PARDOT - DON'T DO IT!

We tried to use Pardot to automate an outbound lead generation process we were using Outlook to achieve. When we moved the process over to Pardot, our e-mail open rate dropped in half. This was mostly due to switching from text based e-mail to .html (almost all of Pardot functionality cannot be used with text based e-mail). We tried to duplicate the look of text based e-mails in html, but the open rate did not improve. We then used Pardot with text based e-mail, and recovered some of loss in open rate, however at that point there was no need to use Pardot because all other functionality was lost. We worked with Pardot and their on-boarding team through this process and they had no useful suggestions. We tried to terminate our contract and they said we could not. So we have been billed for a one year subscription for an expensive tool that is useless. Needless to say we are no longer using Salesforce for anything in our business. Working with Salesforce is like dealing with Time Warner or AT&T.