How to Add Unsubscribe Reason to a Pardot Unsubscribe Page

In this post, I’ll show you how to create a page that asks for feedback as to why the prospect is unsubscribing. The goal is to use the standard Pardot unsubscribe page and ask them why they have unsubscribed on the confirmation page. This gives the prospect the option to complete this information, but it’s not required for them to be unsubscribed from emails.

Page preview

Here’s what the completed page looks like.

Step 1: Create the custom field(s)

First, create a field in Pardot that will be used to capture the unsubscribe reason.

Optionally, you can create an additional field to capture the reason if “other” is selected in the form.

Step 2: Create the unsubscribe reason form

Create a new form and add your new fields.

Step 3: Style the unsubscribe reason form

Add some CSS to the unsubscribe form in the above form section.

Since the only way to get to the unsubscribe reason page will be from an email, I highly recommend hiding the email address field from the form by adding this CSS:


Here’s what my full CSS looks like for my form:

Step 4: Edit or create a layout template

If your unsubscribe page does not have a dedicated layout template, create a new layout template to use for the unsubscribe page. You can find the layout template name on the settings page for your unsubscribe page.

Navigate to your layout template and click on the Form tab. Find the %%form-before-form-content%% tag within the HTML and replace it with the iFramed version of your unsubscribe reason form. Also, add any text you want to include before or after the embedded form.

Here’s the HTML I replaced the %%form-before-form-content%% tag with.


and here’s what the full HTML looks like in the form tab of the layout template:


Lastly, here’s my HTML for the entire layout tab of my layout template.

Issues with email address populating

There have been some reported issues with the email address not populating in the unsubscribe reason form. This is because the form depends on cookies in order to populate the email address. The prospect might have a browser setting enabled or they are in Incognito Mode. There are two workarounds to solve this…

Workaround #1: Show the email address field if it’s not populated automatically.

The first workaround is to show the email address field if the email field is not populated automatically. To do this, navigate to your unsubscribe reason form, go to the look and feel tab and paste this jQuery code in the below form section.

Workaround #1: Hide the unsubscribe reason form if the email address is not populated automatically.

The second workaround is to hide the form altogether if the email address is not populated automatically. To do this, navigate to your unsubscribe reason form, go to the look and feel tab and paste this jQuery code in the below form section. Update the jQuery with your own messages.

Lastly, remove the header from your unsubscribe layout template since the header is placed within the form instead.

Testing

To test the unsubscribe reason page, you must send yourself a REAL email. The page will not show up if you are using one of the email test features.

Questions?

Send me a tweet @jennamolby, or leave a comment below.