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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)
    8.1
    81%
  • 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 7.7

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

(1349)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 98)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We publish marketing campaigns on behalf of various clients using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It's a wonderful tool to use to capture all party data that is essential to our position. We also use it for email content, as well as multiple engagement opportunities. It's a one stop shop, basically, for our field.
  • Platform monitoring
  • Assists with revenue goals
  • Keeps us on the same page as our clients
  • Speed when loading
  • Slightly outdated interface
  • Support is sometimes slow
It is well suited for clients, as well as those who manage them, to get their data and information out on multiple platforms quickly and efficiently.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main foundation is CRM, and the functions that surround it, be it the creating of landing pages, setting up email campaigns, and managing leads, are some of the benefits you get from using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. I have worked for companies that have used all of these features and some who only used the email marketing part.
  • CRM
  • Email marketing
  • Integration with other software
It depends on your marketing infrastructure - if your company uses this 100% so do you too for as long as you work there. It's less appropriate to be using something else when the marketing team is all in on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but I wouldn't necessarily say this product is above others.
Nicoline Tordrup Lage | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for B2B marketing initiatives, meaning sending out personalized and automated emails, connecting Campaigns with Salesforce Sales Cloud, and following up on campaigns. I work for an agency, so I have numerous clients who use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and the Lightning version certainly improved the look and feel of the program. The business problems that our clients usually address are everything from awareness campaigns for unknown prospects to more conversion-oriented campaigns for known prospects and upsells for current clients.
  • User friendly interface.
  • Connects well with Salesforce Sales Cloud.
  • User management and control works smoothly.
  • Automation rules works really well once you understand how to use it.
  • Dynamic content is not as user friendly as it could be.
  • Advanced reporting inside Marketing Cloud.
  • Better drag and drop functionality for landing pages.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is very well suited for large organizations where they need a connector to an advanced sales tool like Salesforce Sales Cloud. It also works well for communicating with large groups of recipients with their engagement studio. This is a feature I like compared to some other softwares. However, the engagement studio could work on options for further segmentation.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My organization is using Pardot to track website visitor behavior and score leads based on their engagement. Being integrated with Sales Cloud directly, it enables us to sync lead, and contact data bi-directionally between platforms. We are also leveraging B2B Marketing Analytics platform for reporting purposes as it provides more capabilities compared to default reporting capabilities of Sales Cloud.
  • Out-of-box lead scoring capability is great to start with lead scoring
  • Engagement components can surface prospect engagement data in Sales Cloud
  • Implementation is more straightforward compared to other Marketing Automation tools
  • Some automation capabilities are limited (for example: you cannot check if email A was delivered and trigger an automation)
  • New email and landing page builder capabilities need future enhancements
  • API capabilities need to be improved
The platform in general is easy-to-use and it doesn't require a deep understanding in Marketing Automation. A marketer with no background in Marketing Automation can learn the platform in 6-8 weeks with 2 hour training per week. Pardot handles lead management, scoring and visitor tracking easily. While out-of-box reporting capabilities in Pardot is not great, B2B Marketing Analytics can be used to join multiple datasets and prepare custom dashboards.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio in our organization to promote the product and services of our customers across various channels. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio has helped us harness customer behavior data and gain valuable insights into what resources, products, or offers are driving customers to the website and ultimately leading to conversions.
  • Personalized Website Experience
  • Personalized Emails at Open-time
  • Provides valuable data and Insights
  • Low cost plan for small businesses
  • Some bugs should be updated
  • Should include a free trial
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio helped understand customer behavior on the website and gain valuable insights. We were able to personalize the website landing page according to the users' past history which in return led to an increase in interactions and user activity on the page and a significant increase in the sales of the products.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In order to better understand our clients, we utilize Salesforce Audience Studio to gather information from them at several points of contact. The technologies and artificial intelligence that enable it has helped us get new insights into our audience and marketing initiatives, which have allowed us to improve our campaigns and return on investment. This single dashboard, in my opinion, is one of the main reasons to make use of the platform.
  • Enhanced productivity as a result of integration with the Salesforce ecosystem
  • Setting up the platform such that it can host various workspaces for different teams
  • An easy-to-use interface
  • With flawed or inadequate datasets, gaining useful consumer insight may be challenging
  • To get the most out of data science insights, you needed Einstein
  • Non-Marketing Cloud MAPs might be more easily integrated with Marketing Cloud
As a user of the Salesforce ecosystem, I suggest the Salesforce Audience Studio platform to those who are habituated to the platform's complexity. Because of the steep learning curve of the platform, I wouldn't suggest it to those who are new to dynamics. I think it's better for larger teams as well.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Audience Studio was being used specifically by our Marketing department to automate + track posting and connections to our Company's social media accounts.
  • Simple and efficient UI
  • Increased efficiency through connections to Salesforce ecosystem
  • Configurability to ability to host multiple team workspaces within same platform
  • Integration with non-Marketing Cloud MAPs could be more seamless
  • Actionable customer insight could be difficult to gather with faulty/incomplete datasets
  • Required Einstein in order to access full potential of data science insights
I would be much more willing to recommend Salesforce Audience Studio to a B2C company rather than a B2B like mine simply because I don't feel as though our business model allowed my marketing team to take advantage of Salesforce Audience Studio's strongest features. Their adaptive Consent Management looks incredibly helpful on paper, but if your audience is comprised of mostly enterprise server email addresses like ours, managing consent and email deliverability is a whole different problem.

Additionally, unless your business is integrated within Salesforce's Marketing Cloud product suite, you may find that functionality of key data science features are slightly limited - specifically when you are trying to build out a customer journey or revenue attribution model.
Pankaj Singh Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Usage: Using it primarily for email marketing, lead capture through forms, and reporting of email efforts. Apart from it, it was also used for lead scoring. Business problem: Automated lead capturing, email marketing, and reporting of email efforts. Scope: Email, lead capturing, reporting, and lead scoring.
  • Lead capture.
  • Email marketing.
  • Lead scoring.
  • It has limited reporting capabilities.
  • Landing page creation can be improved.
  • Dated User interface.
Well suited: For email marketing, lead capturing, lead nurturing, and if you are using Salesforce, Pardot gives you a very tight integration for data sync. Not well suited: If you are not using Dalesforce then Pardot doesn't give you an edge when we compare it to other marketing automation tools.
Neal Sweeney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pardot is used to set up landing pages, custom redirects, emails, email lists, manage the prospect database, sync with GoToWebinar registration, and sync with Salesforce. It is used by marketing as the company's primary communication method to prospects.
  • Setting up and sending emails
  • Building landing pages
  • Integration with other platforms
  • User interface demands a lot of clicking, loading, waiting, and restarting
  • A back button or 'parent folder' button could make navigating much more convenient
  • Make list segmenting more visual
It is a reliable tool for sending emails if you have a routine and consistent process. Pardot's UI can make it very tedious to discover and set up new processes.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Overall Pardot is fine, but there are much better tools out there. Marketo seems more advanced as a marketing automation tool offering tracking link redirects and is easier to segment lists. Pardot is very limited on the marketing automation aspect side of things which can be very frustrating when you're trying to come up with a workaround.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
If your company uses SalesForce, then Pardot is the best recommendation for you. The integration here is really the strongest and allows for easier notification of inbound leads/prospects. In the past, we used HubSpot and even though there is a SalesForce integration, we were always finding workarounds to getting the right information to the sales/accounts team. If you don't use SalesForce, then I think going with HubSpot is a better solution, as their UX/UI is geared more towards marketers and marketing users.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio is used by our creative agency/department and has been used for multiple projects and clients to handle their multiple use cases. It has also been used to create and send out email templates and run campaigns for our internal products to promote and for a lot of official communication which needs to target our all organization employees through a different location. Its integration with other CRM's and salesforce cloud make it a powerful tool that helps it to stand out from the crowd.
  • Easy to use / Integration with multiple CRM's
  • Tracking/ Reporting / API integration
  • Great platform for email design/ Personalized templates
  • Quite expensive for small organizations/ Start-up's
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio is a well-suited tool to handle multiple different requirements for different clients. Its capability to build personalization mails is a win-win for all the stakeholders and the organization. Also, easy integration with other CRM's and salesforce cloud, Journey builder, A/B testing features make it the best choice for most of the email marketers.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We regularly use Pardot every single day as the primary means of communicating with our database. We don't open it up to every department to use but use it centrally and handle requests from other teams. It solves a lot of our problems because we use Salesforce as a CRM and the syncing capabilities are phenomenal.
  • Email drip campaign automation
  • Advanced features such as landing pages and branded preference center pages
  • Builder feels great and is easy to use if you have coding knowledge
  • No robust drag and drop builder
  • Pardot is often slow to adopt new technologies and integrations
  • No Litmus integration
  • Pardot doesn't show ESP renderings well within its own infrastructure
Pardot is amazing for creating dynamic lists that sync well with Salesforce. It is honestly a bit limited as far as design buildout if you don't have a ton of coding knowledge, but most people don't buy Pardot for ease of design. It also kind of struggles with social integrations as those features are a bit dated. If they updated their integrations, it might make it a more widely used tool.
Robert Nagelmaker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by a division, which contains several business units. It addresses the business problems that were presented by having decentralized and different marketing automation systems from business unit to business unit. By selecting a tool like Pardot which can cover the needs of the entire division and the individual business unit, a need can be met for centralization and sharing of best practices and general knowledge in regards to marketing and marketing automation.
  • Pardot enables you to set up different environments via the Pardot Business Unit feature, this is helpful for when decentralization is still needed, but you want all business units working with the same tool.
  • Pardot enables you to quickly and easily create automation rules that can clean the database retro-actively.
  • Pardot has the ability to have multiple lead scoring models run at the same time.
  • I would wish for them to improve the email editing, they have a very protected feature which makes editing sometimes harder to use than other tools. This is safe on one hand, but on the other hand its sometimes harder to use.
  • I would wish for them to improve the ease of use when it comes to user management and what roles in this can and can not do in the sense of their rights.
  • I would wish for them to improve the landing pages, they are not as advanced with their landing page coding and css as other marketing automation tools.
It is well suited if you would want to use Pardot for emailing SME's with a limit of up to 1.000.000 contact records in one business unit. It is less appropiate when you need to email over 1 million contacts as the bandwith of the system simply isn't up to par and it doesn't have the proper server capacity to have thorough cleaning/automation, this shows in their email deliverability settings and the degree of limitations when it comes to the capabilities of the engagement studio inside of Pardot.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • For an enterprise-level B2B MAP, they're probably the most competitively priced in this space. (Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot and the like are more pricey).
  • 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.
Pardot is a great tool for B2B companies that want an email marketing automation platform and don't have the budget for Marketo or HubSpot. It also makes a lot of sense if your CRM is Salesforce. There's good integration between the two (although worth noting that Pardot was not a native Salesforce tool, which explains some of the weirdness).

If basic HTML/CSS are not in your wheelhouse, I wouldn't select Pardot because their templates are not great out of the box and their builder leaves are basically a WYSIWYG. But if you're looking for an email automation platform that does email fairly well at a reasonable cost, Pardot might be a good choice.
Bailey Witt, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
For B2B marketing automation, it gets the job done. It's a comprehensive tool that provides everything you need in one tool. However, it isn't really great at one thing, it's just serviceable at everything. The top things are forms, landing pages, and automations, and reporting. The worst are email builder and list/contact management.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Pardot is great for giving sales teams more touches in lead generation and prioritization of prospects.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Pardot is great if you are using it to manage forms, emails, and all of your lead flows. Pardot works extremely well if you are using Salesforce. They are owned by the same company and the sync is fantastic.
I wouldn't use Pardot if you are a small company. They are very expensive. I also wouldn't use Pardot to build landing pages, as the builder is not that great.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I found Pardot really powerful and versatile. We didn't use the Drip Automation feature as much as I would have liked, but that's just because we didn't have many use cases to justify it. We were able to build out a complex custom CSS for our email templates and appreciated the rendering capabilities that allowed us to preview how our CSS would display across all the most popular browsers and mobile platforms.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Radian6 was used for one of my prior jobs to have an organized dashboard of our brand social media handles - set up to respond to customers, brand engagement, social listening, etc. It was being used by the customer service team and also by the marketing / social media team.
  • Very easy to use
  • Friendly interface
  • Little errors / bugs
  • Heavier analytics abilities
  • Ability to look at platforms that are review sites, amazon, etc rather than just social sites
  • Updated interface
I would say that Radian6 is a fine tool for a company or organization that needs a cohesive platform for their social media handles and how to respond to customer/consumers in an efficient matter. I think that Radian6 training time does not take too long as the tool itself is not as complex as others.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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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