Building your prospect database is a key step in getting your Pardot marketing automation campaigns ready. In order to understand how to build a prospect database, first, you must know what a prospect and visitor is.
Visitor – Someone has visited your site who you do not have an email for. Pardot only has the IP address of the device they were using when they visited your site.
Prospect – A visitor who has provided you with an email either via form submission or data import.
A visitor is someone who has visited your website and had a Pardot tracker cookie placed on them. Pardot only has the IP address of the device the visitor was using when they visited your site.
The visitor record is where you can get insight on your webpage traffic. Use the visitor record to:
However, in Pardot, leads and contacts are both considered prospects and are mapped from the CRM accordingly.
Please note that Pardot’s cost is determinate of how many mailable prospect records you have in your database. Web visitors and unsubscribed/deleted records do not count towards your contact block.
Now that you understand the difference between visitors and prospects, let’s dive into how to build a prospect database.
There are four ways to input prospects into your Pardot database:
Common reasons for a visitor to fill out a form:
To do this you will need:
Other sources may include:
Steps to importing prospects via CSV:
There are three things to check:
1. Do not change the campaign for existing prospects.
If there are prospects on your import list that already exist in your Pardot database, their campaign name/tags will not be overwritten. This is the default and recommended option.
2. Set this campaign for all prospects
Use this option if you want to overwrite the campaign/tags of prospects in your database that are also on the list you’re importing. (not recommended)
Tags: Tags are not always necessary but are helpful to give more information on how the prospect was found. For example, let’s say this list is from the 2018 ABC Trade Show and you already have prospects in your database from the 2017 ABC Trade Show.
Insert tag “2018 ABC Trade Show” so you not only know what campaign they came from, but also what year/event they came from.
There are four options:
The last way to import prospects into Pardot is by syncing them through Salesforce CRM. Pardot and Salesforce CRM integrate seamlessly to help marketers at every stage of the customer journey.
When the two are integrated, they speak to each other and can update their databases automatically.
Some lead and contact activities in Salesforce trigger a sync from the CRM to Pardot’s prospect database for existing prospects such as:
Pardot can technically sync with almost any field or custom object. But, you probably don’t need to sync them all. Only sync the custom fields that are vital to your B2B marketing efforts.
In this next chapter, we will breakdown the different types of prospect lists you can create within Pardot.
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