Pardot is a hole-in-one marketing automation system.
Updated June 16, 2015
Pardot is a hole-in-one marketing automation system.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Pardot Marketing Automation
My company utilizes marketing automation to track behavioral trends and to make suggestions. We also utilize it as a substitute for plain workflow that would better serve the business. We have several landing pages that have forms included. We drive list creation from the forms which then, based on the behavior, drive further actions. We have both companies within our umbrella using Pardot, and I administer both instances. This solves the problem of marketing smart without having to code everything in APEX.
Pros
- Pardot DRIP can allow you to send an email to a list, then if a person opens that email, drive further actions like adding to a campaign, opening an activity or opportunity, or send out further communications in as simple or as complex way that the business deems necessary.
- Pardot's automated scoring system allows me to rank leads/contacts with more precision based off of who is or is not responding to our marketing strategy. This helps with determining the life cycle of certain promotions.
- Dynamic segmentation lists based off of CRM field values is amazing. I no longer have to to manually run reports or do an upload. I can, if I desire, but I can now administer based off of my segmentation fields, which negates having to constantly update. Pardot synchronization with the CRM takes care of this for me.
Cons
- Pardot could use some improvement in reporting. This is especially true for its integration offerings. I would love to see reports accessible in the CRM that are derived from DRIP or Email campaigns.
- Pardot could also allow internal delimiters on the connector (API) user. A use case would be for an org like mine having two companies with completely separate data and customers that cannot have cross pollination. If I could simply limit, for instance, the record types allowed to be seen by Pardot it would make life easier. Instead, now, I have to create custom profiles and roles and manage to get that to jive with the 200 or so custom lead assignments I have for our field sales staff. It is a nightmare.
- Allowing better insight into validation of emails. There are certain types of emails that our customers prefer to use, and historically have responded to from with other marketing automation system (MAS), that Pardot refuses to send to. Let the end user or administrator for Pardot know these things.
- Faster Lead Conversion
- CRM based communications which are derived from interactions from our sales and service staff. This improves customer service.
- This has improved our tracking from forms and pages 100 fold because of the CRM integration.
We have used Eloqua and Exact Target previously. Pardot is miles ahead of the competition. They are the ones that raise the standard in opposition to clunky and out of touch interfaces and non-intuitive automations. It is a marketers dream to have tools that do not require IT involvement just to do simple or even medium complexity automation. It has saved us so much money just in its automation features alone that Exact Target required APEX to perform the same functionality at additional costs of thousands of dollars. Eloqua was a flop for us. I believe that we contracted with Exact Target as quickly as possible because of the poor performance of Eloqua. Once we discovered Pardot, we actually maintained about 6 months of the remaining Exact Target contract and made the switch to Pardot. This may have cost us monetarily in the short term, but once free to automate and dynamically build lists we will never go to another MAS.
25,000 to 100,000
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