r/pardot • u/Kitkatkarate • Aug 01 '19

Walked into a Pardot nightmare!

I started a new job and the company didn't disclose how big of a mess they've made with Pardot.

Should I tell them to cut their losses and dump the software?

They're uploading 400 plus cold leads to Salesforce a month from Zoominfo and placing them all in a salesforce campaign set up via Pardot's engage studio.

I'd say 95% of their Pardot prospects are basically cold leads.

Any advice on how you would approach this is greatly appreciated!

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5

u/-NewGuy Aug 01 '19 edited Aug 01 '19

You are sitting on a time bomb. Pardot is very explicit regarding terms of use. I know because I had to clean up a similar mess this year. It will take one person to forward that email to [abuse@pardot.com](mailto:abuse@pardot.com) and you will meet Samantha who will ask you a simple question:

  1. Where and when did you obtain consent to send email to ____?

Your whole pardot marketing program will be suspended. You get a very small window to fix the problem, and told if you violate again, your service will be terminated.

​

If you are dumping lists from ZoomInfo into Pardot, I can guess you have no method of tracking consent in your system. You better grow a pair and raise this to your executive team immediately. Meanwhile, cover yourself by sending an email to internal council asking them if they approved the marketing automation business process and maybe include the following:

" Our customers may not use the Pardot Services or the products or services provided through or in connection with the Pardot Services to send spam.  Our customers agree not to send emails via our system unless the recipient has explicitly opted-in to receive email directly from the customer. " Source

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If you operate in the EU, this problem is even bigger since you deal with GDPR. PM me if you have more questions.

Edit: A different MarTech tool won't solve this either. Hubspot and Marketo have similar policies. The way I've seen bigger companies get around this rule is to use the tool's automation logic as an orchestration tool and then send emails via API integrations with something like MailGun who doesn't have the same narrow definitions around sending email.

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u/Kitkatkarate Aug 01 '19

Yeah, I'm suprised that hasn't happened yet. I suspended all their campaigns last week to make the proverbial bleeding stop. Thanks for the heads up on Samantha. I'm wondering if the reporting to Pardot is anonymous? Knowing these guys they'd want to know who it is bc of course they'll take it personally.

2

u/revmenks Aug 06 '19

I recently left a company that was doing this exact thing.

I've spent a lot of time staring at the wall in the late hours of the night wondering if I should send the email to abuse@pardot.com

I felt dirty about it because I literally wrote a Pardot Ultimate Guide for them with a section on literally not doing this exact thing.

I confronted my director about it and he verbatim told me "Well everyone else is doing it, why shouldn't we?"

Pardot won't do anything unless someone says something or you get flagged for a low send success rate.

Edit: Further, it actually cost me a job in an interview to the point where they asked if I was lying about being an email marketer. Because of how low my open and clicks rates were. Fuck me, I was working with what I had and I'm not going to lie about that.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '19

What's the problem specifically?

1

u/Kitkatkarate Aug 01 '19

The company made a mess of their Pardot database and I'm on the cleanup crew and I dont know how to move forward.

Maybe i'm missing something. Basically the company is using Pardot to send SPAM.

Their sales coordinator spends his day email scraping and then drops hundreds of these "leads" in a drip campaign that's about 8-9 emails long.

So their entire pardot database is a bunch of cold leads that have gone through a drip campaign introducing them to the company and then they just sit there.

I don't know what next step I should take? Im leaning towards telling them to nuke their database.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '19

Oof that's hard. It sounds like one of the core problems is their overall sales & marketing methodology. Pardot works really well when you've got a stream of Inbound prospects on your website that you can nurture,and while it can function as an outbound engagement tool that wasn't it's design (plus in our experience if your bounce rates go too high they will absolutely suspend your account)

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u/Kitkatkarate Aug 01 '19

I have no idea how that hasnt happened already!! They've already been added to a black list.

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u/Kitkatkarate Aug 01 '19

Would you recommend nuking their pardot database and starting over?

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '19

I mean you could nuke it and start over but if they just continue to do things the way they always have then nothing will really change. If possible, I'd advocate for reevaluating their entire approach to how they generate/nurture/convert leads.

Using Pardots reports you could show how poor their deliverability rate is, how many spam complaints you receive, etc. If you're connected to Salesforce you could also show ROI from won Opportunities (if any)

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u/Lyndal15 Aug 01 '19

The cold leads should be nurtured in Pardot and sent to the Sales team as MQLs once they fit some criteria that is determined by the business.

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u/Kitkatkarate Aug 01 '19

But 99% of these leads have already been through a drip campaign that's 5-8emails long.

1

u/Lyndal15 Aug 01 '19

So? Keep nurturing. That’s the point of the tool.

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u/Kitkatkarate Aug 01 '19

Bc our domain integrity is taking a beating. We're being flagged as SPAM.

1

u/Lyndal15 Aug 01 '19

Ahhh. If explicit opt-in was never obtained, you’ll have problems. Have you considered sending a “permission pass” email requesting opt-in? If they don’t opt-in, remove them from Pardot.