What is Pardot?

Pardot is a B2B Marketing Automation platform by Salesforce, designed to help marketers automate their revenue-generating campaigns. The advanced automation functionality allows marketers to manage and automate their online marketing campaigns while delivering a personalized experience, and growing pipeline. Pardot allows you to automate tasks such as tracking, creating digital marketing campaigns, SEO, social media marketing, and personalization of landing page content for the current viewer. Pardot allows the marketer to create automated and personalized digital journeys where a user can receive personalized content based on their preferences or choices they make in the digital journey.

Since Pardot is a product of Salesforce, they share a powerful connector that not only allows for leads and contacts to sync to Pardot prospects but now Pardot assets, data, snippets and several other Pardot components are now accessible in Salesforce for easier navigation and reporting. Additionally, the two platforms together allow for greater visibility into the complete lifecycle of the lead, as well as some pretty advanced campaign attribution reporting so marketers can see what campaigns are working, closing the deal, and generating leads. 

You can easily pull data back and forth between records, such as leads, contacts, and accounts, to easily share data between the marketing and sales teams. From Pardot, you can leverage the Salesforce active assignment rules to conveniently automate the assignment of leads. You can even embed the activity history right on a lead or contacts record page to allow the sales team to see how their leads/contacts are engaging with your organization. Refer to the Engagement History image to see how it will present the information in Salesforce, the engagement history from Pardot shows through on the lead and contact record.

What are some of the features of Pardot? Tools to Create Your Campaigns: Email Marketing, Landing pages, Forms, Marketing Calendar, Landing Pages & Email Testing, Social Posting, Email Rendering, and Preview Analysis. These are just a few of the main tools available, you can enhance these tools through the use of connectors (listed below), such as Google Adwords or Wisita, to view video engagement.

Automation Tools:
Advanced Dynamic Content, Snippets, Automation Rules, Variable Tags, Engagement Programs, & Lead Nurturing. 

Lead Identification:
Lead Scoring & Grading, Scoring Categories, Multiple Scoring Categories, Social profiling, and lookups. 

Each edition of Pardot comes with a different set of features, so know what you’ll get in each prior to purchasing. If you are really interested in personalization, just note that the dynamic content is not available in the Growth Edition. 

What Challenges does Pardot Address?

• Lead Management: With Pardots automation it allows you to increase the number of leads generated from the website, display ads, events, and other campaigns while tracking the lead source and automating the lead assignment to the sales team. You can leverage active assignment rules from salesforce, assign to queues, or assign to a specific user. Automate the enrollment of leads into a nurture program when they are unresponsive or just not ready to close the deal.
• Generate Faster Sales: With advanced segmentation, lead scoring and grading, Pardot allows you to quickly identify and elevate leads that are qualified and interested in your products or services. They can automatically be sent to the sales team to follow up. 
• Enhanced Personalization: Features like Dynamic Content will help improve the relevancy of the website, as well as the helpfulness of your email communications. Personalization has been shown to lead to an increased number of leads as well as provide a better overall experience for the end-user. 
• Report on ROI: As a marketer, you’re likely working in several different channels, and your campaigns use various channels such as email marketing, social media, and PPC. Pardot reporting breaks down the silos of data that sit in different platforms and channels within the organization. Pardot brings it together and allows you to show the ROI of the marketing department as a whole.

What can Pardot natively integrate to?

When you are using Salesforce and Pardot you can pull data through Salesforce down into Pardot, but Pardot has its own native integrations also known as Pardot connectors that have some pretty powerful features, and shouldn’t be confused with Salesforce integrations. They are specifically designed for Pardot and enhance the tracking, and functionality within Pardot. I’d recommend diving into each of these to learn more about their Pardot integration.

Webinar Connectors:

• Webex
• Ready Talk
• GoToWebinar

Event Connectors:

• Eventbrite

Video Connectors:

• Wistia

Social Posting Connectors:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin

Other Connectors: 

• Google Ads
• Twillio
• Olark
• UserVoice

How much does Pardot cost?

Pardot has three editions that allow you to start small and grow into the most advanced version. They are as follows: 

1. Pardot Growth Edition: The edition has the least amount of features but is a great way to get started, it is $1,250 per month and allows up to 10,000 contacts billed annually. 
2. The Pardot Plus Edition: The most popular version by far, it allows more automation and even includes B2B Marketing Analytics (for new signups), it’s $2,500 per month and up to 10,000 contacts billed annually.
3. Pardot Advanced Edition: The most powerful and innovative solution comes in at $4,000 per month with up to 10,000 contacts billed annually. This version also includes B2B Marketing Analytics.

Each edition starts you off with 10,000 contacts per year, if you need additional contact blocks, you can speak to your Salesforce Account Executive about purchasing more. For a full list of Pardot features by edition check out this great chart with all Pardot features by edition.

What is B2B Marketing Analytics?

B2B Marketing Analytics was designed for the data-driven marketer who is looking to really dive into their Pardot data to see what’s performing, what’s marketing’s impact on revenue, and even create their own reports. You can see the impact of your marketing without needing a data scientist. The real power of B2B Marketing Analytics is the ability to marry together data from Salesforce, Pardot, and even connect to third-party data. We all know as marketers, that we are using a wide variety of channels to attract leads, so this platform allows you to bring it all together in one place. You can create your own custom visualizations for yourself or share it with your team. One of the greatest features about B2B Marketing Analytics is it comes with its own out of the box dashboards: 

1. Pipeline Dashboard: Check out what’s going on in your marketing lifecycle, a breakdown of the sales pipeline, and campaign performance.
2. Engagement Dashboard: Analyze engagement to see what’s performing. See the image below.
3. Marketing Manager Dashboard: An overview of everything happening in your pipeline, and how customers are engaging with top content.
4. Multi-Touch Attribution Dashboard: Discover what’s most effective at different points in the funnel, see what attracts leads, and what closes deals. 

The above chart is a sample of the B2B Marketing Analytics Engagement Dashboard. It shows how individual assets are contributing to Sales. This specific section is the list email engagement component, that provides an overview of all of your email engagements filtered by the campaign. So you can see the total emails sent, the open rate, number of unique clicks, bounces, opt-outs, and undelivered messages.

B2B Marketing Analytics is included for new Pardot Plus and Pardot Advanced signups. If you already have Pardot and are interested, reach out to your Salesforce Account Executive. 

What is Salesforce Engage?

Salesforce engage helps align marketing and sales teams so they can close more deals faster. It essentially provides a window from Salesforce into Pardot and allows the sales team to leverage predefined email templates for their outreach, at the same time, it allows the marketing team to ensure those emails are on-brand. Additionally, it provides real-time alerts so the sales team can deliver their communications in a timely and relevant manner. Salesforce Engage consists of four major features, Engage Campaigns, Engage Reports, Engage Alerts, and Engage for Gmail and Outlook.

Engage Alerts helps you reach out to prospects at the right time by viewing real-time prospect activity in the card-based dashboard shown above. You can filter this dashboard with a specific set of criteria.

Salesforce Engage Benefits for the Sales Team: 

• Gets real-time alerts on desktop or phone.
• Dashboards with detailed engagement history.
• Reach out using pre-approved email templates.
• Track emails sent from outlook.
• Easily add prospects to nurture campaigns.

Salesforce Engage Benefits for the Marketing Team: 

• Can control the look and feel of email templates sent by sales.
• Get insight into the content used by sales to see the effectiveness.  

The cost of Salesforce Engage is $50 per month per user billed annually. 

Pardot Resources:

Salesforce offers a wide variety of both marketing and Pardot resources, but if you’re just getting started with Pardot, or have Pardot and need assistance, or you’re new to the ecosystem and need some help, feel free to reach out to us here, we’ll even give a free consultation. We’re always happy to help or just talk about all things Pardot.  

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.