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August 31, 2020
We primarily use Pardot as our core marketing automation platform in the Marketing department. Marketing is the administrator and primary user, but other departments like sales and customer success receive benefits as well through the connected alerts.
- The UI is pretty intuitive. I've used other enterprise platforms for marketing automation like Marketo and this is much cleaner.
- The integration with CRMs (particularly Salesforce) is a big part of the value.
- The way they manage sender reputation by automatically cleaning your lists is important, and Pardot does that well. For example, any hard bounced emails, automatically become unmailable and are quarantined by Pardot automatically. They also prevent role emails at import and flag certain email patterns as spam traps. All these things are well-managed and help protect your sender reputation (critical especially since most clients are on a shared IP). Not all MAP do this as seamlessly as they do.
- Some of the features like the email builder and landing page builder seem like they've been neglected. They aren't as drag-and-drop friendly for marketers who don't know how to code. In fact, non-enterprise platforms like MailChimp do a far better job in this area.
- The limitations of automation can be a bit frustrating. As good as the integration with Salesforce is, you cannot do something as basic as trigger a rule based on a field change. (e.g. when the date for this field gets populated or updated, add to list or do this). This is not possible as an automation rule or even in their engagement studio. With other platforms, this functionality seems pretty standard.
- Engagement studio has come a long way, and while it's far more eloquent with its drag and drop UI, functionality-wise, it's still behind some of the others.
- This feature also seems like it's been neglected. The reporting leaves a lot to be desired unless you pay for B2B analytics, which is an upcharge. You can't even do something as simple as download the report in PDF format, which is a shame because there are some graphics and callouts in list email reports that would be better if they were shareable. They still record metrics like printed email, which seems a bit dated.
March 27, 2020
As an agency, we assist a SaaS client with using Pardot for marketing automation. It solves the need for email marketing, website forms, landing pages, reporting, list management and segmentation, and more. We are able to trap leads with forms and landing pages, capture their lead source, report on campaigns, send email blasts, and do drip campaigns to our contact base.
- Forms and landing pages. These are fairly simple to set up but also provide a lot of customization and capability. You can trap leads and automatically track a lead source for most of them from online sources.
- Integration with Salesforce. Coupled with Salesforce, Pardot becomes a powerful tool. Two-way integration means contacts the sales team is adding are immediately available for marketing campaigns, and new inbound leads can easily be sent to Salesforce to manage through a pipeline.
- Reporting. Pardot can report very well on email blasts, forms, landing pages, marketing campaigns, and even other things like Google paid search campaigns, webinars, or even search engine rankings vs. competitors.
- Email builder. At an agency where we've used plenty of email tools, Pardot is the farthest behind. While their testing functions are robust, the builder itself is behind the times. The templates are often not mobile responsive and requires a decent amount of HTML hard coding. There's no modern block editor either.
- List management is more cumbersome than other tools. It's difficult to manage a big group of contacts all at once. There's only ever a few options like removing/adding to list or tagging. There's not an easy way to mass update contacts.
- Contact search and segmentation is not great. Other tools have advanced search filters that make it easy to narrow in on contacts and see how many fit a certain criteria. Pardot doesn't really have that. The only way to do such a thing is to make a dynamic list, but the list of lists can get cluttered real fast.
December 20, 2019
We use Pardot for email marketing, and sync with Salesforce. It is used by the entire marketing department across each locality. This included audience segmenting, email design, drip campaigns, custom redirects, etc. Pardot is how we are able to effectively send mass email communication utilizing templates and many automation tools.
- Segmenting by one or two variables is simple and intuitive.
- Changing email language is simple and quick.
- Segmenting beyond two variables is not easy, or well-supported.
- The UI and navigating through the platform can be time-consuming.
January 28, 2020
Almost 5 years ago, we implemented a stand-alone license of Pardot for the CenturyLink Hybrid Cloud and IT Solutions product portfolio. I was the primary administrator of the tool and was deeply involved in rolling it out to our site for activity tracking of all visitors, forms management, prospect auditing, list management, email marketing, event promotion, drip campaigns and critical customer notifications. My internal customers have been Product Managers, Lifecycle Management teams, Billing, Operations and Product Engineering. We made the decision not to integrate with Salesforce.com, which simplified the rollout but limited our ability to engage the sales force to drive product adoption. In retrospect, I think it would have been beneficial to invest in Salesforce integration, as we're now moving toward much broader use of the application across the enterprise.
- Forms, particularly customized forms called "Form Handlers" in Pardot.
- Email reporting. Great detail and insights.
- Email templates and drafts are really confusing. I trained various people to create their own templates, but they consistently got confused between publishing a template or just saving a draft, and where they needed to go back to find it.
- Their help process is broken, at least for our particular use case. Because we have an enterprise license for Salesforce (even though we had a separate license for Pardot) whenever I needed help with something, I'd get stuck down a rabbit hole and couldn't submit a ticket.
March 17, 2020
We use pardot for landing pages (and forms) and drip campaigns for lead generation.
- Drip campaigns that trigger off sales funnel actions.
- Integration with Salesforce.
- Great UI/UX.
- Reporting layouts aren't customizable.
- Could have better integration with Salesforce, particularly the ability to write to account, opportunity or custom objects, and better syncing with SFDC.
February 26, 2020
Pardot is being used across the whole organization. We use it for web forms, all email marketing efforts, and as a database. Our company uses Salesforce, and we chose Pardot because it is built into Salesforce and syncs instantly. Also, we really wanted a platform that has a visual email workflow.
- My favorite feature of Pardot is the visual email workflows. It's very easy to see how leads will flow down the sales funnel.
- Forms are very easy to create and manage. We have completely switched over all of our form to Pardot.
- Pardot is built into Salesforce, making syncs instantaneous.
- You have to pay extra if you want good customer support.
- Sometimes the platform can be a little sluggish when trying to upload or download data lists.
- Expensive. They are one of the more expensive platforms out there.
December 20, 2019
We use Pardot as part of our Salesforce CRM to handle all of the marketing automation needs we have (like email marketing, social, and web forms) and our pipeline tracking as well as the lead qualification process our business development team needs to ensure the right people are being sent to our sales teams to unearth opportunities and close deals.
- Integrates wonderfully with Salesforce.
- Adds important insights to your existing CRM data.
- Can customize easily to fit your needs.
- Strong customer support.
- Doesn't integrate too well with other data third-party apps.
- Too many features are only available at higher levels.
- Doesn't have as robust an email integration tool like HubSpot.
December 11, 2019
Bepress uses a Pardot integration with Salesforce CRM to manage email campaigns and measure impact. With marketing campaigns spanning dozens of market segments, and with the task of managing each falling on one coordinator, it's essential to have software that tracks the efficacy of messages to specific segments. It's just not possible for the human memory alone to do this, but with Pardot we could track opens and links within specific campaigns, allowing us to hone our message to specific audiences based on past results.
- Market segmentation.
- Impact analysis.
- UI can be somewhat complex.
- Requires careful attention to naming syntax when creating new campaigns etc.
March 31, 2020
We used Pardot primarily for email and marketing campaigns. It provides an extremely intuitive and friendly user interface for creating custom and automated campaigns.
- Integrate with Salesforce
- Visual Email Workflows
- Customer Insights
- Time-consuming to teach new users.
- Only one type of attribution.
- Pricey!
Pardot is being used by our entire organization as we communicate with our donors, event participants, sponsors, partners and all of our constituents. Pardot is used to promote new campaigns, remind event participants of event details, share our monthly birthday campaign and share news and information with our constituents. Pardot solves the issue of having to have an entire marketing team dedicated to scheduling and creating emails. Each department is able to create their own emails within the system and then have them approved by marketing.
- Pardot syncs with our database, Salesforce and works seamlessly in updating records with individuals. Having this sync allows everyone in the organization to know where the last communication was and where they stand.
- Pardot's A/B testing is the easiest A/B testing to use and communicate differently with individuals based on reporting. You are able to test this A/B before sending out an email unlike other platforms. The A/B testing is time saving and effective when trying to communicate with our audience.
- Pardot's engagement studio is very easy to not only set-up but to follow. They set up their engagement platform in a way that you can see it overall and follow it like a flow chart, allowing the creator to truly understand where the emails/individuals are doing. The reporting of the engagement studios is detailed and very accessible.
- Pardot is not easy to teach others and takes multiple hours to truly teach to someone in the organization so they can understand the platform as a whole.
- My organization was trying to set up an automate campaign based on birthdays and send these emails out based on their birthday day going a month out, a week out and on the day of. This was very difficult to achieve and the customer service could not provide assistance. The answer came from the Pardot blog and other users working together. Birthday campaigns are used by many non profits and this should be fixed so it is easier to implement.
- Creating lists in Pardot for you to send emails to can be difficult and takes time. There are many steps when trying to create certain lists of an audience.
Pardot was initially implemented for external marketing purposes - to send company updates to our customers. More recently we have extended the use to include more targeted updates on existing projects as well as all company-wide internal updates. I would estimate that we send out at least 2-3 targeted emails per week and a similar number of internal company announcements.
- Ease of creating emails based on templates
- seamless integration with salesforce
- little ongoing maintenance required from an administration perspective.
- The interface looks a little dated
- File storage capacity is low and needs constant management
Pardot is predominately used by our marketing and communications team. However, all departments leverage the usefulness of the product. It assists us in reaching our various audiences and segmenting communications to them. It also helps us see and understand what our audiences are doing to engage with us online. Pardot is a great marketing and communications tool.
- Automation. Pardot has great automation functionalities for emails and other communications to our network. ex: list building features
- Wealth of functionality and features. ex: engagement scoring
- User friendly. It's not very hard to catch on and there are lots of resources to leverage.
- Salesforce connection! This is probably #1 because SF is our CRM and it integrates seamlessly.
- Pricey. I work for a nonprofit so it was a big decision to go with Pardot but it is one of the best in its class.
- You must have the capacity/time/resources to actually use the functionalities and features. Otherwise, it could be a waste of money.
May 09, 2019
Pardot is a cornerstone of our Sales and Marketing program. We use it for the typical marketing automation functionality like email automation (drip/nurture programs, auto-responders, etc.), and also make use of automation and workflows to handle more complex tasks like CASL management, advanced lead grading (beyond what comes out of the box), and advanced sales enablement workflows. I think of Pardot as the glue that binds together a bunch of different processes and technologies in our Marketing Tech stack. While Pardot is primarily used by Marketing, the insights and notifications that it provides are used daily by our Sales team as well.
- Simplicity - I can't stress this enough. Pardot does a very good job of making marketing automation manageable for one person, but scalable for multiple if you have a larger demand-gen team.
- Automation workflows - Pardot has a great selection of workflows out of the box, making it really quick and easy to set up some cool automation that will save a lot of time.
- Salesforce compatibility - Being a Salesforce product, you aren't bound by an API call limit, the sync is really quick, and excluding data integrity exceptions, there's almost never a hiccup with ensuring that your data is properly synced over.
- Emails - Pardot's email builder is really easy to use and comes with some very useful templates out-of-the-box which can be customized to get the look you're wanting. There's a good set of instructions for how to build email templates that are compatible with Pardot's builder.
- Lots of nuances are present - Pardot is great, but there's a TON of little things that it probably should do better being a product that's been around as long as it has. For example, You cannot create drip program emails without an unsubscribe link! That means that if you've automated the emails that go from your Sales team when someone fills out a form asking for a demo, it WILL have the ugly unsubscribe link and additional address tag that Pardot emails require.
- You cannot have automation that will set the value of one field to be equal to another field or variable - only pre-defined values can be used. For example, you cannot have a date field set to equal today + 180 days (useful for Canadian Anti-Spam Law automation). You cannot set one field to equal the value of another field.
- As nice as the email builder is, it's certainly no MailChimp. It would be nicer to have better compatibility with mail clients out of the box and a larger variety of templates. The email builder isn't drag-and-drop like other dedicated email systems, so you're usually stuck having to go into the code and cut+paste the section into the new area where you want it to go.
- There's no option to automate personal emails sent from a team members Gsuite or Outlook 365 account!? Nowadays Marketing is playing a role that goes much farther down the sales cycle - if you are automating emails from your sales team, the email is still sent from Pardot's email server (which has mediocre deliverability compared to Gsuite or Office 365). A simple addition of the Zapier-like ability to trigger emails from a salesperson's actual email account would be a gigantic benefit.
- No built-in calendar functionality like that offered by Hubspot. I love Pardot, but it does feel like they've been slipping in their product development as I haven't noticed any major addition to the platform that has made a difference to my workflows in probably two years.
June 03, 2019
Pardot is used as the marketing automation tool for one of our clients. We manage it, create campaigns in it, run reporting, manage the integration with Salesforce, and maintain the integrity of the overall leads/customers/prospects database. Pardot is used to track website activity (form submissions) and trigger workflows for email marketing and contact organization/segmentation. It is also responsible for syncing information about contacts that we learn on our website with the sales team's CRM, Salesforce.
- Ability to custom style emails, landing pages, and forms
- Lots of customization options for workflows
- Ability to use completion actions to assign contact to Salesforce campaigns
- Visual builder for email and existing templates are clunky and hard to use without development knowledge
- Integration with Salesforce still requires manual field mappings and creating properties separately in both systems so that sync will work properly
- Workflows are linear, and it's difficult to use if/and statements based on custom property values
May 21, 2019
We use Pardot as our main marketing automation tool. All our online marketing activities are connected to Pardot, that way we funnel all data through the application. Pardot is only used by the Marketing and Sales teams. The main problem is solving for us is that we used to have zero visibility into our Marketing big picture. Since we started using Pardot, we channel everything through there so we have complete date about our marketing campaigns, leads, ad performance, etc.
- Lead scoring. We associate prospects actions with a score. That way we have a system to know which prospects are more likely to close when.
- Email campaigns. You can set up not a single email campaign, but a set of them, all interconnected, so you can design (and control) your customer journey.
- Lead management. By having Pardot as a part of our Salesforce instance, you have a complete integration between Marketing and Sales. You know where the lead is sitting all the team, and you can take action on the real-time data you see. The marketing team will nurture leads up until they are ready for a sales representative to jump in.
- The implementation can be a little rough. Unlike other modern systems, like HubSpot, Pardot will require more attention, in both implementation and configuration. Your team will have to study and learn how to use it. It will take time to get it right. I highly recommend you do this process with an implementer.
May 13, 2019
We are using Pardot as a way of engaging with prospective students. This is being used across the entire college and university system as a way of engaging with prospective students at all levels. This addresses a number of issues but mostly in regards to email and communications with said student body.
- Email broadcasts are professional and clean
- Email templates are well thought out and provide a number of good b2b solutions
- SMS is involved and functional.
- SMS could be more thought out and engaging.
- Email is not as sophisticated as in Marketing Cloud.
- Users are not as easily up to speed as they are with Marketing Cloud.
- The whole experience seems a bit piece meal.
May 08, 2019
Pardot is the central platform for marketing. It serves as our engagement hub to target and engage our prospects and customers across multiple channels (including email, social, website, and more). It was first seen just as a "marketing tool" by much of our org, but I proved it out to be a valuable center of insights for sales and now our CS team. Sales uses it to see history of engagement, quality and lead scoring. they can walk into a call or meeting with the most up to date engagement data so they know what that account is most interested in hearing about. For CS, we now have the full tracking on our platform so that they also have an extra layer of insight into the customer needs and interests. We also use it to message to our customers with newsletters, releases, updates, and best practices. it is truly our engagement hub. and all the data porting into Salesforce is fantastic.
- Tracking tracking tracking... we track everything across every channel we have.
- Nurture and re-engagement programs for leads, accounts, lost opportunities especially via email.
- Segmentation. As long as you set up tracking well, you can segment to your heart's content.
- Multi-channel marketing - many see this as a weakness of Pardot, yet, we use it extensively across channels.
- Lead routing and scoring.
- Landing pages -there isn't a marketing automation platform that does this well. We use a 3rd party (and it is far from the worst).
- Reporting... it's hit or miss here.
- Better personalization - the "dynamic" part of it is great in theory, but like its main competitor seriously lacks.
- Attribution - it only allows for a single type of attribution for campaigns... we have to use other platforms.
- Not the best for ABM (but that is a Salesforce FAILURE, that overflows into Pardot).
May 08, 2019
Our Marketing and Sales teams rely on Pardot to help them build, track, and report on our sales pipeline. Marketing is able to build content, such as emails or landing pages, and generate then nurture leads. Once they are engaged enough or qualified our Sales team is able to reach out to those leads to understand their needs and build a relationship. We get a full view of our pipeline and lifecycle- helping us market and sell better/deeper.
- Lead nurturing
- Automation
- Sales-marketing alignment
- Campaign reporting
- Social media listening
- Social media management
- Social media monitoring
- B2C marketing automation
May 08, 2019
Pardot is used in our agency to monitor leads and opportunities that are generated via our email campaigns, as well as through our website. Pardot is linked through both our business development department, that also works cross-functionally with our internal brand marketing teams. Pardot is used to streamline and monitor our inbound and lead-generating business development and sales efforts.
- Cloud-based system.
- Ability to add multiple user licenses at different levels.
- API plugs into existing email campaigns via Outlook.
- Expensive tool.
- Lack of automated reporting.
- Requires a fair amount of user training to gain benefits of using the tool.
Pardot has been a great tool for me as a marketer at 2 companies I have worked at. I have used it for lead nurture programs to help interested parties become customers of 'software as a service' programs. It is a must-have tool for email marketing, lead scoring, lead generation, outbound marketing, and measuring success with marketing.
- Lead nurture. Good engagement studio for marketing automation.
- Lead scoring. Great way to track the progress of your leads.
- Some things are called one thing in pardot and another in Salesforce. This is due to the way Pardot was before Salesforce acquired it.
- Price is high. Contracts can be long. There is a lot of volatility in marketing, teams change, people come and go. It can be difficult to want to keep a software like pardot for 5 years.
- Email building tool is not the best.
It is our Marketing engine. We run every lead through it to be scored, graded, communicated to, measured, routed and analyzed. We also host all of our content and forms there as well.
- Automation rules are a life saver.
- Email campaigns are super easy to create and launch.
- Database management is a cinch with global search, easy tag management systems and automated list builds.
- Forms and content all come with vanity URLs and trackable links.
- Email nurture campaigns get really hairy really fast.
- To this day cannot find a good use for folders.
- They need more nuanced roles.
- The form customization is a bit limited.
May 20, 2019
I work at a small non-profit with a very specific niche audience and a small marketing team of 2 people. We selected Pardot for marketing automation over Marketing Cloud. Our use case was for building journeys for both new and existing B2B and B2C customers to deliver a consistent customer experience every time and automate some of the manual processes that often times weren't getting done on a timely basis due to capacity issues often experienced by smaller organizations. We also wanted something to help support lead generation and our developing sales team. We needed it to be user-friendly and to integrate well into our Salesforce CRM.
- Lead scoring for large sales organizations would be very useful.
- We found it didn't integrate as well with Salesforce as we wanted it to and was not great.
- Building your email templates was not user-friendly or easy to customize. Content builder in Marketing Cloud is much better and user-friendly.
- Great for top of the funnel and to only do lead nurturing- I wouldn't recommend it for marketing/communications to existing customers.
May 16, 2019
We use Pardot across our entire global organization for all of our webforms, outbound email campaigns, marketing automation, lead scoring, landing pages, etc. Using it globally we're able to share our creations throughout our company and reuse them in other countries. Pardot helps us keep in contact with our clients and engage prospects while trying to increase sales.
- Easy to share resources globally
- Easy to copy and modify resources
- Easy to organize
- Lack of automated tracking redirects is frustrating
- Things that should be easy to edit on an email or a landing page are sometimes very difficult for no rhyme or reason
- While it's easy to organize, if your folders go down below the fold you have to scroll up to see everything.
August 12, 2019
Pardot is currently being used by the marketing team for marketing automation purposes. This includes scheduling emails, creating one-off emails, creating and deploying landing pages, and pushing marketing information back to salesforce to be used by the sales team. It makes it easier for us to find, engage, and connect with both current and prospective clients. Additionally, it helps provide relevant information to the sales/accounts team in SalesForce easily.
- SalesForce Connection/Integration - While I found that most marketing automation software "sucks" in their own way, Pardot does the SalesForce integration the best. Which is really important if other departments such as the sales team uses it to follow up on prospects.
- Segmentation - Pardot has some great rules/segmenting features that make it easy to implement engagement programs/email campaigns. Also, with the SF connection, it is a 2-click process to go from a contact or leads report to having a new list in Pardot.
- Uploading New Lead/Contact Lists - The uploading system automatically deduplicates by email address, which comes in handy all the time! Also, uploading big lists of client updates etc. is very efficient and easy to implement.
- Reporting - I have yet to see an automation tool with strong reporting, but Pardot's is really lacking here. The reports are not very customizable, you can't filter out for things like previously imported leads, and their landing page/form reports are EXTREMELY unreliable.
- Support - Honestly, trying to get someone on the phone is not only difficult, it is expensive. They just merged their pardot and salesforce support teams and even deciphering their emails can be difficult.
- UX/UI - Similar to SalesForce, it is not very intuitive, they use marketing definitions that don't make sense (campaign), it isn't the prettiest or easiest system for landing page or email creation. Their navigation is really really bad.
June 04, 2019
We decided to use Pardot due to its robust integration with Salesforce, which we use as our database of existing customers. We use Pardot to communicate with our customers regarding service changes, product updates, etc. Previously, we used a marketing automation system that did not integrate with Salesforce, so we were constantly uploading static lists and had zero visibility into customer behavior when it came to our communications. Pardot allows us to be more proactive with our customer communications and experience.
- The integration with Salesforce is second to none. If you are using Salesforce, you should be using Pardot. It makes everything seamless.
- Pardot's Engagement Studio gives us opportunities to communicate to current customers based on their behavior -- plus, all Salesforce users have complete visibility into what our prospects are engaging with.
- Our customer success manager is amazing. She is always so fast to respond, and if she doesn't have an answer, she will do whatever it takes to find it!
- The general customer support (ticketing system) is horrible. I wait, on average, 10 days for any sort of response.
- The email builder lacks basic functionality. We have to complete workarounds for nearly everything other than simple text blocks, including centering text and adding buttons. Even with our old email system (which was not robust at all), those functions were built in and easy to use. The template builder is clunky and hard to use. We are waiting patiently for a drag-and-drop email builder!
- There are certain email completion actions that don't currently exist and should. For example, when a prospect clicks on a link in an email, we cannot notify the account's support rep. Salesforce could not provide a workaround for this.
Pardot Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Pardot?
Pardot is a marketing automation platform. Its key features include lead management, lead generation, social selling, and email marketing.
Categories: Marketing Automation
Pardot Screenshots
Pardot Video
Pardot Integrations
GoodData, Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, NetSuite ERP, Sugar Sell (SugarCRM), Wistia, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics
Pardot Competitors
Pardot Pricing
Starting Price: $1,250
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
- Entry-level set up fee?No
| Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | $1,250 | /month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually |
| Plus | $2,500 | /month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually |
| Advanced | $4,000 | /month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually |
| Premium | $15,000 | /month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually |
Salesforce Engage, an additional offering for sales and marketing alignment, is priced at $50 per month per user.
Pardot Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | ||
| Live Chat | ||
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Social Media | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
Pardot Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise, SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application: | Apple iOS, Android, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries: | All |
| Supported Languages: | English |