Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Reviews

Fast, Easy, and Powerful Marketing Automation

Comments: I have used Pardot at three different companies now and I love it. It's been one of my most reliable and useful tools in my Marketing Stack over the years and it's continued to get better thanks to the aggressive roadmap put in place by Salesforce. Great for business ranging from small business up to Enterprise.

Pros:

The number one thing that I love about Pardot is how easy it is to use. If you're on a small marketing team, one person can easily handle the system. If you have a larger team, the functionality scales extremely well - and you can bring in as many users as you need into the system without needing to pay for any additional seats. The software is extremely consistent and reliable. Pages load quickly and properly. The WYSIWYG editor for emails is awesome! The amount of automation you can do in Pardot is fantastic - especially with their more recent addition of repeating automations and drip programs. Awesome update releases thanks to being a Salesforce product.

Cons:

The positioning of all of the various functionality can be a little confusing at times. There are a LOT of menu items that lead to the various different features. Some cleanup/re-organization of these might help new users. The out-of-the-box Marketing templates, while serviceable, could use a reboot. For a startup they're likely sufficient, but if you're running a lot of email campaigns you might want to invest in having a developer custom-build a modular email template for your ongoing use. The built-in mail testing using Litmus is terrible. Often half of the renderings fail to load, and a number of the renderings included are not super relevant any more. I actually never use this feature any more as I prefer to send test emails to an actual mail client rather than trust the renderings.

Pardot Helps us Treat Each Donor as an Individual

Comments: Before, we were treating email like it was direct mail. Just send out a high enough quantity and you’ll get enough donations. However, this was treating our donors as pocketbooks and not individuals with unique interests and hearts. Using Pardot means we can tailor what we share to each individual and tell a story they can relate to. Transformational rather than transactional. Donations have increased but that’s a byproduct of involving unique people in the story of our organization. Once you learn the UI, it’s very simple to use as long as you have even a bit of html and css experience or if someone on your team has made some great templates. We love the reporting on the individual level and the integration with Salesforce.

Pros:

We love engagement studio and how easy it is to build out automated campaigns and dynamic lists. The ease of automation has meant less time spent uploading csv’s and more time developing great content.

Cons:

We wish it had a drag and drop editor. Not everyone on our team can code and it makes it difficult when we have a heavy season for deploys. The good news is, they’ve announced a beautiful drag and drop editor for the 20 winter release.

It offers more than it can handle. Terrible support. Way too expensive.

Comments: We were able to update designs for emails and landing pages (with limited selection) but deliverability suffered greatly.

Pros:

There's some good features like email drip campaigns, landing pages and forms but they all have their drawbacks. The drip campaigns we found were never getting delivered and going to spam, no one ever opened the emails. The landing pages only provide 4 or 5 designs and only one of them is even possibly usable. You'll need to code your own. The forms are extremely complicated, I've been using for a few years and I still have no idea how to customize them to improve the designs. Basically just too complicated all around. I don't have any pros really, anything good I can find a con for. Don't get fooled into buying this software.

Cons:

We purchased Pardot on a three year contract expecting much more than we were given. We are a news publication that sends out daily alerts that our customers pay for and were told by their sales team this was the best email delivery software out there - obviously we know they all say that but this software isn't even close. Pardot purchased Exact Target and sends out of their email. Exact Target is one of the most filtered spam filters no so it's almost impossible to get emails sent through to any customers if they have even a shred of spam filtering set up. We have had to work with hundreds of subscribers to mark our emails as a safe sender through IP and Domain whitelisting and sometimes that doesn't even work. That and they fact that the reporting and features in many ways have no flexibility make this software very frustrating for us. In the beginning we were provided a chat function to contact support and found that there wasn't really much they could do for us other than redirect us to links that did not fix our problems - this would end up turning into a ticket that would rarely be resolved. After about a year they did away with the chat function altogether and told us if we want it back we need to pay an extra per month. This is already an EXTREMELY expensive software so for them to turn their back on us for another money grab was a spit in the face. We're done with them and looking forward to the contract expiring early next year.

The best Marketing Automation tool out there!

Comments: The experience so far has been nothing short of exceptional. We have been using Pardot since the last 5 years and have been able to facilitate amazing co-ordination with the Sales and Marketing teams. The automation Pardot provides also helps generate reports to measure Campaign ROI and overall lead generation.

Pros:

Pardot is unmatched in its ability to automate your marketing activities. The Engagement Program features it offers is probably the best in the market and allows you to design Customer journeys with customization based on the customer attributes as well as engagement. The WYSIWYG builder allows you to build beautiful email templates and Landing pages for Lead generation and Lead nurturing. It also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM and a wide variety of 3rd party applications.

Cons:

Pardot allows you to create multiple leads with the same email address. This is a compulsory feature and causes issues with duplicate and bad data. You need to make sure the data is cleansed regularly.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement - Review

Comments: It is an essential tool that, although costly, is necessary to grow and scale.

Pros:

It allows us to gather, segment and target leads all in one place.

Cons:

Onboarding was lengthy and some staff found it difficult to grasp to begin with.

Good

Comments: My overall experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) has been positive, as it has enabled us to efficiently manage and personalize our marketing efforts, resulting in improved customer engagement and lead generation.

Pros:

I really appreciated how Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) allowed me to easily create and automate personalized marketing campaigns that significantly improved our customer engagement and conversion rates.

Cons:

I found that the user interface of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly known as Pardot) could be a bit complex and not as intuitive as I would have liked.

Pardot for some things, not quite all

Comments: Pardot helps us stay on top of automating as much marketing as we can. The main things that keep us from doing that are the design needs - it's always easier just to do things in the HTML - and figuring out campaign tracking for non-email analytics.

Pros:

Pardot makes automating marketing activities simple, whether you're setting up lead gen forms and responder emails or just creating email campaigns. It connects with Salesforce and helps keep lead owners and other information updated that prior to had been a pain.

Cons:

Its campaign tracking really only tracks . It can only track social if the posts are scheduled in Pardot. Email and landing page editors aren't as full-featured for simple design edits.

Pardot for email marketing

Comments: We are very happy with pardot and look forward to implementing more of the features pardot has to offer.

Pros:

We use pardot primarily for our email marketing, but also for inbound lead gen as well. I love how well pardot integrates into salesforce. That is key for our business. You can change anything at the field level using pardot based on activity etc, and segment based on any field.

Cons:

There are features such as advanced analytics that are more advanced on the higher levels of pardot, however the cost increase is significant.

Any other tool is probably better

Comments: Mostly frustrating and disappointing. We've heard so much about Salesforce that we expect everything with that name to be absolutely the best. But that doesn't have to be the case and Pardot is a proof.

Pros:

It integrates with Salesforce very easily which, I assume, is the only reason why anybody might ever consider using it.

Cons:

It offers very limited set of features, which don't work quite as expected, the support is terribly lazy, and all that comes at a price much higher than that of the competition.

All-In-One Enterprise-Level Marketing Platform

Comments: We have enjoyed a centralized and more integration-friendly marketing automation platform.

Pros:

Pardot is the most integration-friendly marketing software to use with Salesforce's Sales Cloud. We are able to use custom objects in our segmentation.

Cons:

Pardot doesn't have advanced automation like process builder or flow in Sales Cloud. Other than engagement programs, automation is not a key aspect of the software.

Salesforce integration oversold, but excellent in its own right

Pros:

Pardot is one of the better marketing automation/nurturing product aimed at mid-sized businesses. It's greatest strength is its integration with Salesforce (which will be discussed more in "cons"). With relative simplicity, it can be connected to the CRM, so that contacts can easily sync two-ways, and even custom objects can be brought through for segmentation purposes with just a couple of clicks. Tracking and automation is very well thought out and easy to use. The product has a straightforward method of tracking campaign results and attribution, all of which can then be pushed into Salesforce for comprehensive reporting on prospect-to-purchase management and measurement. Pardot's greatest strength lies in its ease of use. No marketing automation software is going to be SIMPLE, but Pardot shines in the consistency between its many functions. Nothing feels tacked-on or different from other tools. If you can create a campaign, you can create a complex segmentation rule, and you can manage your social media posts, as it all works identically. The marketing automation function, Engagement Studio, has gone through substantial recent updates and I consider it best-in-class for ease of use and functionality. If true automation is your #1 concern, this is a great choice. Lastly, support is excellent. Salesforce Trailblazer is fantastic for self-guided-training, the documentation is up-to-date and accurate, and support tickets are answered promptly and knowledgeably. If you are experienced in systems of these sorts, you will quite likely not need to take advantage of any external training (or SF's accelerator options).

Cons:

Pardot is a Salesforce product, and its integration is excellent, but it is just that - an integration. Pardot works like a third party service connected with Salesforce, as opposed to a native extension. Lists are synchronized, along with the sort of bugs and frustrations that come with bi-directional synchronization, and some Salesforce functions (notably custom objects) are not as fully fleshed out as one might hope. In some ways, other solutions do a better job synchronizing with Salesforce. That said, Pardot's setup is the simplest I've used, and having unified support for CRM and marketing automation is also a tremendous advantage when I do run into any hang-ups. Also, while Pardot's feature set is great, some of its tools are in need of substantial upgrades to keep up with the competition. Its WYSIWYG email and landing page tools aren't responsive and are far outclassed in ease of use by Mailchimp and other lower cost options (although if you're comfortable with HTML and developing your own templates, it's not bad at all). It is progressively being updated and modernized, but it obviously takes time, and there can be minor frustrations when you see other tools that are smoother or more approachable. But I have never found this to set a limit on what's possible, only an opportunity for things to be faster and easier for less-expert users.

Pardot is a Powerful Tool, but It's Hard to Manage on Small Teams

Comments: Overall, Pardot delivers on all the capabilities that we need and has more power than we are able to leverage. We appreciate it's deep integration with Salesforce and know that it has feature parity with most of the other major players out there.

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.

Review by MT

Comments: Overall, my experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was positive. The platform offered a robust set of tools for managing customer engagement and executing marketing campaigns. The ability to segment and target specific customer groups, along with the automation features, streamlined my marketing efforts and improved campaign effectiveness. The real-time tracking and reporting capabilities allowed me to measure the impact of my campaigns and make data-driven decisions. Although the platform had a learning curve and could be costly, the overall experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was excellent, enabling me to enhance customer engagement and achieve marketing goals effectively.

Pros:

One of the things I liked most about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was its comprehensive set of tools and features for managing customer engagement and marketing campaigns. The platform provided robust customer segmentation capabilities, allowing me to target specific audiences with personalized messaging. The automation features, such as email workflows and journey builders, made it easy to create and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns. The real-time tracking and reporting functionality provided valuable insights into campaign performance, allowing me to optimize my marketing efforts effectively.

Cons:

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement had many positive aspects, one thing I liked least was the complexity of the platform. As a beginner, it took some time to familiarize myself with the various features and functionalities. The learning curve was steep, and I would have appreciated more comprehensive onboarding resources and tutorials to help me navigate and utilize the platform more efficiently. Additionally, the pricing structure of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement could be quite expensive, especially for small businesses or startups with limited budgets.

Best if you use SalesForce Sales Cloud

Comments: We use Pardot as a marketing automation platform including email management, automated nurtures, lead scoring, engagement tracking, etc.

Pros:

The best part of Pardot is the integration with SalesForce and being able to push and pull a variety of information into and from both systems.

Cons:

The UI is pretty poor and there are some key features such as in-depth reporting that the system is still lacking

Easy to use , great UI and powerful

Comments: the experience of using pardot was great. it's highly intuitive and powerful which makes the learning curve for less technical yet more visual users really short.

Pros:

1) it's a really robust marketing automation platform with lots of capabilities but wrapped around a super easy UI 2) deep integration within the salesforce CRM and echo system (you can also use 3rd party salesforce tools from the app exchange to trigger things such as SMS via the SFDC campaign function ) 3) slick customer journey canvas that is highly visual 4) fairly priced (in comparison with the other MA vendors)

Cons:

1) only works with Salesforce (professional edition and above ) so if you're using a different CRM that wont really work for you, or rather be a standalone 2) it would be great if there were more native connectors to it.

Great marketing automation, but not easy to use.

Comments: I really did enjoy using Pardot overall, and I would recommend it as a top-notch automation tool. The learning curve can be steep. I recommend attending one of their 3 day foundations training courses to help jump start your experience.

Pros:

Pardot is great for companies whose sales teams also use Salesforce due to the tight integration between the two products. Prospect and campaign tracking data can sync easily between the two systems and keep track of all campaign touch points across sales and marketing teams. Engagement studios are super easy to set up and allow for easy engagement-driven campaigns that help avoid "spammy" campaigns that help you stay off the blacklists of ISPs.

Cons:

My major complaint with Pardot really has been with the UI/UX. The user experience is not great. It's not intuitive AT ALL. There are many instances where the interface breaks standard functionality conventions, leaving you in the dark trying to figure out how to do even simple tasks. That being said, the Engagement Studio has completely different UI than the rest of the app, and is actually quite a good experience. I guess Salseforce is taking their time redoing the rest of the app, but I'm sure they'll get around to it soon enough.

Great tool, especially for B2b Marketers

Comments: I am Pardot certified and it has been an extremely helpful tool in my Marketing career. It can do very complex marketing tasks but is a great entry point.

Pros:

Powerful marketing automation tool that integrates extremely well with the Salesforce platform. Easy to learn, hard to master.

Cons:

Things have improved, but considering it's under the same roof as Salesforce, the integration is clearly an afterthought. I think it does it better than other tools, but not as well as it could have been.

Everything has a learning curve

Comments: Pardot's just great overall, every tool has a grace period of learning and individualizing the use - you can't always read a KB article and have things humming, you have to hit the dirt face first a few times, show some humility, not break the law and find your fit with how you use it most effectively.

Pros:

Once you understand the areas of Pardot and how affective they are throughout the areas of your marketing efforts and establish a synergy it's a great tool that's used frequently to solve and offload processes from other, potentially costly systems.

Cons:

My con is a con that anyone would have, it's a different UI, capabilities are different in some contexts, and it really just takes a matter of time to feel it out and get comfortable with. If time is that bad of a con, than we'd all have a bad wrap. I do with their integrations were a bit long but with most things going to Salesforce and Pardot having a bond with it, we can solve things through that channel.

Has potential but very complex to set up and manage

Pros:

This can be a good tool to use for automation as you can import contacts and add them to lists and drips fairly easily. It's also good for integrating with custom forms and landing pages and you can create custom campaigns, links etc. High level, it really helps connect everything together from the first visit (including the pages they viewed) and every subsequent touchpoint from then on (but reporting on this falls into the "Cons").

Cons:

Pardot is a difficult tool to set up and manage and their support through the process is quite limited. Their chat seems to fill up by 9 am, and although they offer courses to train you how to use their product, they charge for it. Although it is a powerful tool, their reporting capabilities are very behind, and while they capture every touchpoint, there is no way to roll up that data to gather insights or report on it.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Comments: My overall experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has been positive, as it provided a powerful and comprehensive solution for managing customer accounts and executing targeted marketing campaigns. Despite the initial learning curve and cost considerations, it significantly contributed to our marketing efforts and improved customer engagement.

Pros:

One aspect I liked most about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was its comprehensive set of tools and features for managing and engaging with customer accounts. The platform's ability to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, along with its robust analytics capabilities, allowed for effective customer segmentation and improved campaign performance.

Cons:

One drawback I experienced with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was the complexity of the platform, which required a significant learning curve to fully utilize its features and functionalities. Additionally, the cost associated with using the platform could be a limiting factor for smaller businesses or organizations with limited marketing budgets.

100% YOY Increase in Leads with Pardot and Salesforce Intergration

Comments: We've been using Pardot for years to manage emails and landing pages, but once we added Salesforce, we saw a dramatic increase in Pardot's usefulness. Having the ability to score prospects' interactions on the web and easily hand off warmed up leads has made a real impact.

Pros:

- Once you have solid templates built, creating new emails and landing pages is very fast - Integration with Salesforce is solid, no issues with data sync in either direction - Automation rules (especially b/t Salesforce and Pardot) can take care of a lot of mundane tasks without needing to remember to do them

Cons:

- Getting started with the Program can be tough because there is so much it can do - Reporting on data can be difficult to figure out. Not on a per-email basis, but rather on Campaign-level performance. There seem to be multiple places to get information and they don't always match up. - Landing page templates are not responsive. Seriously! You have to have a web designer built and import them to be useful

You will never go back to any other email marketing software

Comments: Very positive we have encouraged other offices to adopt this platform

Pros:

For a company that communicates with clients and leads primarily via email this platform has changed the game for productivity and delivering personalized emails

Cons:

Always a learning curve when adapting to new software programs but saleforce team was hands on to smooth the transition

Does the job but don't expect custom reporting

Comments: I think Pardot gets you 2/3rds of the way their with Marketing automation and you have to augment with other tools to get the rest of the way. If you use SalesForce connected to Pardot then you really have to do all of your reporting in SalesForce or it gets really confusing trying to sync the two together.

Pros:

I like that they have a landing page builder but their user interface for building landing pages should be more competitive with what's in the market. I like their email campaign builder interface and the drip marketing tool.

Cons:

Their reporting is lacking because you can't customize it. It's hard to really know track leads through the pipeline and recycle them when they aren't ready to buy. The tagging and folder structure isn't intuitive and takes a bit to get used to.

Great for enterpries

Comments: Great tool that speaks very well with Salesforce and an essential tool in our marketing department.

Pros:

Easy to set up and use. Many customization options and high quality.

Cons:

Suppot is a bit cumbersome and takes too long.

Higher End, but worth it if you use Salesforce

Pros:

The automation and contact management is of the best I've worked with. Not turn is unturned in regards to what you can do to optimize your communications and lead management especially if you're using Salesforce.

Cons:

Costs. I've only had one client that could afford this investment. It's really an enterprise solution.