Pardot Marketing Automation Solution Review
If you’re currently considering purchasing the Pardot marketing automation solution, you’ll need this review before you make your decision!
Introduction to Pardot
Founded in 2006, Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform with a strong focus on organizations with longer than average sales cycles. It includes lead management functionality and allows you to automate lead scoring, as well as email marketing, landing pages, email templates, forms handlers, and strong sales capabilities.
Pardot is particularly attractive to companies that need a robust solution for their sales team, as well as strong lead generation since it was acquired by Salesforce CRM tool in 2013. In addition, Pardot’s data collection and intensive segmentation functions make it a desirable solution for marketers who really want to stretch their legs.
Still, if you’re considering Pardot’s marketing automation solution, you’ll want to be sure it’s a good fit for your digital marketing team as well. That means you need to know what it does best, and what it’s weaknesses are. You’ll also need to determine if it fits within your budget. This is what we’ll discuss today.
At the end of this article, you’ll be able to make an educated choice as to whether Pardot is a good fit for your enterprise organization. If you decide in favor of Pardot, we have included multiple checklists at the end of this post to help you plan a migration from your current automation tool, to Pardot.
If you’d like a team of experts to handle your migration with a white glove approach to optimizing your data and workflow in the process, reach out today. We can set up a time to speak with you about our services and how we can assist you during the migration process.
In the meantime, let’s move on to what you need to know about Pardot and all the considerations you need to make before planning your migration.
Why Choose Pardot Marketing Automation Platform?
As we stated before, Pardot is targeted mainly toward B2B marketing automation users and enterprise-level organizations who require longer timelines and strong sales integrations to fuel their campaigns.
In addition to all the marketing automation tools you’d expect, the Pardot engagement studio goes above and beyond with their email marketing campaign performance tracking. Pardot helps to highlight your most successful email campaigns and strategies so you can stay on track for revenue goals, a unique ability among its competitors.
Pardot Pricing & Capabilities
Pardot has three subscriptions available for sales and marketing teams. They are Growth, Plus, and Advanced. With each of the packages, you are allowed up to 10,000 contacts and customer support, however, your service suite scales considerably with each subscription level. Here is the full breakdown:
| Feature | Growth | Plus | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $1,250 p/month | $2,500 p/montho | $4,000 p/month |
| Contacts | 10,000 | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| Users | 50 | 50 | 50 |
| Prospect Tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSL Vanity Domains / Tracker Domains | 3 | 10 | 20 |
| Custom Lead Scoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited Emails/Email Marketing/Lead Nurturing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Engagement Programs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automation Rules | 50 | 100 | 150 |
| Page Actions | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| File Hosting | 100MB | 500MB | 10GB |
| SEO Keyword Monitoring | 100 Keywords | 250 Keywords | 1000 Keywords |
| Competitor Monitoring | 10 Competitors | 25 Competitors | 100 Competitors |
| Landing Pages | 50 | Yes | Yes |
| Forms | 50 | Yes | Yes |
| Customizable URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Basic Dynamic Content | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Tracked Social Posts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Native CRM Integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Webinar Integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Eventbrite Integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Olark Chat Integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| bit.ly Pro Connector | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Basic User Management | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Live Best Practice Calls And Office Hours | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| On-demand Training Videos | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| User Forum | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced Dynamic Content | $ | Yes | Yes |
| Multivariate Landing Page Testing | $ | Yes | Yes |
| Social Media Profiling & Lookups | $ | Yes | Yes |
| Google AdWords Integration | $ | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced Email Analytics | $ | Yes | Yes |
| Email Rendering and Preview Analysis | $ | Yes | Yes |
| Pardot API Access | 25k calls p/day | 100k calls p/day | |
| Email Marketing A/B Testing | Yes | Yes | |
| 3 out-of-the-box Pardot influence models | Yes | Yes | |
| Integrated Marketing Calendar | Yes | Yes | |
| Multiple Scoring Categories | Yes | Yes | |
| Dedicated IP Address | $ | Yes | |
| Custom Roles | $ | Yes | |
| Permission Customization | $ | Yes | |
| Custom Object Integration | $ | Yes | |
| B2B Marketing Analytics | 5 licenses | 5 licenses | |
| Salesforce Engage | $ | $ | $ |
| Predictive Lead Scoring | Yes | ||
| Behavior Scoring | Yes | ||
| Campaign Insights | Yes | ||
| Business Units | 2 included | ||
| Additional Business Units | $2k p/unit p/mnth | ||
| $ indicates the feature is available for an extra fee |
Pardot Marketing Automation Platform Pros & Cons
Now that you’re aware of Pardot’s history, it’s main focus, pricing, and capabilities, we’ll break down what we love the most about Pardot, and what we’re less thrilled about.
PROS
Native Salesforce Pardot Integration
Pardot offers native integration with Salesforce products. Unlike other marketing automation software that claims to integrate with Salesforce but really just impose themselves on top of it, Pardot blends seamlessly with Salesforce for powerful revenue-driven marketing.
Excellent Customizability
Unlike other marketing automation software many of its competitors, Pardot is highly customizable so you can program your instance for your specific needs.
CONS
Fewer Integrations
With its enterprise competitor Eloqua offering nearly 400 integrations, Pardot’s 32 integrations are a little less than thrilling. We don’t feel this is a strong enough reason to discount Pardot’s strong sales and marketing capabilities. However, if you’re a large enterprise organization in need of marketing automation software more robust solution, this may be a deciding factor for you.
Price
Like some of the other marketing automation software we’ve reviewed, Pardot’s pricing is up there. While it does offer an expansive set of services to support your marketing efforts for the cost, it may be a stretch for some startups and SMBs.
Not Super User-Friendly
Another thing we’ve seen in our own experience, as well as our clients, is that there are many nuances to the Pardot interface which may add frustration to the learning curve for beginners. In fact, one of the reasons why many of our clients have come to us is to help them get things up and running with Pardot and help them navigate these “gotcha” scenarios.
For example, one thing that always confuses our clients is when to choose a completion action, segmentation rule, automation rule, or dynamic list. It should be a rather simple process, and yet, Pardot needs to add a flowchart to explain the process.
Ready to Migrate?
Now that you’ve learned the ins and outs of Pardot, you’ll have to decide if moving to this marketing automation software is the best move for you and your organization. If so, we welcome you to read our Pardot migration post as well as use these customized checklists to help guide your transition.
Hubspot to Pardot
Mailchimp to Pardot
Marketo to Pardot
Eloqua to Pardot
Don’t have the bandwidth to commit to a migration effort? Worried that assets might fall through the cracks and campaigns won’t function properly once in Pardot? Let us help!
At Interrupt Media, we are automation experts and we provide a white glove approach to migrating your database from your current automation tool to Pardot.
Reach out today and let’s set up a time to chat.
Topics: Marketing Automation, Marketing Operations, Marketing Tools
