by Sophie Daniline 
AMPSEA. No, my cat didn’t just walk over my keyboard. AMPSEA stands for ‘Allowing Multiple Prospects with the Same Email Address’, and it’s a feature that means Pardot Prospect records no longer need a unique email address. As you can imagine, this can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on what you want to achieve. I’m going to break down how AMPSEA works, and help you decide if it’s right for your Pardot account.
How does AMPSEA work?
The key difference is how Pardot handles the unique identifier. A unique identifier is what differentiates one Prospect from another. Pre-AMPSEA, the unique identifier was ‘Email Address’. With AMPSEA enabled, the unique identifier becomes ‘CRM ID’. CRM ID is the Lead or Contact record ID in Salesforce. Pardot Prospects are linked with Lead or Contact records in Salesforce, therefore the CRM ID becomes the Pardot prospects’ ID as well.
This means we could have multiple Prospects with the same email address who exist as Leads or Contacts in Salesforce, and who also exist in Pardot as individual Prospects. Remember that even though their email addresses are the same, their unique identifier (CRM ID) is not – and most importantly, is unique to them.
Scenarios where Pardot can only see Email Address:
There are going to be a couple of scenarios where Pardot will only be able to access the ‘Email Address’, rather than being able to find the CRM ID of the Prospect. I’m going to outline what these are, and what Pardot will do in each scenario.
Pardot Functionality |
Scenario |
| Form Submissions | The Prospect filling out the form has not already been cookied, and there are multiple Prospects with the same Email Address in Pardot. |
| Data Imports | You are uploading a .csv data file without a CRM ID column. Pardot can only use ‘Email Address’ as the unique identifier, and there are multiple Prospects with that email address in Pardot. |
| Recycle Bin | When there are no active Prospect records matching an email address, Pardot searches the recycle bin next. There are multiple Prospects with that email address in the recycle bin. |
| List Emails | There are two Prospects on a recipient List with the same email address. |
In all of the scenarios above, Pardot will select the Prospect record with the most recent activity. For example, in the List Email send, Pardot would de-duplicate, and would only send the email to the prospect with the most recent activity.
Email Preferences & Hard Bounces
Email Preferences and Bounces work slightly differently. If a prospect Unsubscribes, or has a Hard Bounce, and there are multiple Prospects with the same Email Address, Pardot will Opt out / mark as bounced all prospects with the same Email Address.
In the case of Email Preferences, this is a safeguarding measure that ensures that the preferences of the Prospect are honoured. A Prospect Hard Bouncing suggests a prospect is permanently un-mailable, therefore Pardot is helping protect sender reputation.
Engagement Studio
Engagement Studio AMPSEA rules aims to ensure that an Email Address associated with multiple Prospects doesn’t receive more than one copy of the same email. The rule here is one prospect per Email Address per program.
Who will it work well for?
Businesses who sell multiple products or services. For example, businesses maintaining separate records depending on which product or service an individual is interested in.
For example, if you work in insurance, you might be selling insurance for different products (phone, home etc). AMPSEA would allow you to use a different unique identifier (e.g. customer ID), rather than relying on email address. This is extremely useful, as you may have one Prospect who has purchased several of your products, and each of those purchases will have its own unique customer ID.
It will also work well if you have ever intentionally duplicated records in Salesforce. Now, you can sync all your Salesforce Leads and Contacts to Pardot. This will help ensure that Marketing and Sales are on the same page. You can target your marketing efforts more accurately.
If you use Salesforce Engage, this feature will help. AMPSEA aligns Pardot and Salesforce more closely. Every marketing interaction shows up on individual records in Salesforce, and each Engage interaction syncs down to the matching Prospect in Pardot.
How can you enable AMPSEA?
If this feature isn’t enabled, Pardot admins may see a banner that begins the enablement process on the Pardot dashboard. You can also enable it from the account settings page in Pardot.
If you’ve enabled AMPSEA, and want some help managing your Pardot account, get in touch with us today.