Salesforce Marketing CloudFormerly 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.
Powerful but Lacking in Multiple Ways
Salesforce Marketing Cloud - A piece of cake!
Scalable and Robust
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: As powerful as it is complicated
Robust features if you have the time to learn them all...
Expensive but powerful CRM product.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Views
Love Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is Very Complex but Rich !
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is very powerful
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Review
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Review
Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in HR tech
Awards
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Popular Features
- A/B testing (139)8.484%
- Email deliverability reporting (119)8.383%
- Dynamic content (140)8.181%
- List management (116)7.575%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Account Engagement
$1,250
Engagement
$1,250
Intelligence
$3,000
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $1,250 per month per installation
Product Demos
Pardot Engagement Studio: How-to Demo
How to Use Pardot Salesforce Engage
Pardot Demo: A Pardot Introduction for Beginners
Pardot Marketing Automation Demo
Inspire Meaningful Moments Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Demo
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: B2B Marketing Automation Overview Demo
Features
Email & Online Marketing
Using software to manage lists, send emails, automate email campaigns, and track results.
- 8.1WYSIWYG email editor(110) Ratings
Users can create html emails through a drag-and-drop interface, without html coding knowledge.
- 8.1Dynamic content(140) Ratings
Users can tailor email, website or landing page content depending on the viewer or recipient (e.g., email salutations that include the recipient’s name).
- 7.7Ability to test dynamic content(100) Ratings
Users can test dynamic content prior to launching a campaign.
- 7.5Landing pages(108) Ratings
Users can create web pages that are customized to a particular email or campaign. Landing pages often include web forms which can capture visitor information and integrate it back into the MA software.
- 8.4A/B testing(139) Ratings
Users can experiment with different variations of a campaign and measure results. Testable aspects might include subject lines, header images, or landing page copy.
- 7.5Mobile optimization(98) Ratings
Users can easily optimize emails and landing pages for mobile devices.
- 8.3Email deliverability reporting(119) Ratings
The software helps ensure inbox delivery of email campaigns, through features such as deliverability tests, opt-in management, bounce handling, suppression lists, dedicated IP addresses, and delivery monitoring.
- 7.5List management(116) Ratings
This involves creating, filtering, editing, merging and de-duping lists of contacts.
- 8.1Triggered drip sequences(84) Ratings
The software allows users to set up automatic / drip email campaigns triggered by certain events.
Lead Management
The process of tracking and managing prospective customers from lead generation to conversion.
- 7.7Lead nurturing automation(100) Ratings
Users can set up targeted drip email campaigns based on time intervals or prospect behavior, to automate the lead nurturing process and move them further down the sales funnel.
- 7.3Lead scoring and grading(100) Ratings
Users can set up the software to automatically rate leads based on calculations such as buying signals, such as form submissions, or page views, and automatically qualify leads based on demographic factors.
- 7.6Data quality management(104) Ratings
The software helps store, manage, and organize data around each lead, and avoid data problems such as duplicate contacts or non-standard formats.
- 7.7Automated sales alerts and tasks(92) Ratings
The software helps ensure that a sales person is notified of lead activity and can act on the information in a timely fashion.
Campaign Management
Users can schedule campaigns and/or events with reminders, announcements, etc.
- 7.9Calendaring(93) Ratings
The software helps users maintain a calendar of all marketing activities.
- 7.9Event/webinar marketing(87) Ratings
Users can streamline event marketing with features such as personalized invitations, registration, reminders and post-event follow-ups.
Social Media Marketing
Using social media networks to help amplify marketing endeavors.
- 7.2Social sharing and campaigns(76) Ratings
Users can incorporate social share buttons into campaigns to allow recipients to easily share content. Users can track shares as well.
- 6.4Social profile integration(32) Ratings
The software incorporates social profile data and social share histories to enhance segmentation and scoring of contacts.
Reporting & Analytics
Users can report on and analyze usage, performance, ROI, and/or other metrics of success.
- 7.6Dashboards(107) Ratings
Users can create, customize and share dashboards, which provide an overview of the most important metrics.
- 7.8Standard reports(111) Ratings
The software offers pre-built reports with metrics standard to the category.
- 7.4Custom reports(88) Ratings
Users can create custom reports.
Platform & Infrastructure
Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.
- 7.6API(81) Ratings
An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.
- 8.2Role-based workflow & approvals(78) Ratings
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
- 7.3Customizability(99) Ratings
Users can customize their instance with features like custom fields and custom objects.
- 8.7Integration with Salesforce.com(101) Ratings
The software can integrate with Salesforce.com bi-directionally, allowing for data syncs, activity alerts, campaign triggers, enhanced reporting, and lead assigning.
- 7.8Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM(8) Ratings
The software can integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM bi-directionally, allowing for data syncs, activity alerts, campaign triggers, enhanced reporting, and lead assigning.
- 6.7Integration with SugarCRM(7) Ratings
The software can integrate with SugarCRM bi-directionally, allowing for data syncs, activity alerts, campaign triggers, enhanced reporting, and lead assigning.
- 7.3Third-party software integrations(14) Ratings
Integration functionality with third-party or in-house systems.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
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
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integrations
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Competitors
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Mobile Web |
Supported Countries | All |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(1350)Attribute Ratings
- 9.6Likelihood to Renew112 ratings
- 10Availability11 ratings
- 9.6Performance9 ratings
- 6.2Usability35 ratings
- 4Support Rating35 ratings
- 8.1Online Training7 ratings
- 5In-Person Training4 ratings
- 3Implementation Rating17 ratings
- 7.9Product Scalability24 ratings
- 7Ease of integration2 ratings
- 10Vendor pre-sale2 ratings
- 8Vendor post-sale2 ratings
Reviews
(126-150 of 316)Badass way to get to know your customer while making them HAPPY
- Connecting with clients in a personalized fashion
- Tracking customer behaviors to build better marketing and branding personas
- Finding new clients in creative ways
- The contact import feature sucks.
- Sometimes when updating files on the platform, they have become corrupted and unrecoverable.
- When trying out the product as a free trial, you don't get the kind of support that you should to seal the deal - for smaller companies with limited time and budgets, that also sucks.
Salesforce is unbelievably powerful if you can afford it.
- Easy to use funnels.
- Action based paths that people can go down based on clicks, open-rate, engagement, etc.
- Easy to use templates for building.
- Easy to segment lists.
- It's crazy expensive. Would love if they dropped the price.
- Could be a cleaner interface, but that is just me. Looks like the rest of the Salesforce backend, which is pretty simple.
- More A/B testing options would be appreciated.
We Love Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio is great at managing our customer base which happens to be very large. We were able to create detailed segments and handle them all individually
- The tracking and analytics provided by Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio are great
- Along the lines of segmentation and tracking, Salesforce is great at allowing us to target customers or segments of customers with the content best suited for them.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio is quite expensive. This was a real issue for us when evaluating a vendor to use.
- Because of the amount of control that Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio provides, it follows that learning the tool is fairly complicated. It takes us a good amount of time to train new users.
- We have had some issues with importing email templates that we have used previously into Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio.
Yes! Automate your marketing campaigns with Pardot!
- Creating and sending mass emails is simple, giving time back in the day to the marketing and sales team!
- Integration with Salesforce contacts - can easily sync and merge.
- Great way to manage form data from prospects submitting information on your website.
- UX feels a little bit old and clunky. It is not very intuitive.
- Reporting is very basic.
A Powerful Marketing Tool with a Steep Learning Curve
- Visual editor
- Scheduling campaigns
- Reporting
- Integration with Salesforce CRM is clunky and isn't intuitive
- Inbox placement / deliverability insights
Glad to have Pardot in our toolbox!
- The reporting in Pardot has improved since we first implemented it, so the detail on the reports and date range selection is much better.
- Pardot allows easy merging of records.
- The creation of engagement studio programs is MUCH improved and super easy, as it has clear steps on how and where to make things happen.
- I mentioned merging records as a positive, but the negative for this is why we have to merge them in the first place. Pardot unfortunately creates duplicate records when an email address is removed in Salesforce, instead of having Salesforce be the guiding app. So there is duplication effort in Salesforce AND Pardot to make the records align properly.
Pardot is a Powerful Marketing Automation Tool for Beginners to Pros
- Automate demand generation programs across multiple marketing channels, both traditional and digital
- Provide valuable reporting and tracking to measure program efficiency and efficacy
- Arm small marketing teams with powerful, easy to use tools to act as modern marketers utilizing the best in current marketing automation technology
- Training and helpful resources are abundant and the Pardot community is a growing source of support and hub for marketing ideas
- Although not currently disruptive to our programs, send/action run times across assets and automations can delay campaign execution for those campaigns that come up last minute and need to launch ASAP
- Although reporting continues to improve, we typically utilize reports in Salesforce as well as Pardot to show results and trends across campaigns
Good For Group Organization
- Organization
- Tracking
- User friendly
- I have nothing negative to add.
I would recommend this for teams of 5+ people.
Pardot Review
- Creating emails is made simple
- Integration with our Salesforce prospects
- A/B testing with each email
- In-depth drip reporting is not readily available - a mostly manual process
- Unable to copy/past without formatting issues in email copy area
- There isn't a centralized dashboard without upgrading
Pardot- Great but with a learning curve
- Helps Organize
- Manage Contacts
- Manage Form Data
- User Experience
- Intuitiveness
Salesforce - Mass campaigning and CRM tool
- Salesforce works well in different browsers
- No. of apps available
- Email campaigns feature is a plus
- Installation seemed a hassle, it is handled by third party
- Complexity of the CRM system, for our company size
- And the price of the tool seemed high for our company
Good if you can spend the time to get to know it
- It's quite intuitive to use and I'd say it's pretty good as just about everything you might reasonably expect from an all-in-one email tool.
- There's a lot of flexibility - perhaps too much in some areas, but nothing that some oversight can't contain.
- The ExactTarget feature is apparently very good - I haven't used it enough to know its full capabilities, but I've heard a lot of good things about it.
- Not a criticism of the tool itself, but it can be difficult getting everyone to use it in the same way, due to the flexibility offered. This is something for businesses to figure out and get alignment on.
- I've not had to contact their support, but I've heard people aren't always impressed by the service received. Same with a lot of tools, unfortunately.
- It is kind of expensive. There are surely cheaper ways to achieve what you need if you don't need anything too sophisticated.
Great B2B Marketing Automation for Salesforce customers.
- Pardot does a great job of segmenting our customers based on the data we have available in Salesforce.
- Integrating data with our Salesforce environment. It's also capable of integrating data from many other sources.
- Easy to use and navigate
- Support is lacking, but I've seen improvements. Pardot Office Hours has been a great resource.
- Reporting is pretty basic
- Ability to create powerful and feature-rich segments to personalize campaigns.
- Easy to use tool for data operations as well as for creating email templates and creative.
- Ability to leverage platform capabilities to do effective AB and multivariate testing.
- Simplify the creation of multi-variate testing.
- Simplify role management.
- Data-driven email marketing for higher conversion and ROI
- Personalization of email campaigns
- Data management and usage from cloud ecosystems
- Very simple UI to create AB tests and review results
Great Solution for Marketers in the Salesforce Ecosystem
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud connects well with Salesforce Sales Cloud.
- Journey Builder is incredibly robust and allows customized one to one email marketing.
- Predictive content from the Einstein engine is extremely useful in customizing emails by segments.
- Sluggish development of email basics. I feel that competitors are showing Salesforce Marketing Cloud up by having better templates. Content Builder is a move in the right direction.
- Faster UI. I feel that the Marketing Cloud UI can be a bit dated and slow
- Better inbox viewing and delivery testing.
Powerful Integration, Lacking UI
- Pardot is a powerful tool since it is integrated in with Salesforce
- A lot of opportunity for unique types of marketing campaigns to a wide subset of clients/prospects
- Excellent for transaction emails.
- It is hard to get a handle on. While it is powerful, the learning curve to harness that power is very difficult to overcome.
- The interface feels older than it is. Could use a UI update to make it more user friendly.
- Not something that I would recommend for beginners. It may have excellent automation but understanding how campaigns work within Pardot and how to be successful with them.
It is a good product where your experience will be as positive as your data quality.
It was brought in as a more integrated solution when compared to Wired Marketing. The lesson here is that not all products that claim to integrate with Salesforce actually integrate to a high standard.
- Native to Salesforce
- Good UI
- Simple to use, not code heavy at all
- The Pardot Connector can suffer from some issues when working with Salesforce. Part of this is Salesforce's poor conflict management. Often, users are finding that the Connector has visited a record they are editing, and that they have to re-key all their changes again.
- Your data is a huge factor here. If you have a highly fragmented set of records, multiple duplicates, Pardot will have a good stab at trying to tie things together but fundamentally you can find inconsistent results in terms of matching updates to records.
- Pardot doesn't like duplicate management tools, ironically considering the above. If it finds the Salesforce record that it is attached to deleted as part of merging, it does not attempt to re-link its own record to the newly formed one.
Pardot Marketing Solution for B2B
- Connectors: Pardot has several connectors available, for hosting webinars, videos, RSS feeds, social media platforms, among others, for a synthesized view of a business's marketing connections.
- Scheduling - The scheduling function, for emails or posts, is particularly easy to use.
- The user interface is sometimes clunky.
- Terminology is sometimes inconsistent with Salesforce. Campaigns are not exactly the same thing. It would help to unify these differences.
Read before you even think about that demo
- Pardot is cheaper than Hubspot
- Pardot does not push the persona based marketing
- Pardot links to the Salesforce CRM
- It is not very developed yet, so there are a lot of steps to setting anything up. Even simple emails take many steps.
- The user experience of the tool is very confusing. There are two folder storages and one of them you don't want to use apparently but then you cannot restrict it from others to not use. You will want to provide a lot of user documentation with screen shots and explicit instructions to a team on how to correctly get around the tool and work in it.
- File hosting is annoying. When you hold a file in Pardot for a download, it automatically download the document from whatever link you have and puts the file into your downloaded documents folder in your computer. If the user doesn't know this, then they might think they never received the file. With Hubspot, the file opens as an online PDF in another tab so that you can read it and then choose to download it if you want. A much better user experience.
- There is no true integrated reporting to SF. We are still in the same spot as we were in with Hubspot.
- There are not really any "how-to" articles to make up for their lack of customer support. They rely on some sort of customer community that is a bunch of question feeds from customers with answers from other customers to help you. Terrible experience there.
Pardot: for what ails your B2B marketing
- Web site tracking. Very easy to setup and embed tracker.
- ROI on marketing investments. Pretty straightforward ROI analytics.
- Administration is dead easy.
- Integration with Salesforce is less than perfect.
- Some terminology in Pardot is used differently than Salesforce. Campaign vs Campaign for example.
- Login is a little clunky. This should be controlled by a users Salesforce login and permissions.
Great product, but be ready to put in the work.
- Great customer support. Our account manager was very hands on- I even went to their offices for a training day.
- Many choices for customization- pop-ups, inline, on-exit,etc.
- Reporting
- Marketo integration was very clunky when we first launched Evergage.
- UI isn't the most intuitive
- The campaign builder was finicky and a little difficult to use.
Best Personalization Tool Out There
- Evergage has a great user interface that is easy to use for those of us who do not have a coding background.
- Evergage has the best support of any tool I have ever used in my 10 years as a marketer.
- Evergage continually updates their product based on the feedback of its current users.
- Evergage could have better data exports.
- Evergage Audience analytics could be in a better format and showcase similarities in a more visual format.
Pardot Gets it Done Right
- It has great tools to help our sales and marketing team be on the same page and be able to see who we are communicating with customers.
- Pardot helps prioritize leads in a very effective way so we can assign leads to the best representative for them.
- Pardot is great at keeping up with your sales funnel so you know where you are in your lead process.
- I would like to see more financial trackings.
- I would like to see a place where customers can provide more direct feedback on what they are receiving.
- Better notes back and forth between who assigns leads and who gets them and when they open it.
Enhanced User Experience Through Personalization
- Geographic targeting - we use Evergage to promote regional events to only those users who close enough geographically to attend the event in question.
- Industry targeting - we place users into industry segments and present those users with demand generation assets targeted to their specific industry.
- Account based marketing - Evergage allows us to change elements of our website to specifically target users who are from companies on our targeted account list.
- The platform is pretty complex. For less technical users, there is a somewhat steep learning curve.
- There are good tools available for testing, but I still struggle with using them.
- Build and deploy communications for Marketing and Sales online initiatives
- Automate various emails based processes
- Generate leads into the SFDC CRM via build and hosted web pages (with lead generating web forms).
- Synch, update and get updates with and from SFDC data (contacts, leads, cases, surveys, etc.)
- Tight integration with SFDC - easy to create, update and retrieve records information from our CRM of choice (Salesforce).
- Customization power - through the available AMPScript language you can really take the customization to the next level for all your data capturing, tagging and reporting needs.
- Intuitive interface - it offers a good user experience for its users whether they are seasoned developers with direct access to code or less technical folks that prefer drag and drop or WYSIWYG editors.
- (Lack of) Web Tracking - it offers minimal tracking capabilities for web visit(or)s and the ones that are in place don't provide an easy way to allow you to use that data in building reports or automation.
- No Web Forms - if most of your marketing campaigns include a call to action pointing to a web form submission, the SFMC doesn't have a "web form asset" per se that you can build. You could still achieve the same functionality by deploying cloud pages and/or microsite AMPScript pages that use Data Extensions as tables to hold data but that doesn't come out of the box.
- Customization brings Complexity - OK, maybe this is not a con but sometimes it feels like one. In order to build your own custom way of segmenting, importing, filtering data, having triggered sends, etc. you need to create a lot of assets on the platform. Think of it like small Lego bricks that you need to build first then combine them in a larger brick that is part of an even larger construction.
Its weak point is the web tracking capabilities if your web tracking needs go beyond displaying some charts of visits and visitors (aka use web metrics as part of your email automation, lead scoring, etc.)