You may not know this, but Salesforce Account Engagement limits the number of mailable prospects in your database. So that means prospects who are eligible to receive emails and are not opted out or marked as “Do Not Email” really need to be cleansed and kept up-to-date to ensure clean marketing lists.
In this blog, I’m going to explain the reasons why you should keep your mailable prospect database up-to-date, and share tips on how this can be achieved
You may have lots of cold out-of-date prospects, which, as a result, can lead to low click rates, conversion rates and make your marketing efforts seem less effective than they are.
Duplicate or out-of-date mailable prospects occupy valuable storage space and count toward your mailable prospect limit. Freeing up that space for genuine, valuable prospects means you maximise your current database.
As well as wasting storage space, Duplicate or outdated prospects are costing you. You can purchase additional Prospects in 10,000 blocks from your Salesforce Account Executive. This cost could ramp up fast if you keep needing to purchase more.
It is easier for all account engagement users to utilise smaller, more accurate data sets; nobody wants to be wading through heaps of useless data!
By providing accurate and reliable prospect data, your account engagement database can be trusted during the decision-making process for your marketing strategy
Up-to-date prospect data can allow you to better tailor interactions to individual customer needs and preferences to make them feel valued.
Your business should not be storing contact data without a legitimate reason. Specifically, Salesforce Account Engagement requires users to adhere to a permission-based marketing policy, meaning you must obtain explicit consent to send marketing communications. If you are storing out-of-date Prospects, can you guarantee that they comply with this policy?
Under account engagement settings, select optimiser>scroll down and under âmaintenance resourcesâ>press review duplicate prospects>click on the cog next to the prospect email address. Here you can review the prospects (in the recycle bin, or not) and then merge them using a table action.
My Top Tip: You can use the optimiser to highlight configuration issues and how you can improve performance in your Account Engagement business unit.
Create a dynamic list that matches your cold prospect criteria. Run an automation rule that uses this list and any other additional criteria. Set up a completion action on the rule that marks the prospects as âdo not emailâ.
Create a list that matches your cold prospect criteria, and use a table action to send these to the recycle bin using the âdeleteâ action.
So there are two choices when it comes to cleansing your prospects: The recycle bin or do not email.
Send prospects to the recycle bin if you consider them obsolete, but you may like to re-engage in future. Prospects’ activities are not tracked in the recycle bin, but Prospects will be auto-undeleted if they submit an MCAE form.
Mark Prospects as do not email if you have no intention to email them again, but you would like to keep tracking their engagement.
Schedule time in your calendar once a month to perform a cleanse/review if you’re not setting up automation to manage this.
Ensure that when filtering/creating lists of prospects to cleanse, all angles have been considered, for example, has the prospect been created recently? Has the Prospect recently opened an email? Is the prospect associated with a recently created or won opportunity? If associated with an opportunity that was lost, could another arise?
Furthermore, ensure prospects are not currently in an Engagement Studio Programme and consider data points that could be unique to your business.
Consider removing prospects in a phased approach; this will reduce the risk of encountering issues, allowing you to monitor the data or stop the removal if there are any issues.
Don’t just wait for Salesforce to email you with a warning
Review the Usage and Limits Tab in Account Settings – this applies and is useful for monitoring many of the limits in account engagement
Talking of Limits, be aware that Prospect limits are shared across business units.
There isn’t a good in-app method that aggregates all the prospect counts for business units connected to the same Salesforce org. This means you need to add up all prospects across each of your business units to determine your total usage.
You could send a one-time permission pass email to prospects you are considering removing before doing so. You could launch a whole re-engagement nurturing programme using Salesforce Account Engagement Studio in an attempt to win subscribers back and make your cold prospects active again
When using any database, the output is really only ever as good as the data that’s in it. If you practise these top tips above, you will save yourself from potential issues with your prospect list.
Photo by Chris Weiher on Unsplash
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