Pardot Review

Product:
Vendor:
Founded:
Headquarters:

Pardot
Salesforce
1999
San Francisco, CA

Ownership:
Customers:
Deployment Model:
Free Trial:

Public
150,000+
Cloud
Yes

Product Overview

Note: In April 2022, Salesforce announced that Pardot has been renamed as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

As part of Salesforce’s software solutions, Pardot is a business-to-business (B2B) marketing automation software that makes it simple for marketers to improve lead generation results, and align marketing and sales team goals. It integrates with Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution, allowing businesses to easily find and leverage critical marketing data through a single, centralized platform.

Pardot offers four main solutions:

1. Marketing automation
2. B2B marketing analytics
3. Salesforce Engage
4. Einstein account-based marketing

For this review, we’ll focus on the features and pricing of its marketing automation solution.

Features

Pardot’s user-friendly marketing automation solution has tools to build and improve marketing campaigns and workflows. Here are five of its key features:

Email marketing – Pardot makes managing email campaigns easier for marketers. An intuitive editor helps users build visually-pleasing emails. Automation and personalization settings allow marketers to “set and forget.” Marketing messages can be automatically sent to contacts and modified based on contact engagement. Also, A/B testing capabilities let users find out what truly resonates with a lead and craft the perfect message.

Lead management – Dynamic tools allow marketers to easily adapt and improve marketing messages and workflows for each audience. Emails can be automatically sent based on time, engagement or other custom parameters. Lead qualification settings help marketing teams identify the most engaged leads and prioritize outreach. Automation and segmentation features reduce the repetitive tasks involved with targeting. And campaign performance data can be used to personalize the customer experience.

Sales alignment – Pardot is able to seamlessly integrate with Salesforce CRM, allowing marketing and sales to work together and gain more conversions. Sales teams can send marketing-approved mini-campaigns to customers and easily drop leads into nurturing tracks through the Salesforce app. Alerts can be sent to sales and marketing teams via email, desktop or mobile device to ensure a lead gets a quick response. Activity-tracking features allow teams to see each contact’s activity history to know when and how to best reach out to a lead.

Lead generation – Pardot has built-in editors that use drag-and-drop features to make building landing pages, custom forms and social posts efficient and effective. Pardot can integrate with Google AdWords to track a campaign’s return on investment (ROI) and analyze keyword performance. And social profiling is simplified by tracking all the interactions prospects have with social campaigns.

ROI reporting – Robust reporting features allow marketers to track campaign performance, ROI, customer lifecycles and email metrics to identify what captures the most attention and where workflows fall short. Pardot can also connect with all of a business’s marketing channels to easily tie revenue back to programs, like webinars and live events, and see how individual customers interact with videos and social media.

Artificial intelligence – The Einstein artificial intelligence functionality monitors data and provides actionable insights on prospect engagement. It has three main features. First, the Einstein Lead Scoring feature uses machine learning to score and prioritize leads based on conversion patterns. Einstein Behavior Scoring alerts the user when a lead is ready to make a purchase. The prospect is scored based on engagement activity and users can drill down into the score for further insights. Finally, the Einstein Campaign Insights displays the top marketing campaigns in real time, find similar attributes among prospects and provides suggestions for campaign optimization, including new audiences.

Target Market

Geared for Salesforce users, Pardot serves all types of B2B organizations spanning a range of industries, such as manufacturing, automotive, education, healthcare and information technology. Here’s a list of some prominent Pardot customers:

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Implementation/Integration

New clients work directly with their Account Executive to determine the best implementation path based on its needs. Pardot has a partner network, Premier Success programs and self-guided resources in place to provide a variety of flexible onboarding options.

Customer Service & Support

Salesforce offers three support plans.

• Standard – The Standard plan is included in each Salesforce subscription. It includes guided journeys (users learn best practices and other basics of Salesforce), Learning on Trailhead (online training paths for users, developers and administrators), a Trailblazer Community forum and a two-day response time from tech support.
• Premier – The Premier plan costs an additional 30% of net. It has all the features of the Standard plan, plus phone support, one-hour response times for critical issues, outcome-based Expert Coaching sessions (one-on-one work sessions with Salesforce experts on onboarding, implementation and optimization), developer support, personalized success paths, discounted pricing for the Trailhead Academy public classes, business value reviews and technical health reviews.
• Signature – The Signature plan includes all the features of the other two plans, plus deployment planning services, proactive services (24/7 proactive monitoring, early alerts), technical account management and key event management. Pricing is based on a client’s complex needs, so you’ll need to contact Salesforce for a custom quote.

Pricing

Pardot has three monthly pricing plans (billed annually) that include up to 10,000 contacts.

Growth – $1,250 per month

• Email marketing
• 50 forms and landing pages
• In-depth prospect tracking
• Lead nurturing
• Lead scoring & grading
• ROI reporting
• Marketing training
• Standard CRM integration

Plus – $2,750 per month

• Includes all Standard features
• Advanced email analytics
• Email rendering preview & spam analysis
• Email and landing page A/B testing
• Advanced dynamic content
• Google AdWords integration
• Application program interface (API) access for up to 25K calls/day
• Multiple scoring categories
• Integrated marketing calendar
• Social profiles

Advanced – $4,000 per month

• Includes all Plus features
• AI features
• Custom object integration
• API access for up to 100K calls/day and five concurrent connections
• Dedicated IP address

There’s also a Premium plan that supports up to 75,000 contacts for $15,000 per month. It adds on the B2B Marketing Analytics Plus functionality (optional on the Plus and Advanced plans).

There are also two add-on features: Sales and Email Alerts ($50 per user, per month, billed annually) and the B2B Marketing Analytics Plus ($3,000 per month, billed annually). Users can also purchase 10,000 additional contacts for $100 per month.

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Shortcomings

Some customers have said the sheer amount of options and terms to understand during the onboarding process is overwhelming. Also, Pardot is strictly a marketing solution for B2B organizations, so business to consumer (B2C) organizations will need to use a different solution.

Screenshots

About

Salesforce got its start in 1999 as a sales automation software and has evolved into a global CRM market leader. Its mission is helping businesses run their operations efficiently and providing top-notch customer service. Salesforce stands by four core values: trust, customer success, innovation and equality.

Salesforce has received many accolades over the years, such as the IDC #1 CRM (2013-2019), Fortune‘s Most Admired Companies (2013-2019) and Forbes‘ Most Innovative Companies in the World (2018). Fortune also lists Salesforce as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For every year since 2008.

Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco and has many locations in the United States and throughout the world.

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