The Pardot Resubscribe Prospect Gotcha

The long awaited "Allow Prospect to Resubscribe" feature in Pardot is a dream come true for many marketers that have prospects that frequently return their site, and would like a way to remind them that they've opted out of email communications.

In brief, the feature will show a message right on a Pardot form that tells the person that they have opted out of emails, and offers a link to get an email which will allow them to opt in again. This shows up automatically and requires no interaction with the form in order to appear.

A few caveats about when this feature works and when it does not, and one huge gotcha that I discovered.

When it works:

• When you're using a Pardot form AND the prospect is cookied on that browser.

When it does not work (the resubscribe invitation message doesn't appear on the form) :

• When using a form handler

• When the prospect has cookies blocked or cookies never set

• When the prospect's email has hard bounced

The Gotcha:

• When the person has been unsubscribed manually by Pardot or Salesforce (via the opt out or do not email checkboxes) this feature shows itself to the user (the message appears on a Pardot form if they are cookied), but the feature might not work. Requesting the email to resubscribe never sends an email.

The Fix:

I'd originally reported this problem to Salesforce not really expecting an answer. I was gratified to find that they did have a suggestion that worked, even though it's not documented (yet) in the setup instructions.

Here it is:

In your form template if you have this tag:

<base href="" >

Which is what a lot of the common starter templates have and a lot of folks don't update, you'll get this behavior.

If you set it to your custom tracker domain (not go.pardot.com) it will fix the issue. Or if you just delete that tag altogether it also works.