Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Reviews

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.

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...

Read more

The ability to integrate with Salesforce CRM is a major advantage, as it allows businesses to get a complete view of their customers and personalize their marketing messages accordingly.Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers a range of tools for multichannel marketing, including email, social media, mobile, and web.The platform offers advanced segmentation features, allowing businesses to target specific customer segments with tailored marketing messages.The platform offers a range of analytics tools to help businesses measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

It can be complex and difficult to navigate, which can make it challenging for new users to get started.The platform is quite expensive, which may make it less accessible to small businesses with limited budgets.Customer support is very slow to respond or not very helpful.

In-house integration with SFDC. Easier to manage. Not complicated. It has similar functionality as the other major peers like Hubspot and Marketo and it was easier to learn and start working on it.

Lead routing is not available. I am looking for in-built round-robin routing functionality.

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.

The fact that it integrates natively with Salesforce is Pardot's best feature. The engagement studio automation product is great as well, making it really easy to create drip campaigns and other conditional flows.

The email builder is 10 years behind competitor's builders. To get things to behave, you have to code emails in html. The WYSIWG builder is poor, but asset management of images and files is even worse. Competitors like MailChimp and ActiveCampaign have much better platforms for designing beautiful, responsive emails.

I like that you can create renderings and very interactively build emails.

It can be very complex to do little tasks, like adding in a photo. Not to mention if you want to change the template, you need to have CSS/HTML background.

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.

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 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....

Read more

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...

Read more

Easy to build and send emails, manage contacts, track lists/segmentation, and built automation. You can also setup scoring/grading to see your interest/lead interest.

The integration with Salesforce is a bit confusing, and they change the way it's implemented with every release. This causes issues with clients trying to launch all users at once on Pardot, and ensuring they have the right licensing.

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

Ability to segment your prospects into silos that can help determine which direction will bring the best return on our investment of time. I also like the ability to add photos of our work. We offer a very visual product that clients need to see which will help with their buying decision. Finally, the ability to schedule email drops which allows me to not consume network speed since I can do it after business hours.

Workflows are not well established. It took me a while to learn them because they do not flow logically. A training documentation does not outline any type of logical flow for some of the common ways people work. Secondly, support is lacking. I do think this is a Pardot issue directly but a Salesforce issue. Your best support person is Mr. Google since he knows everything and you do not have to fill out multiple screens hoping you get to the right person.

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.

Pardot is perfect for companies that use Salesforce and also have a multiple person sales team. It has advanced automation features, and allows you to send emails from sales reps and insert dynamic content to make that email from the rep seem personalized. Dyamic content can be anything from the typical first name, company name, to custom dynamic content that's unique to whatever your needs are. Because Pardot syncs with Salesforce it also allows you to assign sales members tasks based on behaviors the recipients of the emails are taking which is great for strategic and timely sales follow up.

The email editor could be better and easier to use. There isn't an undo button which is very frustrating. If you need to undo something you pretty much have to start over.

- Once you have solid templates built, creating new emails and landing pages is very fast - Integration with Salesforce is solid, no issues with data sync in either direction - Automation rules (especially b/t Salesforce and Pardot) can take care of a lot of mundane tasks without needing to remember to do them

- Getting started with the Program can be tough because there is so much it can do - Reporting on data can be difficult to figure out. Not on a per-email basis, but rather on Campaign-level performance. There seem to be multiple places to get information and they don't always match up. - Landing page templates are not responsive. Seriously! You have to have a web designer built and import them to be useful

Pardot and Salesforce work well together. It includes the ability to customize the look and feel of email, landing pages and sign up forms. Lead scoring is another powerful and helpful feature for huge sales insights.

Improve the email editor. Exorbitantly priced- not suitable for the small businesses. There is a room to improve in terms of reporting.

I like that they have a landing page builder but their user interface for building landing pages should be more competitive with what's in the market. I like their email campaign builder interface and the drip marketing tool.

Their reporting is lacking because you can't customize it. It's hard to really know track leads through the pipeline and recycle them when they aren't ready to buy. The tagging and folder structure isn't intuitive and takes a bit to get used to.

The automation and contact management is of the best I've worked with. Not turn is unturned in regards to what you can do to optimize your communications and lead management especially if you're using Salesforce.

Costs. I've only had one client that could afford this investment. It's really an enterprise solution.

Pardots UI is clean and updated, making it easy to use. At first glance, the simplified interface makes it seem like the product is limited, but once you become proficient with automation rules, dynamic lists, and completion actions you'll find that its very configurable and can suit a variety of processes and workflows. It's just a different mindset from a Marketo or Hubspot in terms of approaching some of the workflows, nurtures, drips, etc.

Really lacking in reporting across the board and no visibility into accounts for organizations using account-based marketing and/or sales processes, everything is organized by prospect only.

Creating customized email templates and nurture campaigns. Easily setup A/B testing for any email send. The ability to slice and dice your segments so you can get more granular with contact lists. Integrated well with many of the other platforms (GoToWebinar) and social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) we used. Obviously with Salesforce too.

Compared to other email management tools, Pardot is expensive and the UI feels outdated. Unless you spend a lot of time reading their resources and tutorials, it isn't intuitive. The Pardot forms is also confusing. They have forms and form handlers and there should be a better way of combining the two to make things simple.