Pardot

Lead capture.

Email marketing.

Lead scoring.

It has limited reporting capabilities.

Landing page creation can be improved.

Dated User interface.

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.

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.

Salesforce and Pardot are like a single tool, I think because of the excellent integration.

Simple interface

Ability to gradually increase new customers

Very few customization options

The reports are not the most detailed

Easy to create visually appealing emails

Salesforce integration

List segmentation

Versioning

Support

Form completion actions are good.

Ease of use.

Takes far less time to get hands-on.

Awesome integration with SFDC.

Very simple to launch email campaigns.

Don't limit on the number of automation rules to be used.

Add the time as well to schedule engagement emails.

Build a global module email template in Pardot.

Segmenting by one or two variables is simple and intuitive.

Changing email language is simple and quick.

Options for integration

Segmenting beyond two variables is not easy, or well-supported.

The UI and navigating through the platform can be time-consuming.

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 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.

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.

Integrate with Salesforce

Visual Email Workflows

Customer Insights

Time-consuming to teach new users.

Only one type of attribution.

Pricey!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Integrates wonderfully with Salesforce.

Adds important insights to your existing CRM data.

Can customize easily to fit your needs.

Strong customer support.

Doesn't integrate too well with other data third-party apps.

Too many features are only available at higher levels.

Doesn't have as robust an email integration tool like HubSpot.

Market segmentation.

Impact analysis.

UI can be somewhat complex.

Requires careful attention to naming syntax when creating new campaigns etc.

Pardot syncs with our database, Salesforce and works seamlessly in updating records with individuals. Having this sync allows everyone in the organization to know where the last communication was and where they stand.

Pardot's A/B testing is the easiest A/B testing to use and communicate differently with individuals based on reporting. You are able to test this A/B before sending out an email unlike other platforms. The A/B testing is time saving and effective when trying to communicate with our audience.

Pardot's engagement studio is very easy to not only set-up but to follow. They set up their engagement platform in a way that you can see it overall and follow it like a flow chart, allowing the creator to truly understand where the emails/individuals are doing. The reporting of the engagement studios is detailed and very accessible.

Pardot is not easy to teach others and takes multiple hours to truly teach to someone in the organization so they can understand the platform as a whole.

My organization was trying to set up an automate campaign based on birthdays and send these emails out based on their birthday day going a month out, a week out and on the day of. This was very difficult to achieve and the customer service could not provide assistance. The answer came from the Pardot blog and other users working together. Birthday campaigns are used by many non profits and this should be fixed so it is easier to implement.

Creating lists in Pardot for you to send emails to can be difficult and takes time. There are many steps when trying to create certain lists of an audience.

The integration with Salesforce is second to none. If you are using Salesforce, you should be using Pardot. It makes everything seamless.

Pardot's Engagement Studio gives us opportunities to communicate to current customers based on their behavior -- plus, all Salesforce users have complete visibility into what our prospects are engaging with.

Our customer success manager is amazing. She is always so fast to respond, and if she doesn't have an answer, she will do whatever it takes to find it!

The general customer support (ticketing system) is horrible. I wait, on average, 10 days for any sort of response.

The email builder lacks basic functionality. We have to complete workarounds for nearly everything other than simple text blocks, including centering text and adding buttons. Even with our old email system (which was not robust at all), those functions were built in and easy to use. The template builder is clunky and hard to use. We are waiting patiently for a drag-and-drop email builder!

There are certain email completion actions that don't currently exist and should. For example, when a prospect clicks on a link in an email, we cannot notify the account's support rep. Salesforce could not provide a workaround for this.

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

Lead scoring. We associate prospects actions with a score. That way we have a system to know which prospects are more likely to close when.

Email campaigns. You can set up not a single email campaign, but a set of them, all interconnected, so you can design (and control) your customer journey.

Lead management. By having Pardot as a part of our Salesforce instance, you have a complete integration between Marketing and Sales. You know where the lead is sitting all the team, and you can take action on the real-time data you see. The marketing team will nurture leads up until they are ready for a sales representative to jump in.

The implementation can be a little rough. Unlike other modern systems, like HubSpot, Pardot will require more attention, in both implementation and configuration. Your team will have to study and learn how to use it. It will take time to get it right. I highly recommend you do this process with an implementer.

Lead scoring for large sales organizations would be very useful.

We found it didn't integrate as well with Salesforce as we wanted it to and was not great.

Building your email templates was not user-friendly or easy to customize. Content builder in Marketing Cloud is much better and user-friendly.

Great for top of the funnel and to only do lead nurturing- I wouldn't recommend it for marketing/communications to existing customers.

Email broadcasts are professional and clean

Email templates are well thought out and provide a number of good b2b solutions

SMS is involved and functional.

SMS could be more thought out and engaging.

Email is not as sophisticated as in Marketing Cloud.

Users are not as easily up to speed as they are with Marketing Cloud.

The whole experience seems a bit piece meal.

Extremely clean and user-friendly dashboard

Unlimited automation branching

Strong customer service team

Extremely pricey - not good for small companies

Solution only B2B focus

Not many integration options