Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Erfahrungen

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Zoho CRM

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

I choose Pardot over Zoho because of its amazing customer support.

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp und Marketo Engage

Warum Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement gewählt wurde

The direct integration with Salesforce and wanting more ability with automation responding to individuals engagement with us online.

Zuvor genutzte Software

Campaign Monitor

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

The direct integration with Salesforce and the sheer quantity of things that Pardot can do in making a unique experience for each of our donors.

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.

Vorteile

User friendly interfaceMultiple lead management optionsReports were easily generated and saved without any issues

Nachteile

If the information was captured wrong due to some reason, debugging took timeInitially learning curve difficult

Vorteile

I found Pardot a great utility and Platform for Campaign Managment, Email Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Automation and Sales Force Automation. It has helped our business grow strategically and Marketing just went so easy.

Nachteile

Pardot is quite expensive and really advance to manage.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Keap und Mailchimp

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

I found Pardot to be more advanced than other platforms in terms of functionality, marketing campaign and automation tools.

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

The environment we deployed Pardot was a Salesforce client, thus it didn't make sense to use any other 'marketing tool', as it would have meant lots of integration patches / glue.

Vorteile

We get real time activity updates of our prospects from the lead deck functionality

Awesome customer support

Ease of usage, is highly customisable

As it's a Salesforce product now the ease of integration with the CRM is mind blowing

Nachteile

I would say the makers of this product are a little money minded.

A lot of functionalities are only available for the PRO users like API access and A/B testing

Also, not many integrations are possible using this product

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Salesforce Marketing Cloud und Marketo Engage

Warum Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement gewählt wurde

Strategy shift, cost and contact list size

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Using Salesforce CRM in conjunction with Pardot was the main reason we went with Pardot

Vorteile

The integration with Salesforce and the options included are very helpful.

Nachteile

Creating a landing page in Pardot is a nightmare. You must know coding and Pardot makes it very complicated from start to finish. The form creation is also very difficult to create and hectic to embed.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

The software is pretty intuitive and easy to use. There is a huge community that's eager to collaborate and assist (local user groups, blogs, the Dreamforce conference, the connections conference, twitter, slack groups, linkedin groups, etc). We utilized the product for List Emails ( about 30 each month), Automated Nurture Campaigns, Segmentation, Email Preference Center, and so much more. It is very powerful and played a key role in our marketing efforts.

Nachteile

The trade off to ease-of-use is lack of complexity. After working with the platform for 5 years, I have concluded that it is a great fit for smaller companies that want to use their features in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. We are a medium sized company with multiple target audiences, some that overlap, some that don't, territories with multiple languages and a vast and diverse product line. I am regularly (daily if not weekly) frustrated by the platform's limitations. The saving grace is that there is usually a work around. We are always able to figure out how to solve a problem, but each time it requires more steps, more time, then more "overhead" to manage in the future.

While, Salesforce is regularly rolling out enhancements and features, the list of wants and needs created by users is long. There are features that seem completely basic and have been in demand by the users for years that have yet to be delivered. Things that are sometimes minor but quite surprising to learn aren't included.

One of Pardot's biggest weaknesses is reporting. We do all our reporting in Sales Cloud dashboards or in Excel.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Marketo Engage und HubSpot CRM

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Salesforce alignment.

Vorteile

Even though it might seem a little bit complex to use, Pardot gets easier as you learn how to use it, it has a very intuitive structure that anyone can learn on the fly, with a clean dashboard and well -labeled banners/icons combined with a sleek graphic interface.

The automation efectiveness is impressive and compelling, and its multi-platforms capabilites are beyond any other competing alternative, specially how it connects with Social Media and Salesforce.

You can instinctively customize how it manages the data feed, giving away a set of rules that Pardot follows beautifully, filtering everything at your command with great results.

It is probably the most complete and fully integrated Marketing Automation software in the market, with the nicest set of tools necessary to supply all your necessities and more.

Nachteile

Pardot is rather expensive and probably not suitable for small enterprises.

The e-mail managing/creation/customization interface needs to be worked out, even though it works great most of the times, it tends to have issues with Gmail servers. Sending e-mail templates gets complicated, specially because it has a tendency to crash when some custom coding is involved; this usually forces you to adapt to something that does not bug the system instead of doing what you are actually adapted to.

Even though mostly everything is user friendly, the e-mail marketing tools are over complicated, it might deliver the results you're looking for but it will cost you a lot of toggling.

Vorteile

Creating emails and landing pages are easy once you have templates that are built out. If you are not familiar with how to build templates, it may be difficult for you to use Pardot, as there is no drag and drop feature. The automation rules make it really easy for us to integrate into Salesforce, which we love. It's also very simple to create custom fields, which was important for us.

Nachteile

The reporting feature in Pardot is subpar. It is extremely difficult to report on our marketing activities with their current reporting structure. There is no way to create a custom report, making it very difficult for our team to track ROI. Probably the biggest downside to using this platform.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

HubSpot Marketing Hub und Marketo Engage

Vorteile

We have fully implemented Pardot into our sales and marketing teams. We use everything from landing pages, forms, custom redirects, email templates, email automation, and their gmail plugin. It does't meet our sales and marketing requirements.

Nachteile

In less than one year we have opened 42 support tickets with Pardot. Many with no resolution. After determining that the product simply doesn't work we are transitioning to their competitors. Pardot is still forcing us to pay licensing fees even though their product failed to function. Do not use.

Stand Out Issues:
- The Gmail plugin simply doesn't work. Activity is not consistently logged in SalesForce. We have reported the technical issue many times to their support.
- They cap uploaded assets (Ex: images) at 100 MB storage. This is ridiculous. When we hit the cap they wanted to charge us 4K to increase storage.
- Poor reporting on emails:
* Missing data on 1:1 emails. Direct emails sent via the Gmail plug-in.
* CTR doesn't show for under 1% in engagement studio > Requires us to click down into each email template to pull report and export details to do a side by side comparison
* There are no reports generated for engagement studio (only drip programs - old feature now retired)
- Can't track replies on emails > can't gauge performance
- Recurring issues with Engage in Gmail and Engage Alerts (holds up the sales team from their day-to-day tasks)
- Poor UX in Engage via gmail for sales team (cannot organize 1:1 templates by folder)
- Limited on engage logic, can only use prospect fields. We can't use opportunity or account data in automation.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

There are different characteristics that make Pardot a very interesting product, for example the different drip campaigns that you can carry out from this product triggers and in sales funnel actions and they are generating very good profits in our profit. in turn, the product has an excellent return on investment thanks to the good management of the campaigns it allows.

Nachteile

Not everything is perfect within the product and has failures that reduce efficiency and the new star usually creates a lot of disagreement and even leads to exasperation, due to the lack of a simple and efficient user interface and that navigation through the platform It tends to be time consuming and make small errors that delay product use.

Vorteile

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").

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

I love its integrations with Salesforce, the ability to access from the Salesforce interface, and the ease of use!

Nachteile

I don't really have any cons at the moment.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Mailchimp und Marketo Engage

Vorteile

From its Exact Target roots, the email marketing capabilities are what I like the best about Pardot. I have full HTML control and can easily create my own templates, A/B test, use variable tags, view reports, and more. The use of Litmus email previews is awesome too.

I've been using the new SF Lighting UI for a while now and I like it a lot better. There were a few bugs at the beginning, but I thin they are all cleaned up now.

The folder organization is probably a feature that doesn't get talked about much, but it helps a lot. We were told to try to use them and much as possible during the initial Pardot setup, and I'm so glad we did because you'll notice content and files start piling up immediately and having a solid folder structure makes life a lot easier.

I've used a few other Marketing Automation tools before and Pardot is my favorite. It's simple, but robust enough to handle advanced needs.

Nachteile

The automation and "Drip" functionality is pretty simple and doesn't offer any real advanced options. For example, you can't create drip automation based on if a prospect clicks a certain link in an email, but I think there are working on that.

There are a few other little things, but nothing major. One item that Pardot could improve upon is Basic Chat Support. They only offer basic support through their Olark chat, and more than half the time I check, it shows them offline which means they are full. It can get a little annoying at times if you need something urgent. However, their case management is very good and if you have a case get escalated to a higher team, the support is very good. I've had the team spend a lot of time working on some advanced form functionality for me that helped a lot. Their knowledge base is strong too, so that usually a good place to start.

Vorteile

I really liked how the leads were sorted into ones that were immediately "hot" and with Salesforce mobile, I could even do it on my long train commute home. It was also a good indicator of which leads to focus on. Since our sales cycle can also be really long, it also was helpful to see how long the prospect has been in the system and how knowledgeable they might be about us. As a newer salesperson it was helpful.

Nachteile

I wish some of the pro features were available at the standard price. If we could see the Google Adwords that led our prospects directly to the site easier, it would be much helpful. It is available, so it's not too bad of a downside, however, it is if that feature is too expensive for your budget at the moment.

Vorteile

Easy to Use
Easy to Train On
Pardot makes it easy to measure a return on investing in marketing automation. The tool is reliable and performant, and the Pardot team's customer service is outstanding.

Nachteile

The Client Advocate email domain was terrific -quick and helpful customer support for usage-related questions. I'll be very sad to see this deprecated and replaced with the success community.

Vorteile

I liked that it was an all-in-one tool and building workflows was very easy.

Nachteile

The customer service was subpar. We had a fairly substantial $25k contract and still did not have access to any telephone support. We could only use chat support and their chat was often unavailable. This was the primary reason we ended up transitioning to a new product.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Marketo Engage

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.