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Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Formerly Pardot, Evergage, ExactTarget, MyBuys, Datorama, etc.

Overview

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 27 features
  • A/B testing (139)
    8.4
    84%
  • Email deliverability reporting (119)
    8.3
    83%
  • Dynamic content (140)
    8.2
    82%
  • List management (116)
    7.5
    75%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Account Engagement

$1,250

Cloud
per month

Engagement

$1,250

Cloud
per month

Intelligence

$3,000

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.salesforce.com/products/mar…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $1,250 per month per installation
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Product Demos

Pardot Engagement Studio: How-to Demo

YouTube

How to Use Pardot Salesforce Engage

YouTube

Pardot Demo: A Pardot Introduction for Beginners

YouTube

Pardot Marketing Automation Demo

YouTube

Inspire Meaningful Moments Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Demo

YouTube

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: B2B Marketing Automation Overview Demo

YouTube
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Features

Email & Online Marketing

Using software to manage lists, send emails, automate email campaigns, and track results.

7.9
Avg 7.8

Lead Management

The process of tracking and managing prospective customers from lead generation to conversion.

7.6
Avg 7.7

Campaign Management

Users can schedule campaigns and/or events with reminders, announcements, etc.

7.9
Avg 7.6

Social Media Marketing

Using social media networks to help amplify marketing endeavors.

6.8
Avg 7.5

Reporting & Analytics

Users can report on and analyze usage, performance, ROI, and/or other metrics of success.

7.6
Avg 7.5

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

7.6
Avg 7.6
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Product Details

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing platform that helps companies of all sizes get to know their customers through unified profiles, personalize offers across any channel with AI, and build lasting relationships that drive business growth. Marketing Cloud provides data that is actionable, personalization that scales, and marketing that is connected.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features

Email & Online Marketing Features

  • Supported: WYSIWYG email editor
  • Supported: Dynamic content
  • Supported: Ability to test dynamic content
  • Supported: Landing pages
  • Supported: A/B testing
  • Supported: Mobile optimization
  • Supported: Email deliverability reporting
  • Supported: List management
  • Supported: Triggered drip sequences

Lead Management Features

  • Supported: Lead nurturing automation
  • Supported: Lead scoring and grading
  • Supported: Data quality management
  • Supported: Automated sales alerts and tasks

Campaign Management Features

  • Supported: Calendaring
  • Supported: Event/webinar marketing

Social Media Marketing Features

  • Supported: Social sharing and campaigns
  • Supported: Social profile integration

Reporting & Analytics Features

  • Supported: Dashboards
  • Supported: Standard reports
  • Supported: Custom reports

Platform & Infrastructure Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Role-based workflow & approvals
  • Supported: Customizability
  • Supported: Integration with Salesforce.com
  • Supported: Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • Supported: Integration with SugarCRM
  • Supported: Third-party software integrations

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Pardot Analytics - Pardot's reporting and analytics can be used to perform true revenue impact analysis and closed-loop reporting.Screenshot of Pardot Email Analytics - The reach and impact of  email marketing efforts are displayed in real-time with advanced reporting and analytics by device, and email client.Screenshot of Pardot Forms and Landing Pages - Pardot's form and landing page builders are used to turn online traffic to leads with targeted offers and content marketing.Screenshot of Pardot Email Marketing - Lead nurturing flows are defined via an interface that enables definition of the simplest or most complex segmented and targeted campaigns.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesAll

Frequently Asked Questions

Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts at $1250.

Adobe Marketo Engage, HubSpot Marketing Hub, and Act-On Software are common alternatives for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Reviewers rate Integration with Salesforce.com highest, with a score of 8.7.

The most common users of Salesforce Marketing Cloud are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(1351)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(101-125 of 316)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Steven Wilson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Alert Logic is currently using Evergage to provide a personalized user experience on our website. We are also utilizing the tool for A/B testing and overall user experience enhancements.
  • Easy to implement A/B tests
  • Tracking a visitors browsing history
  • The ability to create user segments based various criteria (Location, date, time, visits etc...)
  • Build complex front-end campaigns with HTML, Javascript/JQuery and API.
  • The reporting can be confusing at times.
  • More 3rd party integrations would be great.
Evergage is great for A/B testing, web personalization and overall user tracking. I feel like it still needs some help in the reporting and analytics department if this is your only tool for that.
Todd Ballowe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
OnStrategy uses Evergage in our web-based strategic planning application to enhance user experience and present timely in-app notifications for a variety of purposes.
  • User behavior analytics
  • Custom web-based messaging (campaigns)
  • A/B testing
  • The UI is not particularly user-friendly.
  • The HTML/Javascript code editor for campaigns is finicky.
Evergage can be used/implemented successfully in a wide variety of websites/web applications. While they are geared more towards e-commerce, there is room to use Evergage in other scenarios.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
I use Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio in my own role to learn more about Salesforce as an entire universe and system. I use it to learn about how the products complement each other so that I can create more effective marketing content to pass along to our clients and prospects. Our consultants implement products like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio after conducting thorough business analysis to determine whether or not it's the best fit for the client.
  • A comprehensive email marketing suite.
  • Provides a good segue into other Salesforce Marketing Products.
  • It's important for marketers today to use and implement with clients to create more effective outcomes.
  • None that I can think of -- this platform is comprehensive in terms of functionality, integration, and ease of use.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio, I believe, accommodates a variety of technological experience and comfort. I think it's easy for new users to break into, but then again, I'm a marketer! If you have a sense of social media or other marketing tools, this will be second-nature. It makes even more sense, of course, if it's tied to your Salesforce Org so that you can leverage data and analytics to send more successful email marketing campaigns out to your contact lists. The design ability is also exciting.
Danielle Armour | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 is well suited when you have an organization that wants to get multiple communications out on different levels and to an array of individuals. The reporting systems of Pardot as well as the ability to plan multiple campaigns within the program is unparalleled. Pardot allows you to gain valuable data from the emails sent and more importantly the individuals who opened and interacted with the emails.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
If you use Salesforce as your primary CRM system, you should be using Pardot -- no questions asked. You will not find a better or more efficient integration out there. If you are looking for simply an email automation tool, I would consider other options as well. The email builder is by far the weakest part of Pardot. I have high hopes they will improve this!
Kyle Moloo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Pardot is well suited if the cost is the most important factor when choosing a marketing automation system, especially if you're already using Salesforce. They don't charge as much per contact as HubSpot does, and you can even pay by total email sends (like Act-On). Pardot is less appropriate if you don't have a team in place with HTML/CSS proficiency. There are multiple instances when building emails, landing pages, form and workflows that you can get stuck if you don't go into the raw code and touch up what you're working on. Contact management and list building also have a bit of a learning curve as the UX can seem backward at times (how to add a contact to a list, how to create dynamic lists, etc.)
Nicolas Costa Ossa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
If your business needs an intensive online content strategy and you are at least a three-person Marketing team, you can probably benefit greatly from Pardot. Especially if you are in a B2B model.

If you are putting a lot of content out there, in multiple places (online), you'll need something to help you automate and work smarter. Because is not only the tough work of developing the content and do proper distribution but the data gathering from those efforts and understanding that data to act upon it. Pardot helps you throughout the whole customer journey.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We found Pardot to be limiting and ended up switching to Marketing Cloud. With the exception of the lead scoring and lead grading, Marketing Cloud can do everything that Pardot can do and integrates better with Salesforce if you are using Salesforce as your CRM. From the email builder and options for testing to how the data is mapped over and used out of Salesforce, we found we had to do a lot of custom work-arounds to get the product to work for our use case. Pardot doesn't seem to get the same amount of resources and attention as Marketing Cloud and I question the commitment to keeping it around long-term.
Justin Wiebe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Pardot is a solution that is ultimately more of a B2B product rather than a B2C solution. This provides some limitations as it relates to the higher education ecosystem in which I work. It still can function as well as Marketing Cloud but ultimately it is not as robust and "clean" interface as that with Marketing Cloud. It is a solution that can work from a grad school perspective. The market segment is somewhat more in line with this realm.
May 14, 2019

Pardot Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pardot is used across various departments in my organization, specifically in marketing. It's extremely useful for quick data consumption and provides solid interaction history that we use to help target specific users for campaigns as we plan and revise them.
  • Extremely clean and user-friendly dashboard
  • Unlimited automation branching
  • Strong customer service team
  • Extremely pricey - not good for small companies
  • Solution only B2B focus
  • Not many integration options
Pardot is the leader in the marketing automation space that is specifically made for large organizations that have large email distribution lists and diverse customer bases. Due to the high price tag, it is less appropriate for smaller organizations who are looking to just increase traffic to their sites. There are better platforms for that.
May 14, 2019

Nurture Your Leads

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pardot provides marketing automation for our organization. We can better address prospects before sending lead information over to Salesforce. This provide us better nurturing opportunities with potential clients.
  • drip campaigns
  • build templates
  • captures leads
  • build redirects
  • searching and navigating
  • training resources
There are other marketing automated platforms that fully integrate with other marketing tools. If you use Salesforce then Pardot may be a good fit.
May 09, 2019

Pardot

Richard Massey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
We use it in a very simplistic implementation so we do not push the boundaries of the system. It suits our needs perfectly. We have, in the past, suffered through a lack of internal support for the system - just to help with the little questions that pop up from time to time.
May 09, 2019

Pardot: Above Par

Jillian Papa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I think if a company has Salesforce, it's kind of a no brainer. Pardot integrates really well with Salesforce. I also believe that the set up to link the two is free (you just need the resources to do it). Given what I know, I would recommend Pardot. I say that because I am not a marketing or communications person so I feel I'm unable to give it much higher than an 8 having not used all of the marketing features myself. For my job, I leverage the engagement scoring that Pardot offers and that is a wonderful tool.
Garrett Genest | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Great for smaller marketing teams, if you use Salesforce CRM, and if you have the knowledge to hack things to create more robust automation. Out-of-the-box Pardot is great for anyone in Marketing who isn't super tech-savvy thanks to its simplicity. If you are more tech-inclined, you'll quickly run up against the limitations of Pardot and will need to begin using additional tools like Zapier, etc. to do what you need to do. I would say Pardot is less desirable if you're a larger organization with more resources to put behind your program (team members, developers, designers, etc.) but much more desirable for any organization with a smaller team count thanks to its simplicity.
Shannon Johlic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
I used it as the sole marketing team for quite a while. It is VERY easy to use but packed with more power than you can imagine. BUT it does require familiarity with marketing automation platforms already in order to get the most out of it. I would recommend someone who owns it full time and that's ALL they do, there is enough in there. (on a note, we tore out Marketo for Pardot to match our needs and company growth projections. Marketo is great if you have a TEAM owning it...) Pardot is great for growing companies.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pardot is used to send a variety of emails to our database, including newsletters, demand generation emails, webinar invitations, customer notifications, partner notifications and training emails. It is also used for drip email campaigns. This enables us to communicate with our database of over 20K using segmented lists to tailor messages to the appropriate audience.
  • Segmented lists are easy to use in Pardot.
  • Setting up emails in the WYSIWYG editor is fairly intuitive and easy to manage.
  • The A/B testing abilities are particularly useful as we determine the most effective strategies for engaging our audience.
  • It would be nice if excluding prior opens was handled in a more obvious fashion (I still have not figured this out since taking over the primary responsibility of the tool from another employee several months ago).
  • I would like to see somewhat more sensitive search features, particularly by words.
For a small marketing group, Pardot is well suited for managing a large database and putting campaigns into place. The integration with Salesforce is key for us, as is the ease of use. Given my limited experience with email automation, I do not know how Pardot would function in different company sizes, but I suspect it scales well.
Jacqueline Fassett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Pardot is great for midsized B2B organizations who have at least 2 people on their Marketing and Sales teams and are looking to streamline their efforts and fill their pipeline. If your teams regularly use digital marketing tactics to find and nurture leads, this is a great platform to consider.
May 08, 2019

Pardot is King

Jordan Linford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Perfect for large scale marketing management. It is on the higher price end. It's great for lead scoring and grading combo. It's the best database management system there is.
Dan Lobring | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 is well suited for tracking against leads that are generated via email that follow the prospect journey to the web, etc. Depending on the nature of your sales organization, Pardot may be overkill in terms of the number of qualified leads needed to convert to a meeting, to an opportunity to a sale.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pardot for our email marketing lead generation campaigns and to communicate with our users. It is primarily used by the Sales and Marketing teams with limited use by our account managers. Pardot allows us to leverage automation and drip campaigns to make our marketing efforts much more effective and wide reaching.
  • Drip campaigns.
  • Link/Sync with Salesforce.
  • The UI is very easy to configure.
  • Better tools when building drip campaigns - the tools are flexible but it can be quite complex.
Pardot is great for firms that do heavy email campaigns. It is similar to Constant Contact but significantly more powerful and flexible.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pardot as our marketing automation tool to communicate with our customers and prospects within the marketing department. It helps us effectively stay engaged with our clients, while also giving insight into their behavior and engagement. Also, Pardot helps us streamline processes with their automation rules.
  • A/B testing is very easy. Clicking a button will split the emails into 2 versions, and from there you can determine which portion of the list you would like to test.
  • Easy integration with our CRM (Salesforce).
  • Ease of use. Most users, even with little marketing automation experience, will be able to set up an email or landing page.
  • Reporting. Most of the reporting is out of the box, meaning you can make very little changes to the report parameters.
  • Email and LP editor. I wish there were more drag and drop functionality.
  • Lead scoring customization. As with the reporting, the lead scoring categories are out of the box and determined by Pardot.
It's a very easy to use marketing automation tool that users of all skill levels should be able to pick up. They also have a very clean UI and UX. It's great for SMB to Midsize companies. However, for larger organizations, a more robust tool may be a better solution.
April 29, 2019

Pardot works well

Jordan Comstock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Salesforce connection. It is a Salesforce product, so it integrates very well with Salesforce.
  • 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.
Well suited for small to medium sized Saas companies that want to grow. Needs to have a B2B focus. Not as well suited for larger Saas companies. Poor choice of tool for e-commerce. It only works well if you are funneling leads to a sales team. It is only appropriate if you are using Salesforce as well. I would not recommend it without Salesforce.
Taylor Martz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Salesforce Marketing Cloud for email automation to our external partners and also our homebuyers or future prospects. We were able to create email journeys for specific products or groups of buyers, but we were also able to make one-off emails for things like seasonal items, new products, alerts, or holidays. We also used Salesforce Marketing Cloud for internal communication to employees. This way, we were able to ghostwrite for executives and stakeholders within the company, and pre-schedule communications to go out in advance. It also allowed for use to use and analyze reporting and metrics to check things like open rate, click-through, or bounce rate. It helped us find the best day to send emails and which senders (i.e. CEO, CIO, etc.) had the greatest impact on the open or click through rate (CTR).
  • Reporting, tracking history, and analytics.
  • Scheduled sends and automation tools.
  • Coding and HTML formatting, with a content builder tool for easy use for first-time users.
  • Ability to send as someone else (ghostwriting).
  • The content builder is glitchy and frequently crashes.
  • Salesforce cloud stacks go down frequently and you cannot send emails.
  • A better scheduling feature with a built out calendar would be nice.
  • Needs a better translation to Outlook; emails don't always display properly, and functions don't work when integrating with/sending to Outlook recipients.
Definitely great for external marketing communications, but doesn't have as much customization as many marketers would want to see. As for internal communication, it works, BUT it is very limited when sending to Outlook, and many things either break or no longer work properly. Extra spacing is usually added and Outlook can sometimes not perform the way Salesforce Marketing Cloud expects it to.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Evergage to provide personalized experiences on our website. We also use it for A/B testing as well as for the visitor cloud, which enables us to track user sessions back to the individual.
  • Customize a webpage based on the visitor’s history
  • Alter parts of the site to optimize for conversions
  • Track a user’s browsing history
  • Reporting interface is confusing
  • Not as easy to make design changes as we’d like
  • Hard to set up conversion goals on a global level
Good for websites that have complicated user journeys. Helpful for websites with varying conversion paths. Not good if you don’t have technical expertise.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Evergage across our multiple retail websites to deliver personalized recommendations. Evergage provides customer product recommendations on various pages of our sites -- from product detail pages to search and checkout.
We also use it to populate personalized recommendations in emails. Showing the customer products they are interested in, or that have some relevance to their previous purchasing or browsing behavior, delivers a much higher ROI than showing static items to all.
  • Easy 'zone' placement can be integrated into mast any platform quickly.
  • Recommendations given are relevant and useful to the customer.
  • Creative assistance is an issue with both timeliness and a lack of communication.
  • They could be much more pro-active in suggesting new features to use.
Well suited for any online retailer looking to deliver personalized recommendations to increase conversions and/or average order size.
It's pricey, so not well suited to smaller companies. Also would not make sense for those with a shallow product selection. The beauty lies in bringing out the most relevant products to the customer -- which really only makes sense if you have a deep selection.
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