Pardot

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.

Kommentare: Pardot has fit our needs especially in working with Salesforce. However, if I had an option I would use a different tool (such as Hubspot). It feels like a dated product that needs some updates to the user experience. Keep in mind it is VERY powerful (a ton of features) but finding them is irritating. For example, you have email templates and email drafts. The differentiation is not clear and you have to look through their knowledge base to figure that out.

Vorteile: Pardot has a huge number of features that allow you to control, split and quickly view your customer lists. It is also awesome being able to get this information into Salesforce. Another feature I love is the customer behavior tracking. It makes it simple to get an understanding of what a prospect is interested in. We can then tailor our message to this prospect. For example, if we identify someone is from a specific State (in the U.S.A) then we can share a link in an email that is information only about that State. The scoring feature is also great because you can quickly see the interest of a current prospect and then notify the correct sales agent to reach out.

Nachteile: There are 2 things that frustrate me about Pardot. The learning curve and intuitiveness is very poor. It takes a long time to figure out what pieces are where. On top of that, I have used Pardot for almost 2 years and I still figuring stuff out. It has a ton of features but figuring them all out is mind-boggling. The other thing that is irritating is the email builder. It just isn't intuitive. You have a tiny screen to make any edits and adding things (like custom information) is hard to find most times. Then you have to sync this email to the HTML version. Every time I have clicked that button the email syncs but I have to spend 5-10 extra minutes fixing the syntax issues that come about from the sync. I feel that process should work much more seamlessly.

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.

Kommentare: Overall its been a good experience (if you / your client doesnt mind the cost of using it). If choosing to use Pardot, ALL Salesforce CRM licences need to upgraded to the highest cost level (Enterprise), even if its only small teams / individual groups that require the Pardot element. This seems a bit unfair.

Vorteile: It's a perfect 'marketing output' tool for Salesforce, which has been adapted to natively fit without having to use 3rd party marketplace plugins for marketing output. Pardot has been a gamechanger for outputting Marketing directly from Salesforce.

Nachteile: It doesnt integrate Social Media management (scheduling, Ads, etc.) - so you still need to use a Social Media tool such as hootsuite. So, while it's the most 'integrated marketing tool' for Salesforce, it's not a complete integrated marketing solution.

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

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.