Pardot Marketing Automation Software

Pros

It's a fairly intuitive way to reach out and follow up with customers.

Cons

It can be hard to get the exact functionality that you want at times, but you can work through it.

Pros

It serves its purpose for the management of leads and prospects

Cons

It's starting to feel dated and Salesforce never felt like they really adopted it - the integration into Salesforce classic is still a poorly designed iframe. Difficult to pull meaningful reporting from Pardot into Salesforce. Just generally a pretty lackluster experience.

Pros

Pardot is one of the better marketing automation/nurturing product aimed at mid-sized businesses. It's greatest strength is its integration with Salesforce (which will be discussed more in "cons"). With relative simplicity, it can be connected to the CRM, so that contacts can easily sync two-ways, and even custom objects can be brought through for segmentation purposes with just a couple of clicks.

Tracking and automation is very well thought out and easy to use. The product has a straightforward method of tracking campaign results and attribution, all of which can then be pushed into Salesforce for comprehensive reporting on prospect-to-purchase management and measurement.

Pardot's greatest strength lies in its ease of use. No marketing automation software is going to be SIMPLE, but Pardot shines in the consistency between its many functions. Nothing feels tacked-on or different from other tools. If you can create a campaign, you can create a complex segmentation rule, and you can manage your social media posts, as it all works identically.

The marketing automation function, Engagement Studio, has gone through substantial recent updates and I consider it best-in-class for ease of use and functionality. If true automation is your #1 concern, this is a great choice.

Lastly, support is excellent. Salesforce Trailblazer is fantastic for self-guided-training, the documentation is up-to-date and accurate, and support tickets are answered promptly and knowledgeably. If you are experienced in systems of these sorts, you will quite likely not need to take advantage of any external training (or SF's accelerator options).

Cons

Pardot is a Salesforce product, and its integration is excellent, but it is just that - an integration. Pardot works like a third party service connected with Salesforce, as opposed to a native extension. Lists are synchronized, along with the sort of bugs and frustrations that come with bi-directional synchronization, and some Salesforce functions (notably custom objects) are not as fully fleshed out as one might hope. In some ways, other solutions do a better job synchronizing with Salesforce. That said, Pardot's setup is the simplest I've used, and having unified support for CRM and marketing automation is also a tremendous advantage when I do run into any hang-ups.

Also, while Pardot's feature set is great, some of its tools are in need of substantial upgrades to keep up with the competition. Its WYSIWYG email and landing page tools aren't responsive and are far outclassed in ease of use by Mailchimp and other lower cost options (although if you're comfortable with HTML and developing your own templates, it's not bad at all). It is progressively being updated and modernized, but it obviously takes time, and there can be minor frustrations when you see other tools that are smoother or more approachable. But I have never found this to set a limit on what's possible, only an opportunity for things to be faster and easier for less-expert users.

Pros

Regardless of how the sales team and sales process is set up in any given company, pardot still works well and can be adapted to your needs.

Cons

I wish it wasn't a separate Salesforce product and was more integrated.

They offer little support. Their functionality and ease of use is challenging. You can find better CRM products for your marketing efforts, like Hubspot and Marketo.

Pros

The engagement studio feature makes it easy to build campaigns.

Cons

The ease of use is challenging. You have to open several tabs just to keep one campaign organized with all the different items you need to build in Pardot at the same time -- so they are connected when you launch. The reporting and campaign functionality is not stellar. Marketo and Hubspot offer better tools, and limit our marketing.

For emails, you'll need a code developer to help build out templates and such. It's not like MailChimp.

We just quit our Pardot contract and moved to a competitor that was half the price and that so far has hands-on customer support.

Pros

I mainly used Pardot for sending emails and adding forms to our company's website.

Cons

Once Salesforce bought Pardot, the customer service experience got very bad. It was incredibly hard to find answers to y questions or to get live support. I had to create a Salesforce developer account in order to even see the Help area for Pardot. I don't use Salesforce for our CRM, though. It was very awkward and cumbersome.

Pros

- Abundance of features
- Easy to customize to fit your needs
- Super scalable
- Integrates well with nearly every software and platform out there
- Backed by the huge brand of Salesforce

Cons

- Very difficult to learn
- UX/UI nowhere near as good as competitors like HubSpot (though if you're used to Salesforce, you might be at home)
- Submitting a help ticket is a huge pain

Pros

Pardot provides easy to use marketing automation for my team. We've used this to increase our leads and build our product sales pipeline. The ability to align marketing and sales has made for easier and more robust conversations. The team likes the ease of use and the great user interface, as well as, the integration with Salesforce.

Cons

The team has not yet identified any cons.

Besides the functionality of using Pardot on the sales team, I know the marketing team and exec team loved the dashboards. The marketing team was also able to capture many prospect details from the easy to create beautiful, customizeable content where most of our leads came from. It's definitely an added bonus to help create the pipeline and sort it effectively.

Pros

I really liked how the leads were sorted into ones that were immediately "hot" and with Salesforce mobile, I could even do it on my long train commute home. It was also a good indicator of which leads to focus on. Since our sales cycle can also be really long, it also was helpful to see how long the prospect has been in the system and how knowledgeable they might be about us. As a newer salesperson it was helpful.

Cons

I wish some of the pro features were available at the standard price. If we could see the Google Adwords that led our prospects directly to the site easier, it would be much helpful. It is available, so it's not too bad of a downside, however, it is if that feature is too expensive for your budget at the moment.

Generally good and efficient, somewhat cumbersome at the beginning but good

Pros

It is a good tool for sending campaigns, stable and efficient

Cons

At first I found it somewhat cumbersome to use.

We use this to help manage leads that come from a variety of online sources and get them into SalesForce.

Pros

It links with SalesForce which is the main reason we are using it.

Cons

We've had to implement multiple work arounds to get things working properly and even then we run into issues pretty regularly. Requires a lot of setup time and is going to be difficult for a standard user to implement. Support is difficult to reach and often times doesn't solve the issue because so many features simply aren't offered or don't work well.

It's a good software with tons of features and easy to use

Pros

Ease of use and out of the box customizable email templates

Cons

Expensive and small companies cannot afford. Email reports are not that great

Pros

I like that we can see visibility on who is looking at the site and what they are looking at.

Cons

I have no run into any issues with the software at this time

Pros

Easy use of customer tracking via IP address
Comprehensive email marketing tools
Ability to nurture customers from first capture all the way to the closed sale

Works perfectly with Salesforce CRM

Cons

It's time to get set up and load customer base into the tool

Pros

The user interface is fairly straightforward for my needs as a user administrator, I can quickly add/remove users to the system and am able to clearly see what's going on.

Cons

As a user management administrator for our instance, I feel that I have 'too much access' to all areas of the tool, rather than having a limited view.

Pros

Full featured marketing automation platform that does the basics acceptably. For the price you can do well.

Cons

Surprisingly poor sync with Salesforce.com, given that that is its parent company. A bit clunky of UI compared to Eloqua or Marketo

our business practices are a bit different from most. we had to make numerous modifications to make it work for us. which is a reason we went with Pardot/Salesforce: very customizable.

Pros

seamless integration to salesforce and just introduced: lightning app!!!

Cons

some of the terminology is a bit confusing. and the order of operation required a change in our processes.

I've helped clients create and implement campaigns onto their websites. When logging into the back-end of Pardot it is jarring at first and hard to navigate. I also have to implement the basic HTML code onto sites for my clients and finding the code is hard to find/navigate.

Pros

That it has the ability to create campaigns.

Cons

Creating campaigns can be a little confusing, and difficult for when you need to implement any web forms digitally.

If you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, Pardot is the way to do it. Be prepared to learn and be a tad frustrated at first, but once you get it going it is totally worth it.

Pros

The amount of things you can do with this platform is virtually limitless. Yes, it takes a good deal of practice to figure out what you have to do but once it clicks, it makes perfect sense. Mailchimp and Constant Contact will never be the same!

Cons

It has a pretty steep learning curve at the beginning. Some common terms (ex. campaign) have completely different meanings inside Pardot. It's not the prettiest tool in terms of UI/UX but it gets the job done.

Invest a decent measure of time and energy in learning the tool as this has such a large amount of inbuilt ability you can use as opposed to maintaining some other parallel business process.

Pros

To date, SF Pardot was one of the easiest tools to configure so smoothly. I could start the sync process in less than few hours. The breadth of automation service are huge and no doubt why this product is making so much of positive noise. The tool allows you to finish the process and keep all participants in loop .The tagging option is my fav. Beginning from messages, pages and different segments you can tag and club in to single element. The second best thing is the match up ability with deals compel truly I sensed that its a no brainier.

Cons

The expansiveness of administration gave through APIS are not a ton I figure they will expand what will assist different applications with integrating effectively. I think there is a great deal of enhancement required in the reporting side too.