In this post, we return to our series on marketing automation reviews. We’re taking a look at some of the major players in the marketing automation space, and reviewing them head-to-head in a grueling series of challenges to see who comes out top of the tables. This week, we’re putting Salesforce Pardot to the test.

Pardot

For B2B-focused businesses who want a comprehensive marketing automation solution, Pardot B2B Marketing Automation has a lot to offer. A part of Salesforce, Pardot’s integration with that CRM is very thorough and easy to implement. Pardot’s capabilities for collecting data, and for surgically segmenting leads, make it a perfect choice for anyone who wants to take their marketing to a much more advanced level.

Email Marketing

With lots of features, intuitive editing, and the ability to readily add tons of templates, Pardot’s email marketing capabilities are ideal for B2B businesses who need time and strategy to nurture big leads. Pardot is easy and intuitive for those who don’t have a lot of technical expertise, although more advanced users might wish for a bit more back-end capabilities from the templates.

Pardot makes it easy to segment your leads based on how they interact with your emails, and customize each email for the right recipient. Pardot can help you create a smart email campaign: one that learns each time a lead interacts with one of your emails. These interactions help to further segment your leads. In essence, each lead is helping to design their own, personalised marketing campaign every time they open an email from you.

Landing Pages

Pardot is positioning itself as the industry leader in email marketing and landing pages, and its landing page capabilities are truly exhaustive. For those just starting out, they offer highly customisable templates for landing pages. However, if you’re a more advanced user and you want to replicate the look of an existing site, you can also use HTML to build a brand-new page.

Most importantly, you can build multiple landing pages, test their performance, and measure how well they compliment your email marketing efforts, with Pardot’s powerful analytics.

Lead Management

Pardot offers a sophisticated lead-scoring system, and plenty of ways to use automation to make lead management easier and more effective. With Pardot’s excellent CRM integration, it can also help to identify the most qualified leads before handing them over to sales.

Pardot can orchestrate sophisticated, action-triggered marketing efforts. This means each lead sees exactly the content that speaks to them, when they want to see it. Rather than automatically blasting out one stock email, Pardot can help you identify increasingly small lead segments, and nurture them in a variety of different ways. This can help you reach out to pickier, or more stubborn leads, in a way that will pique their interest instead of scaring them off.

This program can also help you keep track of leads that might interact with your business in a variety of ways, so you can reach out with personalized efforts that reach them where they are. Pardot can also help you revive so-called “dormant” leads, to see which ones have the potential to blossom into sales.

CRM Integration

Since Salesforce Pardot is part of Salesforce, CRM integration is a no-brainer for companies who are already using Salesforce for their customer relations management. With Pardot’s Salesforce connector, it’s easy to sync Pardot leads and actions with Salesforce. The two platforms sync continuously, eliminating duplicate entries, and transferring leads over to Salesforce simply by assigning them to a salesperson. Pardot’s analytics and information-gathering also strengthen Salesforce’s potential.

Along with Salesforce, Pardot offers native integration with most other major CRM’s as well, although the program can’t integrate with more than one CRM at a time.

Analytics

With Pardot’s analytics, you can track in real time how leads are interacting with your business. In particular, Pardot’s Advanced Email Analytics package will tell you everything there is to know about how your email campaigns are performing, including engagement, click-throughs, and A/B testing. To utilize all of Pardot’s analytics features, you’ll need a Pro or Ultimate plan.

Social Integration

Pardot offers connectors to all the major social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. You can use the connectors to post automatically, and Pardot to build custom forms and landing pages just for Facebook, for example.

Pardot has two LinkedIn connectors, one for fast and easy posting, and another for looking up profiles and company leads. This extra LinkedIn functionality is another asset that boosts Pardot’s potential for B2B marketing.

On-boarding

Pardot offers two on-boarding packages for new clients, Quick Start and High Touch. While Quick Start includes all the basics for moving your marketing campaigns to Pardot, High Touch also includes extra training to ensure you and your team are using your new software to its full potential. For most start-ups, the Pardot Quick Start package will have everything you need. Larger companies with more complicated marketing needs will probably prefer the extra features of High Touch.

Pricing

Starting at $1,000 a month, Pardot isn’t the cheapest option out there, and if you want to use the more advanced features, like email analytics, full integration with AdWords, and A/B testing for landing pages, you’ll have to invest in the Pro plan, which is $2,000 a month.

Pardot has a significant level of functionality, but it comes at a reasonably high price. This makes it the ideal choice for mid-sized companies that can get the maximum ROI from all the features.

Market Position

Salesforce Pardot is a mid-to-higher priced option for marketing automation software, but also one of the most comprehensive. With tons of features, smart analytics and seamless integration with Salesforce, it’s a great choice for more established, enterprise businesses that can fully take advantage of all of its capabilities.

If you need advice about which marketing automation platform is best for your business, just send us a message. Demodia can help you craft a marketing automation strategy that will nurture your leads the smart way. Drop us a line today!

Other articles in this series:

• Oracle Eloqua
• Marketo
• HubSpot
• Salesforce Pardot
• Click Dimensions
• SharpSpring
• Act-On