Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Marketing software for large companies.

Comments: As the company started to handle more complex numbers, it was necessary to have a software according to the needs and this one was able to meet the expectations.

Pros:

The number of customers it can handle is surprising, justifying its price. It also allows you to measure the results of each marketing campaign. In the long run it reduces costs to acquire new customers.

Cons:

The cost makes it an unviable option for small and medium-sized companies, even with the most economical plan. It is a slightly complex software, so it requires qualified personnel.

Salesforce

Pros:

The contacts and customer database personally is a very valuable tool for us for client outreach and pipeline management.

Cons:

Requires a decent level f training for new starters as some parts of the system are not the most intuitive to use.

Lot of things can be done, but very slow platform

Pros:

I like the Journey Builder - it gives us a lot of options, we can easily make segments and target people, and it's visually pleasing. The Intelligence reports are very good and very significant. It helps us to track data, and have a overview of KPIs.

Cons:

The platform can be very slow, bugs are often, the interface looks old, it's not easy to navigate like in Sales or Service Cloud. Even simple thing need to be done in complex way. The platform needs improvement.

You will never go back to any other email marketing software

Comments: Very positive we have encouraged other offices to adopt this platform

Pros:

For a company that communicates with clients and leads primarily via email this platform has changed the game for productivity and delivering personalized emails

Cons:

Always a learning curve when adapting to new software programs but saleforce team was hands on to smooth the transition

Marketing Cloud, a highly customizable email marketing platform

Pros:

There is a huge amount of customization and automation that you can do with the Marketing Cloud. And it's connected in with Salesforce, so it can be used to generate new Leads, update Salesforce records, and automate tasks.

Cons:

It can be clunky to set up the customer databases and connect the corresponding fields between Salesforce & Marketing Cloud.

Review by MT

Comments: Overall, my experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was positive. The platform offered a robust set of tools for managing customer engagement and executing marketing campaigns. The ability to segment and target specific customer groups, along with the automation features, streamlined my marketing efforts and improved campaign effectiveness. The real-time tracking and reporting capabilities allowed me to measure the impact of my campaigns and make data-driven decisions. Although the platform had a learning curve and could be costly, the overall experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was excellent, enabling me to enhance customer engagement and achieve marketing goals effectively.

Pros:

One of the things I liked most about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement was its comprehensive set of tools and features for managing customer engagement and marketing campaigns. The platform provided robust customer segmentation capabilities, allowing me to target specific audiences with personalized messaging. The automation features, such as email workflows and journey builders, made it easy to create and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns. The real-time tracking and reporting functionality provided valuable insights into campaign performance, allowing me to optimize my marketing efforts effectively.

Cons:

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement had many positive aspects, one thing I liked least was the complexity of the platform. As a beginner, it took some time to familiarize myself with the various features and functionalities. The learning curve was steep, and I would have appreciated more comprehensive onboarding resources and tutorials to help me navigate and utilize the platform more efficiently. Additionally, the pricing structure of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement could be quite expensive, especially for small businesses or startups with limited budgets.

Very disappointed

Comments: Massive post-sale cognitive dissonance - not saying Hubspot is better, but I'm really regretting this purchase

Pros:

Robust, customizable system with many features

Cons:

Byzantine and near to no onboarding - we have had it for 3 months with no clear onboarding process - all we get area bunch of random links from our sales executives and sale support - They do a great with their Sales CRM , but fail miserably with their Pardot/Account Engagement

Potential for Good Things, bad execution

Pros:

Could potentially be clear to learn, holds a lot of data, seemingly has a lot of functionality

Cons:

We didn't know we were paying for a "white glove" service, simply because no one reached out to us. That is - until we informed them we were thinking of leaving them and they tried to collect $8K in invoices that were supposedly unpaid over the course of 3 YEARS, yet no one knew anything. No one informed any active admins of the outstanding balance. No one shut off our access. Only when we were leaving due to non performance did they try to collect on a service we were not getting nor using

Salesforce review

Pros:

It’s a very good tool to manage leads and to have a clear visibility on the pipe.

Cons:

It’s not really easy to use for beginners

Easy to use CRM

Comments: We used it for lead management snd monitoring and Salesforce's easy UI and short learni g curve made that convenient

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

Strong Marketing Automation Tool! Highly recommended for SME and Mid Range Businesses

Comments: Overall I loved it. It's easier to use and the LIGHTNING EXPERIENCE IS AMAZING!!! It has the modern look and feel. I am going to stay with Pardot for a long time. Truly recommend it!

Pros:

In-house integration with SFDC. Easier to manage. Not complicated. It has similar functionality as the other major peers like Hubspot and Marketo and it was easier to learn and start working on it.

Cons:

Lead routing is not available. I am looking for in-built round-robin routing functionality.

The best Marketing Automation tool out there!

Comments: The experience so far has been nothing short of exceptional. We have been using Pardot since the last 5 years and have been able to facilitate amazing co-ordination with the Sales and Marketing teams. The automation Pardot provides also helps generate reports to measure Campaign ROI and overall lead generation.

Pros:

Pardot is unmatched in its ability to automate your marketing activities. The Engagement Program features it offers is probably the best in the market and allows you to design Customer journeys with customization based on the customer attributes as well as engagement. The WYSIWYG builder allows you to build beautiful email templates and Landing pages for Lead generation and Lead nurturing. It also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM and a wide variety of 3rd party applications.

Cons:

Pardot allows you to create multiple leads with the same email address. This is a compulsory feature and causes issues with duplicate and bad data. You need to make sure the data is cleansed regularly.

Increase Your Marketing Potential with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Comments: All things considered, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a complete solution for companies looking to organize their marketing initiatives and engage with customers more successfully.

Pros:

Mobile-friendly, personalized emails can be created and sent using powerful email campaign management tools. It helps you segment and target your audience effectively. Can-Spam compliance features to ensure that all emails adhere to legal requirements. Access control and permission features to manage user roles and permissions. Collaboration tools to help teams work together more effectively.Integration with other Salesforce products for seamless data exchange and cross-functional visibility.

Cons:

This platform reuires training or expertise to fully utilise its features.

Nicole Review

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

Amazing product

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

cloud app

Pros:

this program is very useful for companies that use Salesforce and becomes this company with cloud data sales to review with analyze data

Cons:

this app is very important for companies of sales to show data to their customer and I know this app with any concern about it like no issue system with it

Best tools for collaborating the workflow.

Pros:

In a single space I can handle the client, set a resolve, run an investigation regarding the past & present cases.Helps to keep track of my cases & it's status.Ease of maintaining the client's databases, Accounts database, etc

Cons:

The whole page is too slow to load.Some times getting bugs which make the schedule busy.

Fast, Easy, and Powerful Marketing Automation

Comments: I have used Pardot at three different companies now and I love it. It's been one of my most reliable and useful tools in my Marketing Stack over the years and it's continued to get better thanks to the aggressive roadmap put in place by Salesforce. Great for business ranging from small business up to Enterprise.

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.

Gets the job done

Comments: Pardot gets the job done, but it could definitely be better. I would recommend Pardot for smaller businesses that may just be starting out. If you are a larger company, I recommend either Marketo or Pardot.

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.

If you are using Salesforce then this tool is great!!

Comments: Pardot has fit our needs especially in working with Salesforce. However, if I had an option I would use a different tool (such as Hubspot). It feels like a dated product that needs some updates to the user experience. Keep in mind it is VERY powerful (a ton of features) but finding them is irritating. For example, you have email templates and email drafts. The differentiation is not clear and you have to look through their knowledge base to figure that out.

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.

Higher End, but worth it if you use Salesforce

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.

Bite the bullet and invest in a better tool

Comments: Horrific. Would never migrate to this tool again and wouldn't recommend to anyone.

Pros:

Perhaps "simplicity" is one way to put a positive spin on this review. For any Marketing Ops professional who wants to build anything above and beyond Pardot's pre-built functionality -- Good luck. Maybe the simplicity is good for a very small organization, but in that same vein the price point would be nowhere near worth it.

Cons:

Filter logic is absolutely miserable. There is no Boolean logic in the tool (going back to my point on "simplicity"), which is horrific for building out any type of complex filters for segments. There are even character limits on how much you can enter in one argument field. So, think about if you have to build out a segment to compile all leads from Europe and write out each country.... you would need to split the arguments into 15 or more "or" statements to account for each value. Also, everything is a drop down -- no free text entries for search -- so good luck sifting through 400 different values for a single Salesforce field. This is one seemingly minor example but is a great representation of how overly limited the tool is as a whole. Also their proclaimed "one-to-one" sync with Salesforce is a joke. There is always mismatched or missing data that doesn't align when boiled down into a report.

Pardot is a Powerful Tool, but It's Hard to Manage on Small Teams

Comments: Overall, Pardot delivers on all the capabilities that we need and has more power than we are able to leverage. We appreciate it's deep integration with Salesforce and know that it has feature parity with most of the other major players out there.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Great marketing automation, but not easy to use.

Comments: I really did enjoy using Pardot overall, and I would recommend it as a top-notch automation tool. The learning curve can be steep. I recommend attending one of their 3 day foundations training courses to help jump start your experience.

Pros:

Pardot is great for companies whose sales teams also use Salesforce due to the tight integration between the two products. Prospect and campaign tracking data can sync easily between the two systems and keep track of all campaign touch points across sales and marketing teams. Engagement studios are super easy to set up and allow for easy engagement-driven campaigns that help avoid "spammy" campaigns that help you stay off the blacklists of ISPs.

Cons:

My major complaint with Pardot really has been with the UI/UX. The user experience is not great. It's not intuitive AT ALL. There are many instances where the interface breaks standard functionality conventions, leaving you in the dark trying to figure out how to do even simple tasks. That being said, the Engagement Studio has completely different UI than the rest of the app, and is actually quite a good experience. I guess Salseforce is taking their time redoing the rest of the app, but I'm sure they'll get around to it soon enough.

It gets the job done...but requires a ton of workarounds

Comments: It feels like Pardot isnt getting nearly the amount of attention from Salesforce as it should. I used it over the course of a year and noticed that it would take months to roll-out incredibly important features.

Pros:

Once you've thoroughly understood all the features in Pardot, it can be quite easy to use for simple things. Their Engagement Studio, in particular, is incredibly built-out. It's also nice to have that sync with SFDC across fields. Lastly, the dynamic content was super helpful when we needed to update email templates across the board.

Cons:

- The email wizard takes a LONG time to load, even if you want to change something small, like preheader text. Additionally, it can take HOURS to render samples from their built-in litmus integration. For a company as advanced as Salesforce, you'd think this would be an easy feature to use. - From the day they linked Pardot and SFDC campaigns, there were severe bugs with email stats. I think they have solved the issue, but the fact that it took months meant we weren't able to capture that data easily. -To the point above...email stats are not easy to find in Pardot. There is a page that gives you the basics for email templates, but as for one-off email sends, forget about it. The reporting tab is just not good compared to any other email automation product on the market.