Pardot: Marketing Automation that will make your Small Business, Bigger.
Updated June 16, 2015

Pardot: Marketing Automation that will make your Small Business, Bigger.

Billy Barker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Professional

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot Marketing Automation

We use Pardot for both marketing and sales. Marketing uses Pardot to collect information about visitors to our website and then sends automated drip emails to them until they are ready to hand over to Sales. We have Pardot and NetSuite integrated so Sales can easily see all of the activity on our website or through email when they reach out to a contact. Pardot allows us to easily see activity and stay in front of those interested in our product.

Pros

  • Templates - Pardot provides templates for both emails and landing pages that are easy to setup to slightly customize. If you prefer to completely customize your email or landing page template you can do so by manually entering the HTML and CSS code.
  • Automation Rules - Automation rules are actions that can be setup for any number of tasks which you want Pardot to automate. Automation Rules really help us because we use them for things like identifying competitors, current customers, countries outside our product offering, sorting companies into industry specific drip emails, and a lot more. This id definitely one of the better features with Pardot.
  • Campaign Managment - Pardot integrates with Google Analytics so we can see all of our online campaigns in Pardot and track their activity. You can also run reports on them and filter by date or other key factors. We have a lot of campaigns and Pardot makes it easy to quickly glance at one or more importantly report on them.

Cons

  • Reports - Pardot has some good reports, but not enough and not nearly customizable for our needs some times. There are just certain times when we need a report for information Pardot already has but there is not a specific report that will display the information together. It would be nice to see more additions and improvements made in this area.
  • Filters - On most pages when looking and columns of data it would be nice to be able to add in additional filters/columns to sort and analyze data. Sometimes Pardot keeps things too simple.
  • Email Stats - One issue we currently have is reporting on basic email stats such as overall opens and CTR. Right now Pardot does not have a reporting option to show you an overview of all emails. They provide this perfectly for List emails, but not for Drip emails. They are in the process of helping us figure this out using a extension in Pardot called GoodData.
  • We do not measure ROI in Pardot, but rather in our CRM but I know without a doubt that the impact of using Pardot is significant.
  • Sales is able to target their first conversation better with contacts because they already have a good assessment of what the person was looking at on our website, or what links they clicked in a email, or even which white paper or case study they read on our website. This definitely helps gain more opportunities and probably leads to faster lead conversion.
  • Marketing is able to reach out more to potential customers (and current customers) to keep them update with our product and news about our company. This makes the Marketing teams life much easier and they can focus on other areas.
We have only ever used Pardot. I was not in charge of purchasing Pardot but I believe our company also looked into Marketo.
25,000 to 100,000
Probably the first thing you need to figure out before starting with Pardot is how much of it you will really use. When we first signed up we didn't realize how much really went into developing and setting up drip campaigns. Having a 'blueprint' from the beginning will be very helpful in deciding if Pardot is right for you and which package to choose. We out grew our original package in a little over a year and needed to upgrade, be sure to factor that in as the cost jumps about $1,000 more a month.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature Ratings

9.4
WYSIWYG email editor
10
Dynamic content
10
Ability to test dynamic content
10
Landing pages
10
A/B testing
10
Mobile optimization
8
Email deliverability reporting
7
List management
10
10.0
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
10
Data quality management
10
Automated sales alerts and tasks
10
10.0
Calendaring
10
Event/webinar marketing
10
10.0
Social sharing and campaigns
10
Social profile integration
10
7.3
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
5
8.3
API
8
Role-based workflow & approvals
10
Customizability
7
Integration with Salesforce.com
Not Rated
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

Using Pardot Marketing Automation

We love Pardot (I personally use it every day) and couldn't imagine not using. Pardot has helped our business grow and stay at the forefront of marketing. Without Pardot we would not capture all our website visitors data, have automated emails in place, and would not have the ability to report on all over many campaigns. We love Pardot so much that we actually prepay for a full year at a time (I think you actually get a slight discount by doing that as well).

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