Pardot delivers on promises

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.

The best Marketing Automation tool out there!

The experience so far has been nothing short of exceptional. We have been using Pardot since the last 5 years and have been able to facilitate amazing co-ordination with the Sales and Marketing teams. The automation Pardot provides also helps generate reports to measure Campaign ROI and overall lead generation.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

DNV GL US team member's review

Pardot is a Salesforce Marketing extension, and I really liked to use both applications. There are different API connectors that can be used to integrate other software I use, like webinar software.

Pros

Easy to send emails and track activity. Reporting is very easy with all important data right on the dashboard and on the campaign canvas.

Cons

Possibly, templates can be created and WYSIWYG editor used, but we programmed emails in html, which was really time consuming.

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.

All-In-One Enterprise-Level Marketing Platform

We have enjoyed a centralized and more integration-friendly marketing automation platform.

Pros

Pardot is the most integration-friendly marketing software to use with Salesforce's Sales Cloud. We are able to use custom objects in our segmentation.

Cons

Pardot doesn't have advanced automation like process builder or flow in Sales Cloud. Other than engagement programs, automation is not a key aspect of the software.