Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Features

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.

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.

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...

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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.

Pardot has a huge number of features that allow you to control, split and quickly view your customer lists. It is also awesome being able to get this information into Salesforce. Another feature I love is the customer behavior tracking. It makes it simple to get an understanding of what a prospect is interested in. We can then tailor our message to this prospect. For example, if we identify someone is from a specific State (in the U.S.A) then we can share a link in an email that is information only about that State. The scoring feature is also great because you can quickly see the interest of a current prospect and then notify the correct sales agent to reach out.

There are 2 things that frustrate me about Pardot. The learning curve and intuitiveness is very poor. It takes a long time to figure out what pieces are where. On top of that, I have used Pardot for almost 2 years and I still figuring stuff out. It has a ton of features but figuring them all out is mind-boggling. The other thing that is irritating is the email builder. It just isn't intuitive. You have a tiny screen to make any edits and adding things (like custom information) is hard to find most times. Then you have to sync this email to the HTML version. Every time I have clicked that button the email syncs but I have to spend 5-10 extra minutes fixing the syntax issues that come about from the sync. I feel that process should work much more seamlessly.

I loved the demo given to me by an expert who sold me on the ease of the technical set up and use of Pardot.

The technical setup was far too technical for me. The cost was over SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN a month and we never got it up and running after 7 months of trying. They later recommended using a third party company for technical implementation as it was too technical for a somewhat technical person. Our developer and technical team members did not have the time to implement themselves as it was a full time position to setup technically.

This can be a good tool to use for automation as you can import contacts and add them to lists and drips fairly easily. It's also good for integrating with custom forms and landing pages and you can create custom campaigns, links etc. High level, it really helps connect everything together from the first visit (including the pages they viewed) and every subsequent touchpoint from then on (but reporting on this falls into the "Cons").

Pardot is a difficult tool to set up and manage and their support through the process is quite limited. Their chat seems to fill up by 9 am, and although they offer courses to train you how to use their product, they charge for it. Although it is a powerful tool, their reporting capabilities are very behind, and while they capture every touchpoint, there is no way to roll up that data to gather insights or report on it.

Easy to send emails and track activity. Reporting is very easy with all important data right on the dashboard and on the campaign canvas.

Possibly, templates can be created and WYSIWYG editor used, but we programmed emails in html, which was really time consuming.

Pardot is a natural fit for Salesforce users. The functionality of Pardot and the analytics are awesome. This software is a great way to successfully streamline marketing efforts to your customers.

Pardot is definitely not intuitive. There is a learning curve for sure. It is not something that someone can jump into and just figure it out. Assistance from tutorials and our Pardot technical help is needed.

Intuitive UI, great functionality for the price, native integration with Salesforce, dynamic content add-on. Automation rules that can help keep the system clean and prospects updated.

Limitations within automation rules for mutli-variable updates. For example - Loading a tradeshow list with campaign member statuses in SFDC. I would like to upload in one automation rule to say if X campaign status, update to this campaign in SFDC for X status, within the same rule I would like to add all of the other statuses with specific completion actions instead of having to run 1 rule for each status. Dynamic content should be able to trigger via a URL parameter and not just a known prospect field.

Great integration with Salesforce CRM as expected. Lots of guides, resources are available along with an active community.

Multiple ways of accomplishing the same results make it a tad bit confusing. Also, in-built connectors are limited as compared to some of the other alternatives.

The best part of Pardot is the integration with SalesForce and being able to push and pull a variety of information into and from both systems.

The UI is pretty poor and there are some key features such as in-depth reporting that the system is still lacking

Once you've thoroughly understood all the features in Pardot, it can be quite easy to use for simple things. Their Engagement Studio, in particular, is incredibly built-out. It's also nice to have that sync with SFDC across fields. Lastly, the dynamic content was super helpful when we needed to update email templates across the board.

- The email wizard takes a LONG time to load, even if you want to change something small, like preheader text. Additionally, it can take HOURS to render samples from their built-in litmus integration. For a company as advanced as Salesforce, you'd think this would be an easy feature to use. - From the day they linked Pardot and SFDC campaigns, there were severe bugs with email stats. I think they have solved the issue, but the fact that it took months meant we weren't able to capture that data easily. -To the point above...email stats are not easy to find in Pardot. There is a page that gives you the basics for email templates, but as for one-off email sends, forget about it. The reporting tab is just not good compared to any other email automation product on the market.

Once you understand the areas of Pardot and how affective they are throughout the areas of your marketing efforts and establish a synergy it's a great tool that's used frequently to solve and offload processes from other, potentially costly systems.

My con is a con that anyone would have, it's a different UI, capabilities are different in some contexts, and it really just takes a matter of time to feel it out and get comfortable with. If time is that bad of a con, than we'd all have a bad wrap. I do with their integrations were a bit long but with most things going to Salesforce and Pardot having a bond with it, we can solve things through that channel.

Wonderful tracking for leads and creation of drip campaigns. Any company who’s expanding their lead generation efforts and looking to hasten the velocity of closing prospects will definitely find this useful, especially since it is connected to Salesforce.

Interface and usability needs a lot of improvement. Functionalities for creatives and marketers can become too time-consuming and limiting, especially in terms of customisation of drip emails.

I love the ability to have insight into customer activity and to create marketing campaigns. From a marketing perspective Pardot is an amazing tool. However my role is in more of a sales role so I tend to lean on the features of Salesforce much more. I appreciate the tie into sales force and how I am able to create reports and customer lists very easily in Pardot. It has greatly expanded the communication that I am able to have with customers. I work closely with the marketing team to delivery targeted messages which we were unable to do in the past.

My biggest frustration comes from the Salesforce/Pardot relationship. I wish that the terms in salesforce were the same used in Pardot, it is a bit of a learning curve especially when you are getting up to speed and working within two different departments. For example campaigns in salesforce are completely different than campaigns in Pardot.

The lead deck feature provides us with real-time information on the activities of our prospects. Customer service is excellent. It's simple to use, and it's quite customizable. As a Salesforce product, it's really easy to integrate with the CRM.

Pardot does not have a very educational welcome to learn how to use the program and you have to see tutorials and training on other platforms to learn how to use it. Once you learn it is excellent Pardot

Parrot has all the necessary features and functionality to serve SMBs in a marketing automation capacity. The ease of use is simpler compared to some of the other highly complex and customizable options out there, plus the integration with Salesforce is seamless.

We had issues with syncing to Salesforce previously but that has since been resolved. The features and interface have not changed much in the last 10 years so don’t expect a lot of new enhancements or improvements to come.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a Marketing Automation platform that lives within the Salesforce ecosystem. It is the best MA platform that natively integrates with Salesforce CRM.

As a former user of Marketo Engage, I find that Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement lags behind in terms of automations. In the past five years, there have been no significant improvements to Automations and Completion Actions. While I understand that Salesforce is advocating for the use of Flows, it would be beneficial to see some advancements in the native automation tools on the platform.

I have to say that the most thing I like about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is that it gives me a complete view of how our customers are interacting with each of our channels. I can easily measure their behavior, determine which campaigns are most popular with them, and adjust our content and messaging accordingly.One personal experience that stands out is when we used Salesforce Marketing...

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To be honest, the fact that Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can occasionally be somewhat overwhelming is the feature that I find least appealing. It can take some time to get used to using all of the features and options because there are so many of them.When we first started using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, one personal experience comes to mind. We had a lot of questions...

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The software is pretty intuitive and easy to use. There is a huge community that's eager to collaborate and assist (local user groups, blogs, the Dreamforce conference, the connections conference, twitter, slack groups, linkedin groups, etc). We utilized the product for List Emails ( about 30 each month), Automated Nurture Campaigns, Segmentation, Email Preference Center, and so much more. It is very powerful and played a key role in our marketing efforts.

The trade off to ease-of-use is lack of complexity. After working with the platform for 5 years, I have concluded that it is a great fit for smaller companies that want to use their features in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. We are a medium sized company with multiple target audiences, some that overlap, some that don't, territories with multiple languages and a vast and diverse product line....

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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.

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.

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.

Pardot is one of the better marketing automation/nurturing product aimed at mid-sized businesses. It's greatest strength is its integration with Salesforce (which will be discussed more in "cons"). With relative simplicity, it can be connected to the CRM, so that contacts can easily sync two-ways, and even custom objects can be brought through for segmentation purposes with just a couple of clicks....

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Pardot is a Salesforce product, and its integration is excellent, but it is just that - an integration. Pardot works like a third party service connected with Salesforce, as opposed to a native extension. Lists are synchronized, along with the sort of bugs and frustrations that come with bi-directional synchronization, and some Salesforce functions (notably custom objects) are not as fully fleshed...

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There's some good features like email drip campaigns, landing pages and forms but they all have their drawbacks. The drip campaigns we found were never getting delivered and going to spam, no one ever opened the emails. The landing pages only provide 4 or 5 designs and only one of them is even possibly usable. You'll need to code your own. The forms are extremely complicated, I've been using for a few years and I still have no idea how to customize them to improve the designs. Basically just too complicated all around. I don't have any pros really, anything good I can find a con for. Don't get fooled into buying this software.

We purchased Pardot on a three year contract expecting much more than we were given. We are a news publication that sends out daily alerts that our customers pay for and were told by their sales team this was the best email delivery software out there - obviously we know they all say that but this software isn't even close. Pardot purchased Exact Target and sends out of their email. Exact Target is...

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