Marketers

Never Active Prospects: How to Reactivate Pardot Prospects

By Morgan E. Wiedmann

Knowing how to reactivate prospects in Pardot is a trick every marketer should know. ‘Never Active’ Pardot prospects offer an opportunity to increase your conversion rates, also known as ‘low hanging fruit’. I guess that the question you’re asking is: “how can I change those inactive prospects to active prospects?”

The number of ‘Never Active’ prospects in Pardot orgs has been eye-opening to both me and my clients recently. For many marketers, this number reaches into the thousands. This is why I want to going to show you how to find and activate your ‘Never Active’ prospects.

First, a side note. The number of active vs. never active prospects depends on where you are in your Pardot journey. For a new Pardot customer, it’s normal to have a higher proportion of ‘never active’ prospects because you are starting out with a prospect database that no prospect activity history (ie. the data has been imported into Pardot). As the marketing team begins to use Pardot that number will decrease as email campaigns, website tracking, and more generates prospect interaction.

Find Never Active Prospects in Pardot

Have you checked out your prospects tab yet? Or, if you have been using Pardot for some time, when was the last time you checked this tab out?

As a best practice, I recommend getting in the habit of making the Prospects tab a frequent visit because there’s a ton of details you can glean, all with the click of a drop down view menu.

Head on over to the Pardot Lightning App, navigate to the Prospects tab, then on the left-hand side, choose Pardot Prospects.

Your screen will look like the below image.

From the drop-down menu under “View”, you can gain tons of insight into the prospects inside your org, such as:

  • Never Active Prospects (your low hanging fruit)
  • Active Prospects
  • Unmailable Prospects
  • Unsubscribed Prospects
  • Unassigned Prospects

…and much more.

As you can see just these five views alone can tell you a lot about the state of your prospect database.

Plus, you can filter your prospect views even more with a date range, filters, tags that you may have applied during your prospect imports, and other filters such as “Last Activity”, “Created”, “Updated” and “First Assigned” (which you will find at the top of the table).

Why You Have Never Active Prospects

So, let’s bring it back to those ‘Never Active’ prospects – your low hanging fruit. Run that view and see what you get; don’t be shocked if your number is high, especially if you’re new to Pardot.

There are ways you can decrease these numbers and get these prospects active in no time!

Why are all of these prospects not active yet?

These are your prospects who haven’t been cookied, yet.

So, how do you cookie them?

Well, prospects are not cookied when they just open an email. This is something that my clients will get confused about because they look at their ‘Never Active’ prospects and tell me that they have emailed them before.

Remember, prospects are cookied when they click a Pardot tracked link in an email OR fill out a Pardot form.

How to Cookie Pardot Prospects

So, what can you do to get these prospects to click tracked links and/or fill out Pardot forms?

Does your first touchpoint add a cookie?

Have you added iFrame forms to your website? Most clients have a ‘Contact Us’ form on their website, or ‘request a demo’, ‘request a callback’ forms – have you converted these forms yet to Pardot forms? This is a huge way to gain prospect tracking from their first point of contact!

Do your emails encourage click-throughs?

Take a look at your marketing emails. Do you have clear and defined call to actions (CTA)? – Having really strong CTAs can help you cookie prospects in no time, have the action drive them to something helpful, knowledge sharing collateral, whitepapers, ways to make their jobs easier. Think of yourself as a customer, what are you clicking on in emails?

Aim for clicks, not opens

Don’t focus on email opens, focus on clicks!

Some of my clients are thrilled by the number of email opens. I am sure email opens are great to see but what are you really gaining?

So let’s focus on those Click-Through Rates (CTR) which shows that someone took the time, clicked for more, and of course, are now cookied since it’s a Pardot tracked link!

Summary

With these three steps to add Pardot forms on your website, more CTAs, and focusing on CTR, you’ll gain more active prospects over time.

Remember, as a Pardot admin, to frequently check out that Prospects tab to use the drop-down views and see if your ‘Active’ prospects are increasing, and your ‘Never Active’ prospects are decreasing.

The Author

Morgan E. Wiedmann

Morgan is a Marketing Strategist for Cheshire Impact who is passionate about helping others thrive in the Pardot & Salesforce ecosystem. A Marketing Champion and NH B2B Pardot User Group.

Comments:

    Klara
    December 10, 2021 9:03 am
    Hi there, Very interesting article! I am currently looking at the status of my company´s prospects in Pardot. What would be best practice to do with your unmailable/inactive prospects? Have read about re engagement programmes to be done in Engagement studio. But you shouldn´t email someone who has unsubscribed right, so what is best practice to do in this case? Thanks! Regards Klara
    Jaime de Viajes BIDtravel
    March 24, 2022 9:12 am
    Great article! Question: how to target never active prospects within a dynamic list? Setting a filter with "empty prospect time" would do, right?

Leave a Reply