I have used Pardot at three different companies now and I love it. It's been one of my most reliable and useful tools in my Marketing Stack over the years and it's continued to get better thanks to the aggressive roadmap put in place by Salesforce. Great for business ranging from small business up to Enterprise.

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.

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.

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.

Horrific. Would never migrate to this tool again and wouldn't recommend to anyone.

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 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.

To better manage your campaigns we recommend this software

We use this software to manage our campaigns and without really lying, this feature is really the best, our campaigns are well managed thanks to this software

Honestly, we haven't yet hated a few things that we don't like at all

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.

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.

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.

Overall, we didn't get the most use out of it mainly because its ease-of-use didn't turn out to be as advertised and sold. When you buy salesforce and pardot together, you're sold on the premise that it's 'one system', but at the end of the day they're still two separate systems that sync back and forth just like any other marketing automation tool. It just didn't turn out to be worth the heavy cost.

Form handlers, automation/workflow builder, not much else.

The need to pay extra for detailed add-ons, particularly a dedicated IP (a basic need for email marketing), is really annoying (only available in their higher tiers). We didn't like not being able to relate marketing email activity to einstein activity sync. User interface could use some work as well; just not there yet overall.

Pardot helps us stay on top of automating as much marketing as we can. The main things that keep us from doing that are the design needs - it's always easier just to do things in the HTML - and figuring out campaign tracking for non-email analytics.

Pardot makes automating marketing activities simple, whether you're setting up lead gen forms and responder emails or just creating email campaigns. It connects with Salesforce and helps keep lead owners and other information updated that prior to had been a pain.

Its campaign tracking really only tracks . It can only track social if the posts are scheduled in Pardot. Email and landing page editors aren't as full-featured for simple design edits.

We are very happy with pardot and look forward to implementing more of the features pardot has to offer.

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.

Pardot has fit our needs especially in working with Salesforce. However, if I had an option I would use a different tool (such as Hubspot). It feels like a dated product that needs some updates to the user experience. Keep in mind it is VERY powerful (a ton of features) but finding them is irritating. For example, you have email templates and email drafts. The differentiation is not clear and you have to look through their knowledge base to figure that out.

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.

Allowed us to efficiently market to individuals and companies that we already had in our system without using direct mail.

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.

Pardot has a lot of base functionality that sets it apart from email platforms like Mailchimp and the like. It also provides better integration with Salesforce than hubspot and other less expensive CRMs to give your organization with a complete picture of the sales funnel. Pardot provides email templates upon sign-up that are easily customizable for specific needs. You can test this emails to internal lists and with its integration with Litmus you can view how different clients and platforms will render you email before sends. Landing pages and form are an easy way to collect leads, track conversion points, and keep the source of a lead. Forms enable you to send auto-response emails, notify teams or sales reps, and assign leads to the correct person. The can also send leads to a Salesforce campaign with detailed member statuses to provide for multi-touch attribution. Landing pages are easy to build, add Google analytics or any other tracking code and deploy. Automation rules allow you to keep your database clean and ensure that all prospects are going to the right place, tagged correctly, and scored appropriately. Dynamic content is an excellent investment as an add on to allow you to use one template but change messaging based on known prospect information. No need to create 5 different emails or landing pages for industry segments, just create on template and use the dynamic content feature to show messaging that applies to them.

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.

Overall, Pardot delivers on all the capabilities that we need and has more power than we are able to leverage. We appreciate it's deep integration with Salesforce and know that it has feature parity with most of the other major players out there.

Pardot allows us to get insight at a per-contact level into their activity, interests, and profile. We've made it even more useful by adding on additional integrations like Clearbit and Zoom. We track more than 12k new incoming leads annually and we automate outreach to those leads every single day.

Many decisions that you make at the beginning of the implementation will dog you after you've made them (how do we organize our campaigns? what tags should we use? when automations do we want to build off of those tags? how do we segment our lists). Pardot/Salesforce has offered strategic support and even configuration services, however, we find that these often lack the depth of knowledge to tell us if we're making the right call/they are too expensive for a small firm like ours.

Overall, my experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was positive. The platform offered a robust set of tools for managing customer engagement and executing marketing campaigns. The ability to segment and target specific customer groups, along with the automation features, streamlined my marketing efforts and improved campaign effectiveness. The real-time tracking and reporting capabilities allowed me to measure the impact of my campaigns and make data-driven decisions. Although the platform had a learning curve and could be costly, the overall experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was excellent, enabling me to enhance customer engagement and achieve marketing goals effectively.

One of the things I liked most about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was its comprehensive set of tools and features for managing customer engagement and marketing campaigns. The platform provided robust customer segmentation capabilities, allowing me to target specific audiences with personalized messaging. The automation features, such as email workflows and journey builders, made it easy to create and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns. The real-time tracking and reporting functionality provided valuable insights into campaign performance, allowing me to optimize my marketing efforts effectively.

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement had many positive aspects, one thing I liked least was the complexity of the platform. As a beginner, it took some time to familiarize myself with the various features and functionalities. The learning curve was steep, and I would have appreciated more comprehensive onboarding resources and tutorials to help me navigate and utilize the platform more efficiently. Additionally, the pricing structure of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement could be quite expensive, especially for small businesses or startups with limited budgets.

We use Pardot as a marketing automation platform including email management, automated nurtures, lead scoring, engagement tracking, etc.

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

Dissatisfied. I have worked with other systems as a sales person but as an administrator it could certainly use some enhancing and development to make it better. Unfortunately being under the umbrella of Salesforce will set that back for a while. They are just satisfied it works and you can ultimately get the job done. Unfortunately, not caring about their customers frustration level will get them one day.

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.

It feels like Pardot isnt getting nearly the amount of attention from Salesforce as it should. I used it over the course of a year and noticed that it would take months to roll-out incredibly important features.

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.