The Pros and Cons of Pardot

pardot salesforcePardot is marketing automation software by Salesforce that lets you automate marketing tasks and processes. For example, if you want to send a series of emails to everyone who downloads a white paper from you, you can manually send those emails each time someone downloads the white paper, or you can use automation software to generate those emails.

As your company grows, as you collect more leads and deal with more customers, the more important it will be to have a process to manage how you nurture and track your leads. In addition, having more information on your prospects’ activities, such as which links they clicked in your email newsletter, will allow you to have better sales conversations.

In addition to Pardot, there are multiple marketing automation software providers, such as Hubspot, Marketo and Infusionsoft; however, in this blog post, we will discuss some advantages and disadvantages of Pardot.

Pros of Pardot

1. Workflow

One of Pardot’s best features is their lead nurturing campaigns (also called drip programs). Lead nurturing campaigns are useful and efficient for engaging potential customers with content and offers; you can set up the campaign once and use the workflow multiple times for different leads.

With Pardot, you can easily set up workflows with their click and drag interface. There is also reporting available on each step in the workflow and other analytics available to help you improve your campaign.

pardot drip campaign

2. In-Depth Prospect Tracking

Pardot’s tracking can record a prospect’s activities ranging from visits to individual pages on your website, clicks on your email newsletters to them, or conversions on landing pages. There is a large advantage of being able to consolidate and attribute activities to individual prospects, compared to having separate systems when you are using separate systems for your website analytics, email marketing and landing pages. This gives more complete information about each prospect and what content they looked at, which means you can have more meaningful sales conversations.

pardot prospect

3. Close Integration With Salesforce CRM

If you use Salesforce as your CRM system, you can take advantage of Pardot’s close integration with Salesforce. This means that your Salesforce users or sales reps have access to prospect and lead information captured in Pardot, such as form submissions on landing pages. When sales reps have more information before contacting with leads or customers, their sales interactions have a higher chance of success.

Cons of Pardot

1. Price

Pardot’s pricing starts at $1,000/month, but is billed annually, so there’s no option to cancel if you decide the software isn’t the right fit for you after a few months. In addition, Pardot doesn’t offer a free trial, unlike Hubspot or Marketo. If you want a demo of Pardot, you have to deal with a sales rep, instead of being able to try the software yourself.

pardot pricing

2. A/B Testing Only Available To PRO Subscribers ($2,000/month)

A/B testing is a useful feature for email campaigns and for landing pages. In Pardot, only the Pro subscription plan, which is $1,000/month more than Standard plan, has this feature. In comparison, email marketing services like Mailchimp, which start at $10/month, includes A/B testing features, while landing page apps such as Unbounce which costs $49-$199/month also include A/B testing features as well.

3. You Still Need a Separate Tool For Social Media Management

Pardot’s social media support is on the weak side. Unlike other marketing automation tools, such as Hubspot, Pardot doesn’t have capabilities for basic social media management such as monitoring account feeds, replies or Twitter lists. If you’re using Pardot for marketing automation, you will still need to use a separate social media management tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

Conclusion

Pardot could be a good fit if you need good Salesforce CRM integration and have the budget for $1,000/month or more. If you’re not already familiar with marketing tools, such as tools for marketing automation, email marketing, landing pages, and so on, there may also be a learning curve to setting up the software. Being able to track your prospect’s activities is a big advantage for sales, but if you don’t have the budget or the time to learn to use software, you may want to stick with separate systems that are easier to manage even if the data is separate.

Do you use marketing automation? If so, what software programs are you using?

The Pros and Cons of Pardot