Decent Email Marketing Automation for B2B Companies
August 31, 2020
Decent Email Marketing Automation for B2B Companies
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Pardot
We primarily use Pardot as our core marketing automation platform in the Marketing department. Marketing is the administrator and primary user, but other departments like sales and customer success receive benefits as well through the connected alerts.
Pros
- The UI is pretty intuitive. I've used other enterprise platforms for marketing automation like Marketo and this is much cleaner.
- The integration with CRMs (particularly Salesforce) is a big part of the value.
- The way they manage sender reputation by automatically cleaning your lists is important, and Pardot does that well. For example, any hard bounced emails, automatically become unmailable and are quarantined by Pardot automatically. They also prevent role emails at import and flag certain email patterns as spam traps. All these things are well-managed and help protect your sender reputation (critical especially since most clients are on a shared IP). Not all MAP do this as seamlessly as they do.
Cons
- Some of the features like the email builder and landing page builder seem like they've been neglected. They aren't as drag-and-drop friendly for marketers who don't know how to code. In fact, non-enterprise platforms like MailChimp do a far better job in this area.
- The limitations of automation can be a bit frustrating. As good as the integration with Salesforce is, you cannot do something as basic as trigger a rule based on a field change. (e.g. when the date for this field gets populated or updated, add to list or do this). This is not possible as an automation rule or even in their engagement studio. With other platforms, this functionality seems pretty standard.
- Engagement studio has come a long way, and while it's far more eloquent with its drag and drop UI, functionality-wise, it's still behind some of the others.
- This feature also seems like it's been neglected. The reporting leaves a lot to be desired unless you pay for B2B analytics, which is an upcharge. You can't even do something as simple as download the report in PDF format, which is a shame because there are some graphics and callouts in list email reports that would be better if they were shareable. They still record metrics like printed email, which seems a bit dated.
- We've seen a positive ROI with Opportunities Influenced via Pardot Campaigns.
Pardot is a better price point compared to some of the other B2B platforms.
Some of the functionality may be lacking compared to some of the other B2B, and definitely B2C platforms.
Some of the functionality may be lacking compared to some of the other B2B, and definitely B2C platforms.
Do you think Salesforce Marketing Cloud delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Salesforce Marketing Cloud's feature set?
Yes
Did Salesforce Marketing Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Salesforce Marketing Cloud again?
Yes
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