Pardot

Pardot delivers on promises

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: ActiveCampaign and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Choosing Pardot: Greater functionality and alignment with Salesforce

Switched From: ActiveCampaign

Reasons for Switching to Pardot: Alignment with Salesforce

Strong Marketing Automation Tool! Highly recommended for SME and Mid Range Businesses

Comments: Overall I loved it. It's easier to use and the LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE IS AMAZING!!! It has the modern look and feel. I am going to stay with Pardot for a long time. Truly recommend it!

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Alternatives Considered: Marketo Engage

Reasons for Choosing Pardot: Price and getting in-house integration with our current CRM SFDC.

Switched From: HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Pardot: Pardot is already owned by SFDC and our CRM is SFDC. We wanted a seamless and in-house integration which makes process management easier. Customers using SFDC as CRM can really benefit with Pardot as a Marketing automation tool.

Integrates well with Salesforce but lacks features of competitors

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Expensive and UI left much to be desired

Comments: The only reason we've stayed with Pardot this long is because of its connectivity with Salesforce. It helps to have visibility into a prospect's engagement from both platforms. It plays a critical role in our email marketing initiatives and capturing and managing MQLs that come through our website forms. Building and segmenting our audience lists.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

World class all in one CRM

Comments: It has been a wonderful tool for us for carrying out our campaigns, segmenting our lists based on their locations, and the technology they use. Creating AB testing on different types of landing pages and email campaigns has been very useful in creating different workflows and ranking the leads as per their activities.

Pros:

It has been a great product for us for carrying out the best marketing campaigns, every campaign has been automated, and the best feature has been the testing of different campaigns and setting up new workflows. Furthermore, tools like lead scoring have been great.

Cons:

Beginning to use SF Pardot, makes everything complicated as the UX and UI is not the best for such a big name.