Pardot

Pros

The software is great for staying in touch with prospects and clients. It makes it easy to set up emails, create content, measure and report on results, and build stronger relationships. It’s fun to use, once you understand how it works.

Cons

There’s a long learning curve for adopting Pardot, and if I hadn’t had a consultant to hold my hand through the integration and kick off, I’d be struggling. I find Pardot and Salesforce training to be overly confusing and it’s really hard to find what you’re looking for. It’s a knowledge based system and continually adds more and more information, and it’s not always clear if the instructions apply to you or apply to a different level of service. Other than that I highly recommend it because of all the functionality and way it can dramatically improve your digital marketing.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Pardot

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Pardot

Pros

I love Pardot and if I need to tell you what I like most about it then I must say their customer support team, yes I like this most because their customer support team is very active and responsive, they available 24*7 to help the customers and this is the best thing that I like most about it.

Cons

There is one thing that I would like to highlight that I like least about it and that is its high cost, yes Pardot is a little bit expensive compared to other marketing automation tool but on the other hand, I must say that it is worth to spend on it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Pardot

Pros

As Pardot is designed to work with Salesforce, it is easy to run campaigns from and ensure that all of the appropriate lead information is captured. Email marketing campaigns are easy to set up and it is an important part of our marketing stack.

Cons

Pardot does not really have the functionality of other marketing automation platforms that we've used in the past. Engagement studio programs are not dynamic, meaning you have to stop and start them if you need to make changes. There is also no option for operational emails (emails without unsubscribe links), meaning you can only use Pardot for marketing purposes.

Pros

Perhaps "simplicity" is one way to put a positive spin on this review. For any Marketing Ops professional who wants to build anything above and beyond Pardot's pre-built functionality -- Good luck. Maybe the simplicity is good for a very small organization, but in that same vein the price point would be nowhere near worth it.

Cons

Filter logic is absolutely miserable. There is no Boolean logic in the tool (going back to my point on "simplicity"), which is horrific for building out any type of complex filters for segments. There are even character limits on how much you can enter in one argument field. So, think about if you have to build out a segment to compile all leads from Europe and write out each country.... you would need to split the arguments into 15 or more "or" statements to account for each value. Also, everything is a drop down -- no free text entries for search -- so good luck sifting through 400 different values for a single Salesforce field. This is one seemingly minor example but is a great representation of how overly limited the tool is as a whole. Also their proclaimed "one-to-one" sync with Salesforce is a joke. There is always mismatched or missing data that doesn't align when boiled down into a report.

Pros

Pardot allows us to get insight at a per-contact level into their activity, interests, and profile. We've made it even more useful by adding on additional integrations like Clearbit and Zoom. We track more than 12k new incoming leads annually and we automate outreach to those leads every single day.

Cons

Many decisions that you make at the beginning of the implementation will dog you after you've made them (how do we organize our campaigns? what tags should we use? when automations do we want to build off of those tags? how do we segment our lists). Pardot/Salesforce has offered strategic support and even configuration services, however, we find that these often lack the depth of knowledge to tell us if we're making the right call/they are too expensive for a small firm like ours.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Pardot