Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Jillian Papa

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pardot is predominately used by our marketing and communications team. However, all departments leverage the usefulness of the product. It assists us in reaching our various audiences and segmenting communications to them. It also helps us see and understand what our audiences are doing to engage with us online. Pardot is a great marketing and communications tool.

Pros and Cons

Automation. Pardot has great automation functionalities for emails and other communications to our network. ex: list building features
Wealth of functionality and features. ex: engagement scoring
User friendly. It's not very hard to catch on and there are lots of resources to leverage.
Salesforce connection! This is probably #1 because SF is our CRM and it integrates seamlessly.

Pricey. I work for a nonprofit so it was a big decision to go with Pardot but it is one of the best in its class.
You must have the capacity/time/resources to actually use the functionalities and features. Otherwise, it could be a waste of money.

Return on Investment

Engagement formula has allowed us to see to what extent our audience is engaging with us. What are they doing, how often are they doing it, etc. This helps us paint a picture of our network.
The segmentation for emailing has been very helpful for our organization. This allows for more targeted email campaigns to certain groups we know would be interested/benefited rather than loosing folks due to emails that they maybe don't care about (or we've sent too many!)
The connection to Salesforce really is a game changer. Now our CRM database and our marketing tool are connected for seamlessly integration.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

25,000 to 100,000

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Other Software Used

Salesforce Community Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

I think if a company has Salesforce, it's kind of a no brainer. Pardot integrates really well with Salesforce. I also believe that the set up to link the two is free (you just need the resources to do it). Given what I know, I would recommend Pardot. I say that because I am not a marketing or communications person so I feel I'm unable to give it much higher than an 8 having not used all of the marketing features myself. For my job, I leverage the engagement scoring that Pardot offers and that is a wonderful tool.

Pardot: Above Par

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot