Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 4
Author: Kyle Moloo

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pardot is used as the marketing automation tool for one of our clients. We manage it, create campaigns in it, run reporting, manage the integration with Salesforce, and maintain the integrity of the overall leads/customers/prospects database. Pardot is used to track website activity (form submissions) and trigger workflows for email marketing and contact organization/segmentation. It is also responsible for syncing information about contacts that we learn on our website with the sales team's CRM, Salesforce.

Pros and Cons

Ability to custom style emails, landing pages, and forms
Lots of customization options for workflows
Ability to use completion actions to assign contact to Salesforce campaigns

Visual builder for email and existing templates are clunky and hard to use without development knowledge
Integration with Salesforce still requires manual field mappings and creating properties separately in both systems so that sync will work properly
Workflows are linear, and it's difficult to use if/and statements based on custom property values

Return on Investment

Positive impact in that it's better than having no marketing automation solution in place.
Positive impact by having a way to directly route leads into CRM from the website without manual data entry.
It gives us basic reporting based on leads generated, which is limited, but still a positive.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot, Marketo, Act-On Software and SharpSpring

Pardot was less expensive than HubSpot or Marketo. Compared to Act-On, it was similar in price but had more features and the integration with Salesforce was better and natively supported. Compared to SharpSpring, it doesn't have the same strong features, but the integration with Salesforce, again, was stronger. Overall, Pardot isn't the best choice out of these, but it comes down to which platform your existing team is most familiar with and how much support the platform will give your team without billing extra.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

25,000 to 100,000

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Other Software Used

HubSpot, SharpSpring, Act-On Software

Likelihood to Recommend

Pardot is well suited if the cost is the most important factor when choosing a marketing automation system, especially if you're already using Salesforce. They don't charge as much per contact as HubSpot does, and you can even pay by total email sends (like Act-On). Pardot is less appropriate if you don't have a team in place with HTML/CSS proficiency. There are multiple instances when building emails, landing pages, form and workflows that you can get stuck if you don't go into the raw code and touch up what you're working on. Contact management and list building also have a bit of a learning curve as the UX can seem backward at times (how to add a contact to a list, how to create dynamic lists, etc.)

Affordable Marketing Automation with Good Salesforce Integration

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot