Blogs

Top 3 favorite blogs on reducing your

mailable prospect list

We set out to find the three blog articles on how to reduce our Pardot mailable prospect list and we summarized them as follows:

This article highlights important aspects to clean a database, such as:


  1. Know our mail limit

a. Go to Pardot Settings + Account Settings and select Usage and limits

  1. Dynamic list ideas for the cleaning process

a. They have never sent me an email in more than a year, this is done through two lists:

b. Database Cleanup: Criteria: Prospect has received an email at least once in the last 10,000 days

c. Criteria: Prospect is NOT a member of the database cleanup Criteria: Prospect time is greater than 365 days (You can change the day count to suit your situation)

d. Lack of engagement, create a dynamic list to check for inactivity

Criteria: The prospect has been emailed

Criteria: Prospect created

Criteria: Prospects last activity days ago. This activity criteria checks forms submissions and email clicks.

(Don't use email open because it's no longer a reliable email metric.)

e. Get rid of competitors

f. Eliminate unwanted job titles

g. Discard prospects based on low scoring and qualification criteria

3. Options for removal

a. Delete in Salesforce

b. Delete in Pardot

i. To remove a prospect from a list, select the checkbox in the top left to select all prospects


4. Do not email

a. A repetitive automation rule should be created for any prospects you want as Do Not Email

5. Bounced prospects

a. A bounced lead is either an invalid email or a prospect has soft bounced five times

This blog has very relevant ideas for data cleansing
1. Create dynamic lists

a. Prospects who haven't opened emails in more than 90 days

b.Prospects that haven’t been active in over 90 days

2. Automation rules

3. Disable connector setting with Salesforce: “Automatically create leads in Pardot if they are created as a prospects or contact in Salesforce"


Elimination of prospects


Pardot never actually deletes our prospects, it just transfers them to our recycle bin so they don't take up more space in Pardot

Pardot has a default limit of 10.000 mailable prospects in an account. However, these do not count:


  • Anyone in your recycle bin


You can purchase additional prospects in increments of 10.000 but if you do not wish to do that, there are a few recommendations, for example:


  • Run your whole list through NeverBounce: Upload a CSV file with the email addresses, NeverBounce pings the email servers and spits out a list telling if the emails are:

  1. Valid

  2. Invalid

  3. Accept All

  4. Disposable

  5. Unknown

Once you get this list back, import the list of Invalid and Disposable emails into Pardot and mark it as “Do Not Email”.

  • Make creative use of the Recycle Bin: You can send sets of people to the recycle bin that you don’t want to lose and don’t plan to email right now. If they fill out a form in your website or the sales user clicks “send to Pardot” it will go back to the mailable list, the Pardot admin can also restore them


  • Weed out any junk prospects: Delete test records using a Pardot dynamic list to pull prospects whose emails contains “test”, “fake”, “asdf”, “1234”, “+”, “a@, b@”, etc


  • Remove role-based emails: Target role based emails like info@, sales@, etc for deletion


  • Delete dupes (if you’re AMPSEA enabled): AMPSEA = Allowing Multiple Prospects with the Same Email Address. Duplicate emails count as extra Prospects.

  • Remove anyone who’s just not that into you: Consider removing anyone who has not been active in over a year


  • The one thing to NOT do to clean your mailable list: Once a group of people is marked as Do Not Email, you can get large numbers of them back on your mailable list and doing so usually requires a support ticket. You can use the Recycle Bin as the mechanism for removing these people from your list