Pardot Marketing Automation Software

Pardot is a very valuable tool for the correctly staffed and sized organization. Maybe overkill for some.

Pros

I liked the ability to create landing pages in Pardot. Having an API to connect leads to our lead database. Email tracking. We used this tool to assist sales for a 100 Million Dollar company as a staff of 5 people.

Cons

We needed to have a web programmer on staff to make the most of this system.

Makes sending out newsletters, notices or anything else for mass messages very easy to use.

Pros

How quick and easy it is to build things and gather information

Cons

Can sometimes be glitchy leaving you to have to completely rebuild your email from scratch.

My experience was for the most part positive. Pardot is powerful and reliable, I found it to be useful for the most part, they just need to revise the e-mail marketing tools and it will surely become a market standard.

Pros

Even though it might seem a little bit complex to use, Pardot gets easier as you learn how to use it, it has a very intuitive structure that anyone can learn on the fly, with a clean dashboard and well -labeled banners/icons combined with a sleek graphic interface.

The automation efectiveness is impressive and compelling, and its multi-platforms capabilites are beyond any other competing alternative, specially how it connects with Social Media and Salesforce.

You can instinctively customize how it manages the data feed, giving away a set of rules that Pardot follows beautifully, filtering everything at your command with great results.

It is probably the most complete and fully integrated Marketing Automation software in the market, with the nicest set of tools necessary to supply all your necessities and more.

Cons

Pardot is rather expensive and probably not suitable for small enterprises.

The e-mail managing/creation/customization interface needs to be worked out, even though it works great most of the times, it tends to have issues with Gmail servers. Sending e-mail templates gets complicated, specially because it has a tendency to crash when some custom coding is involved; this usually forces you to adapt to something that does not bug the system instead of doing what you are actually adapted to.

Even though mostly everything is user friendly, the e-mail marketing tools are over complicated, it might deliver the results you're looking for but it will cost you a lot of toggling.

Pros

I like the programs ability to link with Sales Force, and the management aspects of the software. At times, Pardot enhances the overall workflow of the day.

Cons

Pardot doesn't offer the ability to go back at certain stages, so if you do hit back on your browser, or hit pardots back button it will either time you out or delete your previous steps. Also the program doesn't seem to be entirely compatible with our companies server, as it is extremely slow. If you populate something in Salesforce, it will take up to several hours to show in Pardot, despite restarting the page and the whole computer. Lastly, building out emails is extremely difficult as there is a delay in the editor box and the email overview box. Also things like formatting pictures, text etc. are extremely frustrating in comparison to some of the other email platforms I've used in the past.

I think Pardot gets you 2/3rds of the way their with Marketing automation and you have to augment with other tools to get the rest of the way. If you use SalesForce connected to Pardot then you really have to do all of your reporting in SalesForce or it gets really confusing trying to sync the two together.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Simply great. There was a lot to learn but the customer success manager we had was great, not to mention the excellent community and training material available on the web. Took a while for us to get it up and running but now we couldn't operate without it.

Pros

Helps automate marketing, sales, service activities. Greater understanding of how our prospects + clients interact with marketing collateral.

Cons

Very expensive and doesn't make much sense to use it without Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Pros

It had all the features we'd expect from a marketing automation solution, and had a nice visual interface to work with. Lead scoring capabilities were good as well, along with customization options.

Cons

I found the salesforce integrations clunky and not up to expectations. The promise of an amazing integration given both are now under the salesforce umbrella wasn't the case from my experience, and I found the transition to Hubspot much more powerful.

I have had a good enough experience with Pardot in terms of onboarding and free ongoing training.

Pros

I like the user interface and free office hours.

Cons

There's no ability to easily update a custom funnel retroactively, but I think this is a limitation for all of the marketing automation tools. Often times, our MQLs, SALs criteria change, and we want to see how our marketing progress has changed retroactively. Lacks a lot of integration with other third party tools.

overall, good, not great. there are a few things that just aren't possible to do in Pardot, but they make updates at least 2x a year to the platform. since salesforce is the industry standard it is very useful to have Pardot, I do suggest hiring a consultant for implementation and training.

Pros

integration into Salesforce, ease of use, easy to set up, email deliverablity, online behavior tracking, and reliability.

Cons

little help with event planning (without additional tools), does not allow to overwrite Salesforce data, wonky drip automation setup, and the terminology was a bit strange.

Pros

The ultimate leader in marketing and email and CRM automation. All in one.

Cons

If you don't like salesforce you might have difficulties with this tool

It's a good software. There are a lot of features and its easy to use. I'm grateful that there are many ways to solve a problem. So even when we run into limitations, there's usually a way to figure out a work around.

Pros

The native integration to Salesforce was the main reason we chose Pardot. They did not win the "bake-off" against their competitors, but according to our vendor, the native integration was a feature we couldn't live without. I also appreciate that Salesforce is investing in Pardot and they are regularly releasing new features and fixes. Thirdly, the community is large and friendly and helpful. I'm developing several connections that are helping me in my day to day.

Cons

My general sense is that Pardot works well for small businesses that do normal things and have a straight-forward business. We are a medium size business and very complex. We have found a lot of limitations and thus have a lot of workarounds in place that were required to do what we want to do. That results in a very maintenance heavy installation and the risk for missing something is high. Reporting is horrible (although they do have a new B2B Marketing Analytics module for an extra fee).

Pardot is pretty great! When going from no automation to Pardot, things get pretty streamlined and the marketing team is able to get so much more done in much less time.

Pros

This product is super easy to use. It was the first markeitng automation software I learned how to use and it was pretty easy from day one. The team was extremely helpful in getting it set up and teaching us all the features.

Cons

There are a few features missing that markeitng automation vendors like Marketo and HubSpot have but overall they are a great company to work with

Pros

I was using Hubspot before I switched over to Pardot. The best thing about the change was the incredible integration with Google Adwords. It was able to completely integrate with Adwords and helped give advice for better ways to improve.

Cons

This was super costly. That is my biggest complaint. I worked with the sales rep, he was awesome, and was able to get a good discount, but it was still very expensive.

Overall, the experience has been pleasant, but the tool is not quite as intuitive as their sales team makes it seem.

Pros

The integration with SalesForce is the biggest pro. With the bi-directional sync you can really do a lot in terms of measuring performance, getting the right information to the sales team, and engaging target prospects.

Cons

Their standard support is really not that great and they have some redundant features that can make things a tad confusing. Also, it would be great if they could be more prescriptive during the set up process.

Pros

There are so many ways to be able to continuously and effectively reach our customers with this platform. With experimentation built right into it, it makes it easy to refine and continue to produce results.

Cons

The reporting aspect of Pardot leaves much to be desired. They tried to implement an Analytics suite to accompany it but it is not quite ready in my opinion. There are so many more ways I would love to be able to review that data that I can see is available but it is not able to be put into a report format that is digestible.

Pros

The insights that Pardot gives are incredible. There are lots of functionalities and great tools to enhance a personalized marketing experience.

Cons

It really is a full-time job to manage the system and take advantage of all the features. If people are using it that aren’t super tech savvy, things like emails are cumbersome in the system.

It's frustrating. I am wasting at least 5 hours a week because either something doesn't work or the functionality is simply not there and I need to think about the workaround.

Pros

Absolutely nothing. Witch each capability there was a moment it didn't work properly. It doesn't even sync quickly with Salesforce - it's own product.

Cons

Starting from building the lists, ending on building the emails. The limitations didn't allow me to build the list based for example on people that clicked a specific email, didn't receive any email etc..No visibility to who will receive the email before the blast.

Great! I love it.

Pros

This is one of the most effective ESPs I've worked with over my career as an email marketer.

Cons

It's expensive. The UX is not as competitive as HubSpot or MailChimp.

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

The two things I like most about Pardot are the abilities to setup and customize automation rules (which saves a ton of time), and then the integration with Salesforce CRM. The integration has it's downsides but as a whole it's a significant improvement over any other 3rd party marketing automation in terms of integrating with Salesforce.

Cons

While Pardot covers the marketing automation piece exceptionally well, we ended up moving to HubSpot for one reason - HubSpot has a website building tool for us to host our entire website on, while Pardot does not. Pardot has the ability to create and publish landing pages, which is necessary for marketing automation, but we needed a tool for our entire website not just landing pages, so it made sense for us to move to HubSpot.