Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

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.

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

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.

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement