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Pardot delivers a great UX and broad functionality
January 29, 2020

Pardot delivers a great UX and broad functionality

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot

Almost 5 years ago, we implemented a stand-alone license of Pardot for the CenturyLink Hybrid Cloud and IT Solutions product portfolio. I was the primary administrator of the tool and was deeply involved in rolling it out to our site for activity tracking of all visitors, forms management, prospect auditing, list management, email marketing, event promotion, drip campaigns and critical customer notifications. My internal customers have been Product Managers, Lifecycle Management teams, Billing, Operations and Product Engineering. We made the decision not to integrate with Salesforce.com, which simplified the rollout but limited our ability to engage the sales force to drive product adoption. In retrospect, I think it would have been beneficial to invest in Salesforce integration, as we're now moving toward much broader use of the application across the enterprise.
  • Forms, particularly customized forms called "Form Handlers" in Pardot.
  • Email reporting. Great detail and insights.
  • Email templates and drafts are really confusing. I trained various people to create their own templates, but they consistently got confused between publishing a template or just saving a draft, and where they needed to go back to find it.
  • Their help process is broken, at least for our particular use case. Because we have an enterprise license for Salesforce (even though we had a separate license for Pardot) whenever I needed help with something, I'd get stuck down a rabbit hole and couldn't submit a ticket.
  • Early on, we were able to successfully drive revenue by engaging visitors through targeted email campaigns to convert them to CenturyLink Cloud customers.
  • We use Pardot extensively for notifications to customers about End of Life initiatives that have resulted in significant cost savings for the company, as we've been able to turn down costly infrastructure and eliminate low-performing platforms.
Pardot is definitely one of the best tools out there. It's got a great UX and it is intuitive, easy to learn, and fast. Some of their naming conventions are a little bit confusing, like Users vs. Prospects. Published Templates vs. Draft Templates. List Emails vs. Sent Emails vs. Email Drafts vs. One-to-One Emails. The WYSIWYG editor is slightly problematic, in that you can accidentally make the editor crash by clicking on the View panel instead of the Edit panel. I must have done that a couple dozen times, to my great agitation. Pardot is quite expensive, so an operation with a smaller budget might have a hard time justifying the expense. It probably makes less sense if you're not going to integrate with Salesforce.
25,000 to 100,000
Both
Adobe Acrobat DC, Concur Travel and Expense, Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft), Microsoft Office 365, UserTesting, Clarity PPM (formerly CA Project Portfolio Management), Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business (formerly Lync), UberConference, Atom, GitHub, Trello, SolarWinds Papertrail, SAP SuccessFactors, Smallpdf, MaxMind, Braintree, OptumRx, WordPress, Intercom
I found Pardot really powerful and versatile. We didn't use the Drip Automation feature as much as I would have liked, but that's just because we didn't have many use cases to justify it. We were able to build out a complex custom CSS for our email templates and appreciated the rendering capabilities that allowed us to preview how our CSS would display across all the most popular browsers and mobile platforms.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature Ratings

9.7
WYSIWYG email editor
9
Dynamic content
Not Rated
Ability to test dynamic content
Not Rated
Landing pages
9
A/B testing
10
Mobile optimization
10
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
10
Triggered drip sequences
10
10.0
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
10
Data quality management
10
Automated sales alerts and tasks
Not Rated
10.0
Calendaring
10
Event/webinar marketing
10
Not Rated
Social sharing and campaigns
Not Rated
10.0
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
7.7
API
10
Role-based workflow & approvals
5
Customizability
8
Integration with Salesforce.com
Not Rated

Using Pardot

12 - 
  • Product Management
  • Technical Writing
  • Lifecycle Management
  • Product Owners
2 - Some HTML coding experience is needed. Comfort with marketing automation in general would be good to have.
  • Lifecycle notifications to customers.
  • Pricing and security notifications to customers.
  • Setting up landing pages to promote special events.
  • Engaging visitors to our site for lead nurture.
Unfortunately, there's no appetite for carrying this license expense in my new business unit.

Evaluating Pardot and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
The feature set was superior, at the end of the day. The UX is more elegant than Marketo, and we liked the ability to customize forms more easily in Pardot.
I wouldn't change a thing. I'm disappointed to be losing the tool.