Skip to main content
TrustRadius
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.

Read more
Recent Reviews
Read all reviews

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 (140)
    8.5
    85%
  • Email deliverability reporting (120)
    8.4
    84%
  • Dynamic content (141)
    8.1
    81%
  • List management (117)
    7.6
    76%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

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
Return to navigation

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
Return to navigation

Features

Email & Online Marketing

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

8
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.

6.9
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.

7.8
Avg 7.6
Return to navigation

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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(1351)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use evergage to personalize customer experience and show them contextual ads or products they can use. We also use it to build customer profiles and make recommendations to them so they have better experience with our products.
  • Building Customer profile e.g. also customer about there business needs
  • Contextual Ads
  • Banners & interstitials
  • It is not very easy to use for a marketer. You need a dedicated technical guy to use it
  • UI/UX can be improved
  • Support response can be improved
If you have a technical dedicated user then I would recommend it. It's a personalization tool, but the user cannot be just any marketer.
  • Improved customer engagement
  • Reduced time to execute caimpaigns
Monetate. We are using both Monetate and evergage. Evergage is being used more on the control panel side.
Marketing
You need to be lil technical. You need to know basic HTML
  • Contextual ADs
  • Customer profiler
  • Banners
  • Reduce support calls
  • Improve personaliztion
  • Cross selling products
  • Improve customer engagement
  • Improve NPS
  • Customer help me modals
  • Improve sales
  • Reduce churn & customer support
We use it often to improve customer engagement
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
How quickly somebody can use the product to improve customer personalization and engagement.
I 'll probably look for a product that is more easy to use and more intuitive.
Yes
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
It took descent amount of time to get it implement but it was done correctly.
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.
It's is very complex without inperson training. It is not intuitive at all.
Response time is slow. Have to repeat requirements multiple times.
Yes
We have premium support
No
We wanted to build a customer profile tool. System was not built for that find of functionality but they helped us build a profiler.
It is not easy to use.
  • Marketing
  • Support
  • Marketing
We are using it for millions of visitors every months
I never had any reliability issues. It was always up
Performance of evergage system is pretty good.
  • Google Analytics
  • Exact Target
  • Billing systems
  • BI System
Data import export every day.
  • File import/export
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
  • Javascript widgets
Integration with evergage can be time consuming depending of the systems you are trying to integerate
Plan ahead and do it in phases
They were in constant communication with all key stakeholders.
Easy to work but slow to respond
NA
No
Steven Steier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • The interface and work flow for completing marketing tasks like sending emails or designing forms is clean and easy to learn. It allows the people generating marketing pieces to get them completed and in use quickly.
  • Pardot ties into a number of different CRM programs. In trying to work with all those different products it does not have a great interface with any of them. We used Marketo before Pardot and it is primarily designed to work with SalesForce. In Marketo any field changes made in SalesForce are copied by Marketo with no additional work by the user. In Pardot if you add a new field or add additional values to an existing picklist in SalesForce you also have to go into Pardot and do some additional work to be able to use the new value or new field in Pardot. Pardot also will not allow you to use the custom objects you create in SalesForce to either build lists or as a field on a form
Pardot has a good solid product that works well as long as you are not doing a lot of customization in SalesForce or as long as you don't have a huge database of prospects.
  • We are able to get a email out to the target about 20% faster than with Marketo. Our year over year sales have increased by at least 10% in the 2 years we have been using Pardot
Eloqua and Genius where the other two we looked at.
Genius did not offer the marketing team all the tools they were looking for
Eloqua had more features than we needed and was more expensive than our budget allowed
25,000 to 100,000
B2B
94
We have people in marketing, sales and customer support using Pardot. For sales we have both inside and outside sales.using the data from Pardot. The marketing team we use it for a number of marketing functions so we have graphic designers, website designers, writers and our online marketing specialists using the program on a regular basis.
2
We have two part-time people supporting the product. The marketing team has a go-to person on how to set up forms and generate emails and I support the product in terms of its interface with SalesForce and in generating lists. The person who works the interface with your CRM needs a strong background in both Pardot and your CRM to insure your fields remain in synch.. The marketing person along with their marketing skills needs to have astrong grasp of Pardot itself
  • We use this to send mass emails, track website traffic, and generate forms for our website to allow prospects and customers to request more information.
We have already made the decision to renew the software. The marketing department is very happy with the tool and is not interested in even looking at something new.
We were using Marketo before Pardot.
  • Implemented in-house
Pardot assigned a specific point man for us to work with for the first 90 days and that was very helpful. I don't feel they made a huge effort to understand why we did things a certain way. They had a way to use the software and did not want us to deviate from it.
At that point we had been on Marketo for 3 years and had a very effective process in place and we did not want to make many changes to that process. We just wanted a software that would allow us to make that process run smoother which Pardot had trouble understanding.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught
They did a good job of covering the basics but most of the more in depth functions we had to learn on our own
I would never recommend anyone bypass available training especially when it is free as it is with Pardot
No
In general I have been very happy with the support my biggest issue is the fact that they dont have an easy way to call support directly
This rating is really an average.
The usability of generating and tracking marketing activities is a 10
The usability of the tool to generate lists is a 7
The usability of the interface with the CRM is a 5
We have had very few incidents of the program being down. While I know there have been some I cant remember exactly when the last one occured
In general the software runs a little slow all the time and there have been a few instances where we were waiting several hours for a function to complete
  • SalesForce.
The integration was not complex to setup. The harder part is making sure the SalesForce and Pardot remain in synch. If you add new values or fields to Pardot or SalesForce you have to do some manual updating in the other program to have both stay in synch. It has gotten a little better since we first started using it but they still are a long way from a total synch
  • None at this time.
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
No others that I am aware of at this time
The initial setup was easy to get started but keeping the integration maintained over the long run can get a little cumbersome if you do a lot of custom fields and objects in SalesForce. Now that SalesForce owns them i keep hoping this area sees major improvement but so far we have just seen some minor changes
You need to make sure that the person who maintains the fields and data in your CRM is the same person who maintains the fields and data in Pardot.If those two areas don't remain in synch. You can have all kinds of problems hitting your target markets with your emails
They have generally been pretty easy to work with both during the sales process and after. The were bought by another company after we did our implementation and from what i have seen and heard it is not as easy a process as it was when Pardot was a stand alone company
They were great until they got bought. Now they seem harder to work with and don't have as personal a connection as they did when they where on their own. Maybe this is caused by them just trying to get used to being part of a new company and once they are completely integrated and comfortable with being owned things will go back to the old way
I was mostly involved in the purchase as a product evaluator. I did not have much to do with hammering out the final agreement.
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
Return to navigation