Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 7
Author: Hannah Slaven

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We decided to purchase marketing automation software to aid us in our online marketing efforts (mainly e-blasts), to simplify some of our marketing processes via the automation features, and to give us better analytics in regards to marketing campaigns. It is currently just being used by myself in the Marketing department, but we hope to have our Sales team using it within the next 6 months.

For the most part, it did fulfill the needs that we expected it to fill.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The email creation interface is simple and streamlined. It makes creating templates and custom emails extremely simple.
Pardot's support is excellent. Their help desk is prompt and friendly, and our representative is always on-hand if we need her. Their implementation expert was also very helpful. Also, their ideas forum (where users can post ideas on how to improve the product) is highly regarded by their development team, so they are regularly implementing user-suggested ideas (which I've found rare for most companies).
We've used Pardot's API quite a bit to build custom programs to help us manage our data better, and it's quite straightforward.
Pardot does a good job of handling and gathering Prospect data.

Cons

The automation features (specifically with drip campaigns) are, unfortunately, limited. Pardot has powerful segmentation features, but oftentimes when sending out automated emails, you want to DO more with prospects after they complete an action, but Pardot has limited support for this.
Dynamic email content is not included in the basic package, which is a huge inconvenience for us. We made a significant investment in the product, and I feel this is a silly thing to charge extra for.
Pardot did not adapt well to our existing marketing campaign structure, and thus we had to create a couple work-arounds to help us manage our marketing efforts that unfortunately render some of the analytics useless.

Return on Investment

Pardot has given us more knowledge about our prospects, and thus more selling/marketing power.
Pardot has given us a much more personal and dynamic way of interacting with prospects.

Alternatives Considered

Act-On,Adobe Marketing Cloud,Marketo Marketing Automation

We selected Pardot because of Salesforce's reputation and because the interface was much more intuitive/modern than the other systems. We knew little about the features or how to compare them across platforms.

Likelihood to Renew

Right now we are deciding to renew because of the initial time investment of setting up the system. We're open to other solutions, now that we know enough to better compare features.

Likelihood to Recommend

We were told that Pardot works well as a standalone application, since we do not have a CRM. While that is true, many of Pardot's features rely on conversion data that is provided by a CRM, so our analytics are quite basic. Pardot may not be the best solution if you do not have a CRM to integrate with.

Additionally, if your organization relies heavily on tradeshows or other marketing events, there may be another solution out there. Pardot only tracks "Campaigns" and has no way to track sub-campaigns. Meaning that for a specific tradeshow (in our case, IMTS in Chicago), we can EITHER track the leads from IMTS as a whole ongoing campaign, taking into consideration every IMTS show we've ever attended, OR we can track the leads from one specific show. Ideally, the marketing automation software would be able to track both.

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