Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Reviews

Pros

workflow of pardot and marketing cloud is very simple and easy to understand after figuring it out. Would love to see more features.

Cons

Structure and organization of tools is okay, could be more user friendly and easier to navigate

Pros

You can build everything you dream of in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The Journey module is amazing and Automation Studio is very powerful. Rest assure, you will be able to build any user story.

Cons

Ver expensive. It's not just the tool, but the launch, implementation, and Salesforce partner (or an in-house team of 4-5 experts) to get the most of the tool. Not for new or small companies that can't afford a learning curve of 4-6 months to launch and keep the Salesforce partner or dedicated in-house team to implementation and maintenance.

Pros

The sales team could click in their CRM sales page to see the last email sent

Cons

Validations - if you didn’t create custom objects for your form data it was a mess

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a clean, enterprise level product that does a great job!

Cons

The price can seem a little high based on some of the industry competitors.

Pros

Smooth integration with Salesforce.
Works fast enough

Cons

Pricing is not competitive when you look at other options available on the market (not SF appexchange)
The other things might be solved with other more expensive packages, but Pardot is already expensive)
Not possible to set local time of receiver when you send emails. All of them go out at once
Not possible to send emails based on user behavior (also the time when they are sent)
No tracking of email forwards
Poor responsiveness of pages you can create through internal tools (for example to track unsubscribe reasons)

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign, SendPulse and Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

They were good tools, but we needed deeper integration with Salesforce

Switched From

ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp

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.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo Engage

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Pardot had a tight integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud

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.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

To upgrade to a better product that offered more advanced marketing automation solutions.

Switched From

Sage CRM

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Because it easier to integrate with other products in our workflow and tech stack.

Pros

It's quite different; it would be hard to fake extensive experience. You could learn how to send emails and make lists in a couple hours, but learning how to put it all together took me months. There's also no sandboxes to learn on and I personally could not have done it on just the Trailheads. Although the Trailheads might get you to the point of being able to talk about general functionality.

Cons

EVERYTHING, SALESFORCE IS VERY CONVENIENT TO USE.

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement gives us value for money because it has impressive capabilities.
I like the ease of use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is simple to deploy.

Cons

No cons for Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement meets our expectations.

Pros

I really like the ability to have a granular data for each and every customer we have.

Cons

I do not like the complexit of the interface which leads to different unintended sections.

Pros

Form handlers, automation/workflow builder, not much else.

Cons

The need to pay extra for detailed add-ons, particularly a dedicated IP (a basic need for email marketing), is really annoying (only available in their higher tiers). We didn't like not being able to relate marketing email activity to einstein activity sync. User interface could use some work as well; just not there yet overall.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Because we were sold on the premise that Salesforce and Pardot are essentially one system, which would be easier for a small startup like us to implement and maintain.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

It was great fining it to a easey way to find want u needed

Cons

Sometimes it was hard for y get in touch with customer serivce

Pros

Love the ease of use that I have had with salesforce, very easy to work with in the website and navigate

Cons

I have not had anything I dislike so far about salesforce

Pros

Sales force is the best CRM out there hands down it is worth the money. because you get out what you put in.

Cons

in the beginning it was a little confusing

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement lets you personalize your communication with prospects and customers based on their past interactions with your brand.The platform allows you to communicate with your audiences across multiple channels, such as social media, email, mobile, and web. You may automate a variety of marketing operations, including lead nurturing, and email campaigns.

Cons

Since Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a complete platform with many features and capabilities, some users, especially those who are new to the platform may find it difficult.It could take some time and effort to learn how to use the platform because it is a large and complicated platform. Also, the platform can be costly, especially for startups or smaller companies with limited budgets.

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

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo Engage

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Intuitive UI, great functionality for the price, native integration with Salesforce, dynamic content add-on. Automation rules that can help keep the system clean and prospects updated.

Cons

Limitations within automation rules for mutli-variable updates. For example - Loading a tradeshow list with campaign member statuses in SFDC. I would like to upload in one automation rule to say if X campaign status, update to this campaign in SFDC for X status, within the same rule I would like to add all of the other statuses with specific completion actions instead of having to run 1 rule for each status.
Dynamic content should be able to trigger via a URL parameter and not just a known prospect field.

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

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo Engage

Switched From

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Pros

Easy to build and send emails, manage contacts, track lists/segmentation, and built automation. You can also setup scoring/grading to see your interest/lead interest.

Cons

The integration with Salesforce is a bit confusing, and they change the way it's implemented with every release. This causes issues with clients trying to launch all users at once on Pardot, and ensuring they have the right licensing.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

More functionality

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

better tool