Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 9
Author: Colin White

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot Marketing Automation

Pros and Cons

Pros

Pardot is very easy to get up and running. We were able to set up basic email campaigns and landing pages within days of turning it on.
Pardot has very strong integration with webinar providers like Webex and GoToMeeting. If your organization is heavily dependent on webinars for lead generation or nurturing, then you should definitely consider Pardot.
Pardot's wizard-based interface for setting up the different marketing automation components makes it very user-friendly and suitable for non-technical users to implement and maintain.
Pardot was one of the first marketing automation platforms to integrate social media channels and enable marketers to leverage them for lead generation and nurturing.

Cons

While Pardot's ease of use makes it a terrific tool for most companies, I could envision larger companies or companies with complex or diverse product offerings or complex sales organizations running into some issues. Pardot does a great job building in most of the features that marketers need, and relasing new features on a frequent basis, but it is not as user-customizable as some competing offerings. Now that Pardot is part of the Salesforce family however, I expect this will change.

Return on Investment

Pardot definitely helped us increase the volume and scale of programs we were able to run. This included giving us the increased ability to test different program elements in order to optimize campaign results.

Key questions to ask Pardot during the selection process would be mainly around how they plan to handle any requirements for customization, especially for larger enterprises with complex lead scoring and lead routing requirements. How will their relationship with Salesforce help them improve in this area going forward?

Using Pardot Marketing Automation

Likelihood to Renew

When we selected Pardot, it did not have as much mindshare in the industry as other platforms, but it is one of the most capable marketing automation platforms I have seen. Though their profile has raised considerably since being acquired by ExactTarget and then Salesforce, they still seem to fly under the radar a bit, but I consider Pardot to be one of the unsung heroes of marketing automation. Pardot has looked for the features that marketers need most, and incorporated them into a very easy-to-use platform that does not require heavy IT support to implement and maintain. Pardot also does a great job listening to customer feedback and using it to inform their product roadmap.

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Pardot - the Unsung Hero of Marketing Automation

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