Great Marketing Automation platform

My overall experience with Pardot is great, being a sales guy I am using this tool daily to send marketing and sales emails to our customers and prospects and this tool never fails me.

Pros

I love Pardot and if I need to tell you what I like most about it then I must say their customer support team, yes I like this most because their customer support team is very active and responsive, they available 24*7 to help the customers and this is the best thing that I like most about it.

Cons

There is one thing that I would like to highlight that I like least about it and that is its high cost, yes Pardot is a little bit expensive compared to other marketing automation tool but on the other hand, I must say that it is worth to spend on it.

Pardot Helps us Treat Each Donor as an Individual

Before, we were treating email like it was direct mail. Just send out a high enough quantity and you’ll get enough donations. However, this was treating our donors as pocketbooks and not individuals with unique interests and hearts. Using Pardot means we can tailor what we share to each individual and tell a story they can relate to. Transformational rather than transactional. Donations have increased but that’s a byproduct of involving unique people in the story of our organization. Once you learn the UI, it’s very simple to use as long as you have even a bit of html and css experience or if someone on your team has made some great templates. We love the reporting on the individual level and the integration with Salesforce.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Great business intelligence

I use it daily, as I track where my prospects are clicking so I can send specific offers based on their specific needs.

Pros

It is a great tool that provides you with great business intelligence over prospects that visit specific links you send over emails or when they visit your website.

Cons

It can be a bit confusing at first because it requires a lot of clicking to get to a place or to create lists.

Bite the bullet and invest in a better tool

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.

Power-packed Marketing Automation Tool

A powerful marketing automation tool but expensive. Good for people who are looking for imapctful insights, lead nurturing and tracking down customer activities with ease. Pardot could be a good fit if you need good Salesforce CRM integration and have the budget for $1,000/month or more.

Pros

We get real time activity updates of our prospects from the lead deck functionality Awesome customer support Ease of usage, is highly customisable As it's a Salesforce product now the ease of integration with the CRM is mind blowing

Cons

I would say the makers of this product are a little money minded. A lot of functionalities are only available for the PRO users like API access and A/B testing Also, not many integrations are possible using this product