Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ease of use in all things marketing automation. With Pardot, even a beginner can start building a landing page, creating emails, and using forms for lead capture almost right away.
Segmentation in marketing is king for making sure your message is relevant. Pardot makes it very easy to create segmented target lists- based on industry, level of engagement, job title, and almost any factor you'd like to consider.
Pardot is great for dynamic nurture programs. In a fairly short amount of time, you can build a completely automated nurture program that can guide prospects through the buying cycle. This can save a marketer a lot of time and manual labor.

Cons

I'd like to see more customization in the forms. The forms work like a charm, but the options to tweak the look and feel of forms are limited in my opinion.
In all my time with Pardot and speaking with other Pardot users, everyone is in love with almost everything Pardot has done- except the email builder and landing page builder. In the past it has been easy to use But definitely a bit clunky and could sometimes cause you to spend too much time on a small details because the html behind the builder gets muddled. Just in the last couple months, Pardot has come out with a new email builder and responsive templates which is huge. My experience with these though has been limited.
I wish Pardot and Salesforce were more closely/better integrated. Getting the two systems to sing to each other the way you want can require a decent bit of backend labor. This is not necessarily the fault of either system- it's just that Salesforce and Pardot each have their own terminology and method of operating. Hoping this will change now that Salesforce has acquired Pardot.

Return on Investment

Pardot has had a hugely positive impact on the visibility to the effectiveness of marketing efforts. We are using Pardot to understand effectiveness of our website, emails, and different campaigns. As a direct result, we've improved our conversion ratio across the board.
The ease of use has allowed us to be much more efficient. Entry level employees are supporting high-level marketing functions, leading to better efficiency and effectiveness of the whole organization.
After using Pardot for a year, the improvement in reach and effectiveness of our marketing programs has more than doubled website traffic. Not to mention, the visitors are more relevant to our business.

Marketing automation tools are more important than ever to "conversation marketing" initiatives that prevail today. Pardot supports this extremely well. Functionally the product is extremely strong and the company's rate of innovation is rapid and relevant- hence the addition of responsive templates in the last couple months. In Marketo and Act-on, I see no great differentiating factors that would justify changing. And as important as anything else, Pardot has an INCREDIBLE service team. They are quick to respond and always have a solution.

Likelihood to Recommend

I have not seen anything in other Marketing automation tools that positions them above Pardot. Pardot is very strong functionally, and continues to innovate relevant features at fairly rapid rate. The important thing to ask is- what would you like to do with a marketing automation system? Our marketing team can do everything we'd like to do- faster and with better visibility (metrics, reporting)- with Pardot. This allows us to understand what is working well, what isn't, and how we should adapt our efforts. In short, it improves marketing effectiveness. I would also consider service as a determining factor. If I could, I would give the service team at Pardot a 12 on a scale of 10. They solve problems quickly and even make great suggestions when their isn't an issue to be solved.

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