Pardot has made it easy to understand how our marketing is working, know who is a hot lead versus a disengaged one, and to create content that is easy to share and delivers good ROI. It’s built in many safeguards to keep you from getting in trouble with spam rules and avoid sending emails multiple times.
Pros
The software is great for staying in touch with prospects and clients. It makes it easy to set up emails, create content, measure and report on results, and build stronger relationships. It’s fun to use, once you understand how it works.
Cons
There’s a long learning curve for adopting Pardot, and if I hadn’t had a consultant to hold my hand through the integration and kick off, I’d be struggling. I find Pardot and Salesforce training to be overly confusing and it’s really hard to find what you’re looking for. It’s a knowledge based system and continually adds more and more information, and it’s not always clear if the instructions apply to you or apply to a different level of service. Other than that I highly recommend it because of all the functionality and way it can dramatically improve your digital marketing.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 8/10
The experience so far has been nothing short of exceptional. We have been using Pardot since the last 5 years and have been able to facilitate amazing co-ordination with the Sales and Marketing teams. The automation Pardot provides also helps generate reports to measure Campaign ROI and overall lead generation.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
My overall experience with Pardot is great and it is allowing our company to scale contact with our customer base segmenting the messages according to Account/Contact information.
Pros
I really enjoy creating engagement email cadences with dynamic content. In my case, I use it to send the same message in different languages.
Cons
I would like to have more tools to create the design of emails without needing HTML.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 8/10
Horrific. Would never migrate to this tool again and wouldn't recommend to anyone.
Pros
Perhaps "simplicity" is one way to put a positive spin on this review. For any Marketing Ops professional who wants to build anything above and beyond Pardot's pre-built functionality -- Good luck. Maybe the simplicity is good for a very small organization, but in that same vein the price point would be nowhere near worth it.
Cons
Filter logic is absolutely miserable. There is no Boolean logic in the tool (going back to my point on "simplicity"), which is horrific for building out any type of complex filters for segments. There are even character limits on how much you can enter in one argument field. So, think about if you have to build out a segment to compile all leads from Europe and write out each country.... you would need to split the arguments into 15 or more "or" statements to account for each value. Also, everything is a drop down -- no free text entries for search -- so good luck sifting through 400 different values for a single Salesforce field. This is one seemingly minor example but is a great representation of how overly limited the tool is as a whole. Also their proclaimed "one-to-one" sync with Salesforce is a joke. There is always mismatched or missing data that doesn't align when boiled down into a report.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 3/10
Overall its been a good experience (if you / your client doesnt mind the cost of using it). If choosing to use Pardot, ALL Salesforce CRM licences need to upgraded to the highest cost level (Enterprise), even if its only small teams / individual groups that require the Pardot element. This seems a bit unfair.
Pros
It's a perfect 'marketing output' tool for Salesforce, which has been adapted to natively fit without having to use 3rd party marketplace plugins for marketing output. Pardot has been a gamechanger for outputting Marketing directly from Salesforce.
Cons
It doesnt integrate Social Media management (scheduling, Ads, etc.) - so you still need to use a Social Media tool such as hootsuite. So, while it's the most 'integrated marketing tool' for Salesforce, it's not a complete integrated marketing solution.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 7/10
GROWTH
Standard marketing automation
$1,250/month/up to 10,000 contacts
PLUS
Advanced marketing automation
$2,500/month/up to 10,000 contacts
ADVANCED
Customizable marketing automation
$4,000/month/up to 10,000 records
All plans are billed annually.
Sales teams are always looking for more strategic ways to nurture leads. Pardot is a B2B marketing platform that automates this process, providing organizations with the ability to grow their pipelines, generate better leads, and improve their close rates from within Salesforce.com.
SMBs, B2Bs, and sales firms that are looking to improve their email marketing strategies, improve the quality of their leads, and gain more insight into their sales funnels can utilize Pardot’s tools to create, execute, and track their marketing campaigns. The solution helps professionals in the sales and marketing fields connect with customers through paid search, webinars, and video. It also automates lead nurturing behind the scenes, and shows professionals where they can improve their targeted efforts.
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that simplifies lead management and makes email marketing much easier for its users. The solution offers tools for building email templates, custom forms, and landing pages. It also understands where its users are working and how they can improve their efforts for maximum output.
As far as lead nurturing and lead growth are concerned, Pardot offers tools such as lead scoring and real-time alerts to let its users know when their prospects are ready to buy. It also prioritizes leads automatically, and quickly assigns leads to the best representatives based on the relative importance of each individual lead. As a result of using Pardot, organizations should be better able to accelerate their pipelines and increase the return on investment (ROI) they see from digital marketing campaigns.
Pardot was designed for SMB and B2B companies with between 10 and 500 employees. Within those organizations, it is used most frequently by professionals in the marketing and sales departments.
Pardot offers a powerful email marketing solution that helps marketers reach prospects through personalized, targeted emails. Marketing automation and scheduling tools help professionals send the right messages to the right prospects at the right time. Meanwhile, Pardot uses custom email authentication, SPAM analysis, and multivariate testing to optimize delivery rates.
Use Pardot’s intuitive email builder, with a WYSIWYG editor, to design your first email. You can choose from one of Pardot’s pre-designed templates, or use HTML code to create your own email from scratch. Schedule the message you’ve designed to go out at the optimal day and time, and set up auto-responder emails to welcome new prospects to your mailing lists or confirm event registrations.
Lead nurturing helps to ensure that the best leads are being sent to the best sales reps at the optimal times. Pardot has developed a blended lead scoring and grading model to increase lead quality.
Creating “smart” lead capture forms makes it easier for you to collect the right information from sales prospects and run more targeted campaigns. By automating this process through Pardot, you can reduce instances of human error and decrease the amount of manual work for yourself and your fellow sales colleagues.
More than 40 canned reports make it easier for sales and marketing teams to measure their overall effectiveness and ROI. A campaign ROI calculator ties CRM sales opportunity data together with search results, which means marketers are better able to associate prospects with campaigns. This is useful for reporting and calculating the costs of campaigns.
Get a better understanding of your own campaigns by running closed-loop reports with Pardot. Through these reports, you’ll be able to tell where your best and worst leads are originating. This information may be useful for prioritizing which channels should be your focus in the coming weeks and months. You can also create custom reports thanks to Pardot’s partnership with GoodData.
The web page a visitor reaches after clicking on a link or an online advertisement is typically called a landing page. With Pardot, sales teams can design custom landing pages that display content specific to the advertisement that brought the visitor in.
With Pardot’s landing page builder, you can use pre-existing HTML or you can create landing pages from scratch with stock templates. If you’re comfortable using Pardot’s drag-and-drop builder, then the company recommends building landing pages with its tools. Once a landing page has been activated, a URL will be automatically created and that URL should be added to any associated PPC or email campaigns.
Pardot includes certified CRM integrations with Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SugarCRM. It also offers email plugins, a Google AdWords connector, webinar and video integrations, and an Eventbrite connector.
Pricing for Pardot ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 per month. The company’s most popular option is its Pro plan, which offers advanced marketing automation for up to 10,000 contacts. The Pro plan costs $2,000 per month, billed annually.
Provides businesses with the ability to grow pipelines and generate better leads
Helps professionals in the sales and marketing fields connect with customers
Easy-to-use solution for non-technical marketers
Tools for creating, executing, and tracking marketing campaigns
Automates lead nurturing behind the scenes