Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Reviews

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.

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.

We get real time activity updates of our prospects from the lead deck functionality

Awesome customer support

Ease of usage, is highly customisable

As it's a Salesforce product now the ease of integration with the CRM is mind blowing

I would say the makers of this product are a little money minded.

A lot of functionalities are only available for the PRO users like API access and A/B testing

Also, not many integrations are possible using this product

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

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.

Pardot makes automating marketing activities simple, whether you're setting up lead gen forms and responder emails or just creating email campaigns. It connects with Salesforce and helps keep lead owners and other information updated that prior to had been a pain.

Its campaign tracking really only tracks . It can only track social if the posts are scheduled in Pardot. Email and landing page editors aren't as full-featured for simple design edits.

It integrates with Salesforce very easily which, I assume, is the only reason why anybody might ever consider using it.

It offers very limited set of features, which don't work quite as expected, the support is terribly lazy, and all that comes at a price much higher than that of the competition.

One aspect I liked most about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was its comprehensive set of tools and features for managing and engaging with customer accounts. The platform's ability to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, along with its robust analytics capabilities, allowed for effective customer segmentation and improved campaign performance.

One drawback I experienced with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was the complexity of the platform, which required a significant learning curve to fully utilize its features and functionalities. Additionally, the cost associated with using the platform could be a limiting factor for smaller businesses or organizations with limited marketing budgets.

The software is pretty intuitive and easy to use. There is a huge community that's eager to collaborate and assist (local user groups, blogs, the Dreamforce conference, the connections conference, twitter, slack groups, linkedin groups, etc). We utilized the product for List Emails ( about 30 each month), Automated Nurture Campaigns, Segmentation, Email Preference Center, and so much more. It is very powerful and played a key role in our marketing efforts.

The trade off to ease-of-use is lack of complexity. After working with the platform for 5 years, I have concluded that it is a great fit for smaller companies that want to use their features in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. We are a medium sized company with multiple target audiences, some that overlap, some that don't, territories with multiple languages and a vast and diverse product line. I am regularly (daily if not weekly) frustrated by the platform's limitations. The saving grace is that there is usually a work around. We are always able to figure out how to solve a problem, but each time it requires more steps, more time, then more "overhead" to manage in the future.

While, Salesforce is regularly rolling out enhancements and features, the list of wants and needs created by users is long. There are features that seem completely basic and have been in demand by the users for years that have yet to be delivered. Things that are sometimes minor but quite surprising to learn aren't included.

One of Pardot's biggest weaknesses is reporting. We do all our reporting in Sales Cloud dashboards or in Excel.

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.

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.

Pardot allows us to get insight at a per-contact level into their activity, interests, and profile. We've made it even more useful by adding on additional integrations like Clearbit and Zoom. We track more than 12k new incoming leads annually and we automate outreach to those leads every single day.

Many decisions that you make at the beginning of the implementation will dog you after you've made them (how do we organize our campaigns? what tags should we use? when automations do we want to build off of those tags? how do we segment our lists). Pardot/Salesforce has offered strategic support and even configuration services, however, we find that these often lack the depth of knowledge to tell us if we're making the right call/they are too expensive for a small firm like ours.

There are different characteristics that make Pardot a very interesting product, for example the different drip campaigns that you can carry out from this product triggers and in sales funnel actions and they are generating very good profits in our profit. in turn, the product has an excellent return on investment thanks to the good management of the campaigns it allows.

Not everything is perfect within the product and has failures that reduce efficiency and the new star usually creates a lot of disagreement and even leads to exasperation, due to the lack of a simple and efficient user interface and that navigation through the platform It tends to be time consuming and make small errors that delay product use.

Creating customized email templates and nurture campaigns. Easily setup A/B testing for any email send. The ability to slice and dice your segments so you can get more granular with contact lists. Integrated well with many of the other platforms (GoToWebinar) and social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) we used. Obviously with Salesforce too.

Compared to other email management tools, Pardot is expensive and the UI feels outdated. Unless you spend a lot of time reading their resources and tutorials, it isn't intuitive. The Pardot forms is also confusing. They have forms and form handlers and there should be a better way of combining the two to make things simple.

I loved the demo given to me by an expert who sold me on the ease of the technical set up and use of Pardot.

The technical setup was far too technical for me. The cost was over SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN a month and we never got it up and running after 7 months of trying. They later recommended using a third party company for technical implementation as it was too technical for a somewhat technical person. Our developer and technical team members did not have the time to implement themselves as it was a full time position to setup technically.