Fast, Easy, and Powerful Marketing Automation

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.

Easy to use , great UI and powerful

the experience of using pardot was great. it's highly intuitive and powerful which makes the learning curve for less technical yet more visual users really short.

Pros

1) it's a really robust marketing automation platform with lots of capabilities but wrapped around a super easy UI 2) deep integration within the salesforce CRM and echo system (you can also use 3rd party salesforce tools from the app exchange to trigger things such as SMS via the SFDC campaign function ) 3) slick customer journey canvas that is highly visual 4) fairly priced (in comparison with the other MA vendors)

Cons

1) only works with Salesforce (professional edition and above ) so if you're using a different CRM that wont really work for you, or rather be a standalone 2) it would be great if there were more native connectors to 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 youll 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 thats a byproduct of involving unique people in the story of our organization. Once you learn the UI, its 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 csvs 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, theyve announced a beautiful drag and drop editor for the 20 winter release.

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.

Great Quality Marketing Automation System for B2B Marketers

Pardot is by far my favorite Marketing Automation system I've used. They have great support articles, a large user community that you can utilize, and you can trust that the software will actually work.

Pros

I love how easy it is to start automated workflows, send autoresponders based on contact engagement and do all around data tracking. The integration with Salesforce allows for easy data maintenance and gives a high quality hand off between marketing and sales. The engagement and information on all campaigns your leads and contacts are apart of can easily be viewed on the Salesforce records for quick access for Sales to see. Custom redirects are also one of the best features that Pardot has because you can utilize them on all SoMe platforms for prospect tracking and provide more quality on certain links on your website.

Cons

The customer support team for Salesforce and Pardot is not great. It can take months for them to get back to you. Which, could highly impact your automations if you can't solve a problem. You're better off asking the Pardot community via Twitter or a Salesforce Community for any questions you have.