Permission-Based Marketing with Pardot
Nelson Eisenmann
Permission-based email marketing
With email automation, we have to be especially careful that we are following all the relevant laws. Pardot requires all of its users to follow its permission-based email policy, meaning that emails are “requested, anticipated, personal, and relevant.” Following this policy will help keep your account in good standing with Pardot and will generally keep you out of legal trouble.
- Email people who want to be contacted by you: Only contact prospects who have opted in to receive emails from your company. One way to ensure compliance with Pardot is to have a checkbox at the bottom of your forms that indicates they read your permission-based email policy and agree to its terms.
- Make it easy to opt out: Pardot will not let you send an email if you don’t have the %%Unsubscribe%% link in the body of the email. Make sure that the unsubscribe link is easy to locate in your email template.
- Be transparent: Identify who the email is being sent from and include your address and contact information at the bottom.
- Be honest: Don’t write misleading subject lines. Recipients should know that the content is commercial before they open it.
- Monitor your email deliverability: Make sure the emails that you’re sending are consistently reaching your prospect’s inbox. Pardot encourages you to have a 90% deliverability on all your emails and will send you a firm reminder if you don’t.
Anti-spam email laws by country
We’re marketers, not lawyers. But let’s look at the big picture view of how these countries’ laws vary.
If you do business in the European Union, Pardot has a feature that will create a cookie consent pop-up on your website. Pardot is smart enough to know, based on IP address, whether or not to display that pop-up.
The EU’s GDPR and other data privacy directives can get very complicated very quickly. We thought it would be outside the scope of this article to get into details of it. Here is another resource that elaborates further on the EU’s data privacy and communication protection laws: The Beginner’s Guide to the GDPR.
Don’t have time to read the full guide right now? Download the B2B Marketer’s Guide to Pardot to read at your convenience.
Chapter 10: Pardot Automation Rules & Page Actions
Sending Email with Pardot