least once (which will be possible if they are part of more than one mailing list).

Note: If you have any use case where you have prospects with the same email address (which is possible thanks to AMPSEA, which stands for “allowing multiple prospects with the same email address”), please cross-check the recipient and suppression lists before you run them. 

In this case, Account Engagement (Pardot) is known to ignore the suppression list which leads to emails unexpectedly being sent out to that same email address even though they have technically been “suppressed”.

You may refer to (and upvote) this Salesforce idea: Suppression Lists Should Trump Recipient Lists in AMPSEA Orgs.

Thankfully, within recipient lists, Account Engagement (Pardot) is smart enough to only send the email once. From a technical standpoint, using or creating lists may seem simple. However, the most difficult part, especially when using suppression lists effectively, is creating alignment within the marketing or sales teams’ processes, as all users have to always include the suppression lists in each email send action manually. 

Step 4: Check Your Email Automation

Engagement Studio programs offer a lot of flexibility in actions and tools (like action listeners and complex rules). 

These programs can become increasingly complex, too. 

This concern should be mitigated with full testing of the Engagement Studio program with various testing personas. 

Step 5: Focus on Delivering Value to Your Subscribers

Different companies have different audiences – there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what “value” can look like in marketing content. But, the key action is to personalize that content to keep your customers engaged.

You can start by making some assumptions about what your audience likes (emails with only one picture vs emails with several images), A/B testing enables you to test one change between two versions of your marketing assets. In the context of Account Engagement (Pardot), A/B testing is for list emails.  

Here are other tips to make your email content valuable to your subscribers: 

• Avoid using spam words in your emails, like “free gift”, “once in a lifetime”, and “special promotion”.
• Make it easy for prospects to access the custom email preferences page so they can opt in or out of public lists according to their interest.
• Leverage existing automation to determine the date/time that the email should be sent in Account Engagement (Pardot). 

While you’re working on this, don’t be afraid of opt-outs! The customer should opt-out rather than not engage with your emails or, worst still, report your email to spam.

Summary

In short, the objective would be to get the emails we’ve so carefully crafted to the right people (whom we have permission to contact) in the right conditions (so they engage with it).

After all, email marketing is typically the number one tool used to communicate with customers about upcoming events or trade shows and the company’s products and services. However, remember that email deliverability success doesn’t come in the short term, where you overwhelm your subscriber list with the same content week over week. 

With these comprehensive steps, you’re well on your way to getting your email to the right people in Account Engagement (Pardot).