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Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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

Overview

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

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

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

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

Popular Features

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

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Account Engagement

$1,250

Cloud
per month

Engagement

$1,250

Cloud
per month

Intelligence

$3,000

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

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

Offerings

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

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $1,250 per month per installation
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Product Demos

Pardot Engagement Studio: How-to Demo

YouTube

How to Use Pardot Salesforce Engage

YouTube

Pardot Demo: A Pardot Introduction for Beginners

YouTube

Pardot Marketing Automation Demo

YouTube

Inspire Meaningful Moments Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Demo

YouTube

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: B2B Marketing Automation Overview Demo

YouTube
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Features

Email & Online Marketing

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

7.9
Avg 7.8

Lead Management

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

7.6
Avg 7.7

Campaign Management

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

7.9
Avg 7.6

Social Media Marketing

Using social media networks to help amplify marketing endeavors.

6.8
Avg 7.5

Reporting & Analytics

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

7.6
Avg 7.5

Platform & Infrastructure

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

7.6
Avg 7.6
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Product Details

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

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

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features

Email & Online Marketing Features

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

Lead Management Features

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

Campaign Management Features

  • Supported: Calendaring
  • Supported: Event/webinar marketing

Social Media Marketing Features

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

Reporting & Analytics Features

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

Platform & Infrastructure Features

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

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Screenshots

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

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Technical Details

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

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts at $1250.

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

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

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

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Reviews and Ratings

(1351)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Vinny Poliseno | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Dynamic Content.
  • Progressive Profiling.
  • Lead Grading.
  • Lead Scoring.
  • Sometimes using the WYSIWYG is not completely intuitive when using dynamic content.
  • Campaign Management within the product. It syncs to SFDC campaigns very well but the native campaign management within the product doesn't connect directly to SFDC campaigns.
  • Higher qualified leads getting into the hands of my sales team.
  • Using scoring & grading to help prioritize lead follow-up.
  • Delivering relevant content to proper segments.
I have been extremely happy with the product and I've received some great feedback so far from my sales users.
I think the product is just going to get better now they are a part of the SFDC family.
27
SMT, Sales and Marketing
1
It is just me right now. Might be a second eventually but I am the internal admin of the product.
  • Marketing Automation
  • Lead Grading
  • Lead Score
  • Lead Round Robin
  • Drip Programs
  • Keyword evaluation
  • Sales Intelligence
Act-On
Eloqua, Marketo, Genius.

Eloqua was too expensive. Marketo, is a very slick product, and the pricing they offered us for the lowest-level version (Small and Medium Business) was competitive, but still about $3,000 per year more than Pardot. One big issue with Marketo though was the very aggressive sales process. The sales rep was so aggressive that it ultimately soured us on the company. Genius is really more of a bulk email tool and focuses less on the automation side of things which is really what we needed. It's a good starter tool, but does not have the depth of functionality that we were looking for.
  • Implemented in-house
N/A
It's a SaaS tool so implementation of the product is a few clicks on your end. Connections to other services are pretty simple and straightforward. Again they have documentation with images walking you through the process.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
When brought on board you get an implementation specialist who provides you a timeline & tasks to be completed. We received 30 mins per week for a screen share to get all of those questions answered and he was very responsive to email replies with screencasts showing my faults or misconfigures.
Though the product was easy to pick up and very relatable to similar marketing automation platforms...I would not recommend just jumping and running on your own. They offer on-demand trainings covering the entire product with two one-hour welcome webinars which you give an overall sense of the product. You'll want to read the documentation and watch the training videos to ensure long-term success.
You'll want to configure your fields to match your custom CRM fields, configure scoring as it makes sense to your business along with grading profiles.
No
There support team is extremely helpful and very responsive...also all of the their documentation is widely available and top notch. http://www.pardot.com/help/
Back to my previous statement their support team is AWESOME. Depending on your service you may get better or implementations done for you during install but I was on a very quick install that was tied to another project so I did 90% on my own.
Very easy to understand GUI.
I have no had any issue with any connectivity/availability issues with the product.
There are various connectors to the product to other services (SFDC, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Bit.ly, Social Accounts, etc.). They all seem to sync very well and frequently.
  • Salesforce.com.
  • Google Analytics.
  • Google AdWords.
  • bit.ly.
  • GoodData.
  • GoToWebinar.
  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
Extremely easy.
  • Not right now.
N/A
Pretty easy as I don't play the sales game. I am pretty transparent through the whole process and after reviewing 3 other vendors, we were quoted & accessing the product within 3 weeks.
13 month term with 1 month free to move from Act-On. Was able to talk down price to a nice point to only pay a little bit per month more than we were paying for Act-On.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Marketing Automation in general can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Meaning that these applications do so much, so where do you start first. Here is a quick glimpse into what Pardot does well for Advantix:
  • Integration with CRM's. As I shared earlier Salesforce is one of Advantix' main operating platforms and with the use of this system over the last 10 years has become highly customized. Integration for us was important as we wanted to be able to drive specific account/contact records into Pardot. With the support of some minor code, Pardot + Salesforce met our need to be able to automatically send any new contacts created in Salesforce to Pardot.
  • Identifying Implicit Behavior - Out of the 4 MA's apps we researched, Pardot was one of the applications that included Prospects Activities CRM integration as part of the monthly subscription fee. There is something to be said about the analytical data you receive from Google which is quite high-level (quantitative data about interaction with a corporate website), it's a whole different thing to get in-depth feedback as to your prospects 5 W's (who, what, when, where, why) and be able to build out marketing campaigns, dynamic content, etc tailored to prospect segments based on their behavior. Pardot allows us to do that. The possibilities to connect become endless.
  • Supporting Sales & Operations marketing efforts - Building brand awareness is important for any business and while you have sales reps prospecting, operations staff supporting, Pardot's engine provides businesses with a way for us to duplicate our efforts to support marketing initiatives across multiple depts.
  • Not sure if it is on Pardot's road map; however, the only downfall I see with this application currently is the ability to specify mutiple url's within an email (drip program or list email) that if clicked will allow the action to send that prospect to another drip program. For example, you have created an email that contains 3 urls for three different products you sell. If the prospect clicks on Widget A link and Widget C link I would like to send a follow-on email or send that prospect to both a drip on Widget A and a drip on Widget C.
  • Today, Pardot only allows you to specify a single url to add a completion action.
  • Marketing Automation as a whole instantly brings quantifiable benefits to any business. Initially, Pardot provided something that Advantix was lacking, more visibility and insight. The follow-on to that was the growth of knowledge, better communication, lead identification and development, etc...
  • With the business won from utilizing this application it has more than paid for itself.
The old saying: If it ain't broke, why fix it.
Marketing Automation is a healthy choice for any growing business. It is important when evaluating that you define your core goals and objectives of what your business wants to gain from such a technology. From there you will be able to better understand which application best fits your needs. For us our core goals and objectives were met by selecting Pardot and as Pardot develops and grows in their applications capabilities so do we.
10
Marketing, Sales, IT, Executive
3
Marketing, IT/Development
  • Pardot is used to accomplish a plethora of items not visible to Advantix prior to our two year engagement including, but not limited to:
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Capture
  • Implicit and Explicit Activities
  • Email Marketing
  • Social Data
  • Detailed reporting and Analytics
  • Connectors to 3rd party apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Online Meeting Apps
Not applicable
For over 10 years, we have been utilizing Salesforce as our core businesses operating system, so when evaluating Marketing Automation apps we went to the App Exchange to search for the best. Our search included Marekto, Eloqua, Manticore, and Pardot.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house
When implementing any new application I would recommend that you have folks that understand your business processes, tools and systems and IT/Development represented.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
When we implemented Pardot I was impressed to see that they used Project Path (Basecamp.com) to on-board new clients (training was part of on-boarding process). On-going, I have been extremely impressed by our Client Advocate.
The topics and content are well thought out, but Pardot I have to be honest the last webinar I attended the guy sounded drunk. My team and I continue to attend the webinars as knowledge is key and who best to put on a clinic than that of the folks working within the company!
Yes and No. As I have shared already this application is very intuitive; however, due to the sophistication of our CRM environment I have found myself needing to work with online support and/or our client advocate specifically on complicated scenarios.
Advantix has 60K+ account/contact records within our CRM and we did not want to load all of that data in Pardot. So custom code was built so that accounts/contacts associated with a specific record type would automatically load in Pardot.
No
As a Pardot customer I have experienced support via online to live chat and have been very happy with the SLA's.
Pardot built an intuitive application.
Over the past two years, I have experienced high availability of this application.
Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.
  • Not applicable
On a scale of 1-10, 9 for during and post sales.
There was really no need to negotiate as the pricing offered was extremely competitive and comparable to the other 4 MA apps we evaluated (Marketo, Pardot, Manticore, and Eloqua). Advantix leadership likes month to month contracts and Pardot was on the only one offering such a term so that resulted in Pardot receiving a slightly higher evaluation score.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • It does a great job of lead scoring before connecting with our CRM. However, the three systems we use for our CRM, CMS and marketing automation are more or less duct taped together. Meaning, while they are great tools, they were either implemented incorrectly from the get go and have not been able to be easily changed as we have grown rapidly...or...they just aren't made to work together.
  • What it does extremely well is track our prospect activity incredibly well. I am thoroughly impressed with the ability to track social media activity alongside email and web activity too.
  • It is terribly cumbersome when it comes to trying to pull information from it for our reporting needs. Every asset we have on our website (white papers, webinars, etc.) is linked to a segmentation list. This list keeps record of every person who hits a landing page and thank you page for a particular asset. However, in order to take a snapshot of the unique responses from each asset for any specific period of time requires a few hours of list pulls and a few more spent in Excel, merging together this exported information.
  • I like that it has the ability to post to social channels, however, the connectors are not that useful. So when I try and post a blog post to our Facebook page from within Pardot, it doesn't give me an option to choose the correct thumbnail to use. Just little quirks like that.
  • We use Pardot to build out the top of the sales/marketing funnel. The records of prospect activity and the number of individual responses per asset are used to build out the top of the funnel.
  • Full disclosure: I have not used any other marketing automation tool so while the ROI is great from being able to do my job, I cannot say if the amount of time I spend using Pardot is above, below, or on par with other marketing automation tools.
The amount of time it would take to move to a different platform right now would not be an option. Pardot is familiar and useful for what we use it for but I think we would be better suited moving to either a fresh re-install of Pardot or a different platform.
I am mostly concerned with reporting and social media/inbound traffic, not automating marketing emails. We use that aspect of Pardot extensively and from what I know, it works just fine.
5
CMO, Marketing Analytics Consultant, Inbound Marketing Manager, and two other mid-level marketing managers. This represents the entire marketing team.
1
I say 1 because while it's a marketing owned system, we have an IT consultant that we use if we need to make any major changes to the code.
  • The tool is used to capture responses on both our website as well as serve as our email automation for our marketing team. The information captured here is based on a point system that we set up and as unique prospects come back to our site (or receive emails from us), their activity is logged and ranked. Once a unique prospect reaches an appropriate threshold level, their user information is pushed over to our CRM where the inside sales pick up on the lead.
Did not switch from anything. Was already in use when I joined the company.
Was already in use when I joined the company.
  • Don't know
I cannot verify this, but I have a suspicion that our implementation was not done correctly the first time and as we've grown into a larger company, it's becoming more noticeable that things might need a refresh.
  • Self-taught
Since this was the first marketing automation tool I've used, it was easy to pick up. However, others on my team coming from Marketo or Eloqua have said that it's difficult to transition just because things look the same, but have slight variations that make it a bit confusing.
We use Clickability/Limelight for our CMS and Sugar for our CRM. Paired with Pardot, these systems need some special care when working together. This is predominantly where our custom configuration is located.
Customer/technical support is great when it comes to basic platform issues that come up. But when it comes to variables/things we've done within Pardot, it's more difficult to get a problem solved as fast.
It's a very usable product. Nothing jumps out to me as being difficult to understand. However, that being said, the amount of steps it takes to do my reporting is much higher than I would like it to be. Again, I have no exposure to other marketing automation tools and Pardot accomplishes the tasks and responsibilities that are required of me.
I find that during the week, it takes longer for me to pull the segmentation lists (responses per asset on our website), but that their servers are less trafficked during the weekends. I have not experienced an outage in the almost two years I've used it.
  • Clickability/Limelight CMS
  • Sugar CRM
Was already in place when I joined the company.
  • I would LOVE to switch to using Wordpress or Joomla for our CMS and Salesforce for our CRM. I think it would solve a lot of our grief.
Yes, they are supported.
Our reps are very nice to talk with and I have not had a bad experience when them.
n/a
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