Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

The number one thing that I love about Pardot is how easy it is to use. If you're on a small marketing team, one person can easily handle the system. If you have a larger team, the functionality scales extremely well - and you can bring in as many users as you need into the system without needing to pay for any additional seats. The software is extremely consistent and reliable. Pages load quickly and properly. The WYSIWYG editor for emails is awesome! The amount of automation you can do in Pardot is fantastic - especially with their more recent addition of repeating automations and drip programs. Awesome update releases thanks to being a Salesforce product.

The positioning of all of the various functionality can be a little confusing at times. There are a LOT of menu items that lead to the various different features. Some cleanup/re-organization of these might help new users. The out-of-the-box Marketing templates, while serviceable, could use a reboot. For a startup they're likely sufficient, but if you're running a lot of email campaigns you might want to invest in having a developer custom-build a modular email template for your ongoing use. The built-in mail testing using Litmus is terrible. Often half of the renderings fail to load, and a number of the renderings included are not super relevant any more. I actually never use this feature any more as I prefer to send test emails to an actual mail client rather than trust the renderings.

We love engagement studio and how easy it is to build out automated campaigns and dynamic lists. The ease of automation has meant less time spent uploading csv’s and more time developing great content.

We wish it had a drag and drop editor. Not everyone on our team can code and it makes it difficult when we have a heavy season for deploys. The good news is, they’ve announced a beautiful drag and drop editor for the 20 winter release.

Creating emails and landing pages are easy once you have templates that are built out. If you are not familiar with how to build templates, it may be difficult for you to use Pardot, as there is no drag and drop feature. The automation rules make it really easy for us to integrate into Salesforce, which we love. It's also very simple to create custom fields, which was important for us.

The reporting feature in Pardot is subpar. It is extremely difficult to report on our marketing activities with their current reporting structure. There is no way to create a custom report, making it very difficult for our team to track ROI. Probably the biggest downside to using this platform.

Pardot is unmatched in its ability to automate your marketing activities. The Engagement Program features it offers is probably the best in the market and allows you to design Customer journeys with customization based on the customer attributes as well as engagement. The WYSIWYG builder allows you to build beautiful email templates and Landing pages for Lead generation and Lead nurturing. It also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM and a wide variety of 3rd party applications.

Pardot allows you to create multiple leads with the same email address. This is a compulsory feature and causes issues with duplicate and bad data. You need to make sure the data is cleansed regularly.

We use pardot primarily for our email marketing, but also for inbound lead gen as well. I love how well pardot integrates into salesforce. That is key for our business. You can change anything at the field level using pardot based on activity etc, and segment based on any field.

There are features such as advanced analytics that are more advanced on the higher levels of pardot, however the cost increase is significant.