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
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(1349)Attribute Ratings
- 9.6Likelihood to Renew112 ratings
- 10Availability11 ratings
- 9.6Performance9 ratings
- 6.3Usability35 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
(1-25 of 98)Salesforce Marketing Cloud Views
- 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
Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in HR tech
- CRM
- Email marketing
- Integration with other software
Salesforce Marketing Cloud improves conversion rates.
- 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.
B2B Marketing Automation Tool That is Easy-to-use
- 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
Great platform for personalized targeting!
- 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
- 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
- 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
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.
Stable but old feature set
- Lead capture.
- Email marketing.
- Lead scoring.
- It has limited reporting capabilities.
- Landing page creation can be improved.
- Dated User interface.
Good platform but a terrible UI/UX can be frustrating
- 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
- 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.
Great if your sales team uses salesforce
- 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.
- 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
Pardot is a phenomenal tool!
- 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
My review of Pardot
- 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.
Decent Email Marketing Automation for B2B Companies
- The UI is pretty intuitive. I've used other enterprise platforms for marketing automation like Marketo and this is much cleaner.
- The integration with CRMs (particularly Salesforce) is a big part of the value.
- The way they manage sender reputation by automatically cleaning your lists is important, and Pardot does that well. For example, any hard bounced emails, automatically become unmailable and are quarantined by Pardot automatically. They also prevent role emails at import and flag certain email patterns as spam traps. All these things are well-managed and help protect your sender reputation (critical especially since most clients are on a shared IP). Not all MAP do this as seamlessly as they do.
- Some of the features like the email builder and landing page builder seem like they've been neglected. They aren't as drag-and-drop friendly for marketers who don't know how to code. In fact, non-enterprise platforms like MailChimp do a far better job in this area.
- The limitations of automation can be a bit frustrating. As good as the integration with Salesforce is, you cannot do something as basic as trigger a rule based on a field change. (e.g. when the date for this field gets populated or updated, add to list or do this). This is not possible as an automation rule or even in their engagement studio. With other platforms, this functionality seems pretty standard.
- Engagement studio has come a long way, and while it's far more eloquent with its drag and drop UI, functionality-wise, it's still behind some of the others.
- This feature also seems like it's been neglected. The reporting leaves a lot to be desired unless you pay for B2B analytics, which is an upcharge. You can't even do something as simple as download the report in PDF format, which is a shame because there are some graphics and callouts in list email reports that would be better if they were shareable. They still record metrics like printed email, which seems a bit dated.
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.
Solid all around. Not best in class at any one thing.
- 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.
Pardot - Awesome for Marketing Automation
- 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 and Salesforce Go Hand in Hand
- 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.
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.
Pardot delivers a great UX and broad functionality
- 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.
Community Management Radian6 Review
- 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
- 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
- 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).
- Lead nurturing
- Automation
- Sales-marketing alignment
- Campaign reporting
- Social media listening
- Social media management
- Social media monitoring
- B2C marketing automation
- 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.
Personalized Recommendations Done Right
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.
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.