Pardot’s New 2-Click Unsubscribe: not perfect, but enable it anyway

Pardot has just released 2 click unsubscribe for all orgs in the Spring ’21 release. While this feature is still very much in “MVP” (minimum viable product) mode, here’s why you should enable it, despite its shortcomings, and a few tips on how.

Why 2 Click Unsubscribe?

Enterprise Antispam / Antivirus software is the main culprit. If you’ve ever sent an email and noticed a high number of unsubscribes immediately, particularly from the same domain, your prospects likely have some sort of corporate security software running. One “feature” of this type of software is checking all the links in inbound messages to see if they contain anything nefarious. A consequence of this behavior if you are using {{Unsubscribe}} in the standard way– which is a 1-click unsubscribe, the software is automatically unsubscribing your recipients from your beautifully crafted Pardot emails.

What’s worse, your prospects are likely unaware they have been unsubscribed. Your email will appear to them as normal. Previously, the only way to get around this problem was to use the preference center exclusively instead of unsubscribe, but now we have another option. Enter Pardot 2-click unsubscribe.

How do I enable 2 Click Unsubscribe in Pardot?

It’s really as simple as editing your unsubscribe page to turn on the feature. There’s a new checkbox when you edit called “Two-Click Unsubscribe”. There are also two sections that you can customize, on the “are you sure you want to unsubscribe” page and the confirmation page. Here are the other things you need to know about enabling this feature:

1.The title text is required but it might not show up.

The Title text used on the “are you sure” and “confirmation” page will only appear if your layout page template contains %%Title%% somewhere in the body. If it doesn’t, this text does not appear.

The first part of enabling 2-Step Unsubscribe in Pardot

2. The default text show up no matter what

The default text used on both pages cannot be changed. It is not overridden by anything you put in the message or the title text. Likewise, the button names are also unchangeable. Further, after inspecting the code on the landing page, it doesn’t appear that you can easily override any of the defaults with CSS either. As with many things Pardot, considerations for multi-language take a back seat to expediency in the first iteration.

3. You cannot use HML in the message
This was one of the first things I checked. Unfortunately you can’t use HML in either of the messages or the titles.

The second part of enabling 2-Step Unsubscribe in Pardot

4. You can add a link to your email preferences center in the part 1 message

Adding a link to your email preferences center in the first message gives you an extra option to try and entice your prospects to stick with you instead of unsubscribing. Simply add a link to your preferred preference center in the message.

5. Make sure the second step redirect works

If you use a custom layout template for your unsubscribe page, be sure that you include a base href tag in your HTML that refers to your tracker domain as the base domain. It should look like this: <base href=”https://your.trackerdmain.com“> If not, the confirmation redirect may not work properly, and people won’t be able to unsubscribe.

Why you should enable it anyway

Yes, it represents an extra step for the prospect. True, it doesn’t work with multiple languages (for now). But you should still enable it because it avoids the problem of people being unintentionally unsubscribed because of corporate IT policy. Furthermore, if you have lots of legacy email templates that use {{unsubscribe}} instead of the preference center, it’s a way to do a quick upgrade for all those templates without having to go in and change them to the preference center link one by one.

 


 

This Pardot article written by:  Bill Fetter

Unfettered Marketing

A collection of random thoughts on how people, places and things in our fascinating world connect to sales and marketing, and what we can learn from it.

Original Pardot Article: https://www.unfetteredmarketing.com//post/testing-pardot-s-new-2-click-unsubscribe

Find more great Pardot articles at https://www.unfetteredmarketing.com/blog

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This Pardot article written by:  Bill Fetter

Unfettered Marketing

A collection of random thoughts on how people, places and things in our fascinating world connect to sales and marketing, and what we can learn from it.

Original Pardot Article: https://www.unfetteredmarketing.com//post/testing-pardot-s-new-2-click-unsubscribe

Find more great Pardot articles at https://www.unfetteredmarketing.com/blog