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Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: What is Pardot in Salesforce and Does Your Business Need It?
• Date: February 2024 •
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Many businesses consider marketing automation to be a must-have. According to the latest Salesforce State of Marketing Report, 63% of marketers use the same CRM system as sales and service departments.
How often, though, does quantity lead to the quality of marketing processes? And what are the planned outcomes of the transformation?
No matter what tool or platform you are going to have, the results might not justify the investment if you don't prepare the ground for its implementation. Taking Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, also known as Pardot, as an example, we will discuss what companies expect VS what they really get with the help of martech tools.
In this article, we will be delving into what Pardot is, its practical advantages, recognized as a top B2B marketing platform in the Salesforce realm. We'll uncover the impact of this B2B marketing automation tool through real-world examples shared in Salesforce Pardot customer stories.
Additionally, we'll explore the significance of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement growth and highlight essential Pardot features that have solidified its role for B2B marketers.
Table of Contents:
First things first:
What is Pardot Account Engagement?
Account Engagement, formerly known as Pardot, is a widely-used marketing automation tool designed specifically for Salesforce customers. Originally introduced in 2007, Account Engagement initially operated independently from the core Salesforce platform.
However, in recent years, there has been a gradual migration of Pardot's features and functionalities into the core Salesforce platform, resulting in a more integrated and seamless experience for users.
The Role of Pardot Marketing Automation
However tempting to imagine it this way, the customer journey isn't straightforward. You don't just fill the pipeline with clients and then push them to obtain products with thousands of irrelevant messages. Each interaction needs to play a role in converting your customer into your partner.
This is especially true for B2B companies with considered purchases. So it's up to marketing teams to provide an engaging, powerful, and personalized experience for a customer from their first visit to the website to their making a purchase.
Salesforce Pardot Pipeline
Marketing automation software provides a central database for oiling these processes.
- It automates repetitive tasks, such as email & ad campaigns, content distribution, handling contact forms, and social media planning. As a result, marketing operations are more optimized, and conversion rates increase.
- You have access to analytics. Data and marketing are synonyms. Relevant information about your customer behaviour gives more opportunities to personalize messages, fine-tune campaigns, and prove marketing ROI.
- It ensures a seamless experience. If integrated with the CRM, a unified platform harmonizes sales and marketing teams in their approach to customers.
However promising these benefits may sound, not every business needs marketing automation. There are two critical factors to consider before implementing it.
1. Growth strategy
First of all, it's impossible to upgrade something that doesn't work. Consider the current marketing processes in your company. If you have an active multi-channel strategy, then automation will serve you best, as it provides an all-in-one automation tool. But if scaling isn't on the horizon, and an email channel, for example, is enough to keep you afloat, then it's worth taking your time.
2. Ecosystem
This point backs the first one. An ecosystem is a base for your growth. So think about the tools that would fit in properly in the current ecosystem and help you scale faster. For example, Pardot (MC Account Engagement) integration with Salesforce expands its functionality with minimum errors in data syncing plus gives more automation options.
Keeping these two factors in mind, let's see how exactly marketing automation works in the example of Pardot (MC Account Engagement).
What are the benefits of Salesforce Pardot (MCAE)?
Why businesses bother with adopting MCAE? The long-term advantages speak for themselves.
What is Pardot and its benefits
- Improved time-to-revenue: Pardot facilitates a quicker time to revenue for businesses by streamlining and automating sales and marketing operations.
- Streamlined processes: Pardot streamlines outdated sales and marketing processes, saving time and resources for businesses by automating routine tasks.
- Increased revenue: marketing automation with Pardot contributes to increased revenue by identifying and focusing on the most effective and profitable marketing channels.
- Quality lead generation: Pardot's lead scoring and grading features help businesses generate more high-quality sales leads, ensuring a more effective and targeted approach to lead nurturing.
- Unified platform value: Pardot's integration capabilities ensure a unified platform for sales, service, and marketing teams, fostering collaboration and providing a complete 360-degree view of customer engagement.
- Data-driven insights: Pardot offers data-driven insights, helping businesses make informed decisions and align marketing and sales efforts for improved overall impact.
- Seamless integrations: Pardot seamlessly integrates with other key business tools, such as CRM, video platforms, and advertising tools, enhancing overall functionality and connectivity.
- Easy collaboration: businesses using Pardot alongside Sales Cloud experience faster transitions from marketing to sales, fostering better collaboration and boosting conversion rates.
- Cost-effective growth: As part of the Salesforce Platform, Pardot eliminates the need for complex integrations, saving time and money and making it easier for businesses to scale and add new functionalities.
- Customer trust building: Pardot aids in building customer trust by enabling businesses to nurture leads, deliver relevant content, and personalize customer journeys, ultimately fostering long-term relationships.
Here's a success story that illustrates how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) can improve marketing outcomes world-leading safety and risk management company:
Gexcon faced a challenge in streamlining marketing activities across departments. CRM was only adopted by one department, and other teams were using different tools, which led to disjointed data and gaps in the full customer view.
What is Pardot Used for?
Pardot (MC Account Engagement) oversees the upper layer of the sales funnel. It means you can build your customer journey and organize lead nurturing processes.
1
Track visitors and convert them into prospects
2
Use criteria-based automation tools to perform actions on prospects
3
Score and grade prospects to prioritize activities within your team
4
Engage them with adaptable email & social campaigns
5
Analyze how they interact with content
6
Segment effectively
7
Push high-quality leads to sales
As a result, anonymous website visitors get converted into qualified leads. Sounds impressive, and Pardot sticks to its promise. However, a tool is not enough to achieve success.
Pardot (MCAE) Common Misconceptions
For creating a realistic perspective on its capabilities, you need to give the boot to misleading expectations. Let's dig into the most common of them.
Misconception #1: Pardot will Drive Revenue Growth and Replace my Marketing Team
Several surveys outline two key barriers to marketing automation success: lack of strategy and good-quality content.
Automation won't do marketing for you – it can only streamline your operations. So, if your existing marketing processes are chaotic or close to absent, Pardot won't help you save the day. However, with a costly, complex, and time-consuming strategy, it fits the bill.
The most salient benefit of Pardot is cutting down on mundane tasks: you can set up automation rules based on criteria, such as a prospect's grade, a landing page view, or email opening, schedule email campaigns and autoresponders, enable A/B testing, and analyze SEO, all on one platform.
Automation Rule Editor
In the long run, automation helps to boost revenue if configured and bolstered properly. But to do so, you still need to invest in talent. Your team will have to take up not only strategic development but also powerful content generation.
Misconception #2: Pardot will Help me Generate More Leads
Most automation tools for marketing and sales bridge the gap in the middle of the funnel. For example, Pardot creates prospects when visitors leave their contact details on your website interacting with the forms or content (downloading books or guides).
After that, you perform engagement campaigns aiming at converting your prospect into a lead. Moreover, with the help of segmented and customer-centric content, you have more upsell opportunities. In short, Pardot enables inbound lead generation.
What's important here is that it doesn't work with the top of the funnel, which usually poses challenges to most teams. So make sure to have a long-term plan and a steady flow of leads before implementing an automation tool from Salesforce.
Misconception #3: Pardot is for Email Campaigns Only
Email automation is a proven and most wanted marketing automation technique. Pardot has an intuitive email builder with templates, custom design capabilities, scheduled email sending for drip campaigns, and deep statistics. It also provides such useful tools as A/B testing, SPAM filter check-ups, email testing, and rendering.
Email Template Editor
Nonetheless, the success of email campaigns relies on the personalization and relevance of your messages. Content here again comes to the fore. For that, Pardot offers opportunities to keep one step ahead in customer engagement with the help of various channels, like socials and ads.
Misconception #4: Pardot is Self-sufficient
Let's not forget the goal of marketing automation - warm leads. Leads that turn into paying customers. To make it real, sales and marketing teams need to join forces. That's why Pardot gets integrated with a CRM system, such as Salesforce.
With this combination, you can deliver warm leads to your sales team, and they will know how to break the ice using the information about their previous interactions.
Misconception #5: Pardot is (not) an Out-of-the-box Solution
Business automation implies upscale. The tool you choose has to be flexible enough to align with your growth. Flexibility is usually the other side of complexity.
The main barriers to marketing automation adoption often include integrating data from sources and systems and lack of resources, staff, or skills for setting up rules, lead scoring, and sequences.
For these reasons, hiring an outsource consultant allows you to set up all the processes quickly and benefit from specialized expertise. Thus, you can ensure a stable growth path aligned with your business needs.
Twistellar's marketing team is using Pardot too to analyze and increase the effectiveness of our engagements. We have dealt with its implementation and configuration for various industries. We'd be happy to share some use cases!
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One might come to the conclusion that marketing automation is a bad idea. Not at all! It spans operations and narrows your work down to really impactful tasks. However, the success of marketing automation is a matter of right expectations and strategic planning.
Reap the Benefits
of Pardot Implementation
of Pardot Implementation
Automate marketing processes, improve lead generation and qualification, unify sales and marketing teams
How to use Pardot to Bring Tangible Results?
Using Pardot efficiently allows you to maximize your resources, save time, improve lead management, gain valuable insights, and deliver more effective and personalized marketing campaigns, ultimately driving better results for your business.
There are a few tips seasoned Pardot (Account Engagement) experts share:
- Utilize the recycling bin feature to reduce data usage limits while retaining contact information for future reference. Prioritize placing hard bounces, unsubscribes, soft bounces, and inactive contacts into the recycling bin.
- Use custom redirects for email/landing page links within Pardot to track traffic and perform actions on contacts based on link clicks. This simplifies the process compared to using engagement studios and allows for easier reporting.
- Instead of relying on automation rules, consider using completion actions or page actions for simpler actions. Reserve automation rules for more complex actions to avoid reaching the limit quickly.
- Review and customize the default scoring settings to align with the value you assign to different contact activities. Additionally, utilize grading to track contacts' demographic information and identify ideal customers.
- Implement scoring categories to track activity based on different content or topics. This allows for more targeted scoring and evaluation of campaign performance.
To Wrap Up
Before you spend months and thousands of dollars on a system with quite vast capabilities, let's overview some precautions that software salespeople might omit.
- Not every business needs automation
Think about current processes and your scaling plan
- First comes the strategy, then the tool
Content and skilled people matter
- Talk to your team first
Analyze the channels you use as well as your sales cycle
- Generate a steady flow of leads
Pardot will help to capture and nurture them
- Integrate it properly
Consider the existing ecosystem and other tools you might need in the future
- Outsource to save time
An experienced consultant will highlight the pitfalls to be avoided, save budget and time with its implementation
FAQ: What is Pardot in Salesforce?
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform by Salesforce. It streamlines and automates marketing tasks, facilitating lead generation, nurturing, and analytics.
Account Engagement in Salesforce Pardot focuses on B2B marketing automation, while Marketing Cloud offers a broader set of tools for multi-channel marketing, including B2C interactions.
Read the article for more details on the difference between Pardot and Marketing Cloud.
Read the article for more details on the difference between Pardot and Marketing Cloud.
Pardot is essential for optimizing B2B marketing efforts, automating tasks, nurturing leads, and providing in-depth analytics, ultimately improving overall marketing efficiency.
Pardot integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, enhancing marketing and sales alignment. Pardot marketing automation includes lead nurturing, scoring, and tracking within the Salesforce environment.
Pardot is designed with user-friendliness in mind, offering an intuitive interface. However, some training may be beneficial for maximizing its potential.
Yes, Pardot is a Salesforce product specifically tailored to work seamlessly with Salesforce's suite of CRM tools. You can check availability and Salesforce Pardot pricing on the official website.
Pardot is primarily designed for B2B marketing automation, focusing on streamlining and optimizing business-to-business marketing processes.
Pardot pricing varies based on the edition and features required. Detailed pricing information can be obtained from Salesforce's official website. Prices are subject to change.
In 2006, co-founders David Cummings and Adam Blitzer acquired the domain name Pardot.com. Subsequently, they introduced their marketing automation software in the following year.
During their search for a suitable name, they stumbled upon the term "pardot," a Latvian verb denoting "to market or sell." Although initially prompting uncertainties regarding pronunciation, with some commonly mispronouncing it as "par-deaux," the correct pronunciation of "Pardot" aligns precisely with its spelling.
During their search for a suitable name, they stumbled upon the term "pardot," a Latvian verb denoting "to market or sell." Although initially prompting uncertainties regarding pronunciation, with some commonly mispronouncing it as "par-deaux," the correct pronunciation of "Pardot" aligns precisely with its spelling.
No, Pardot is not free. It comes with a separate cost, and pricing details can be found on Salesforce's official website.
Salesforce Pardot is used by businesses engaged in B2B marketing to automate and optimize their marketing processes, enhancing lead generation and nurturing. Many enterprises and SMBs use Salesforce for marketing automation.
Yes, the best B2B Salesforce marketing platform is well-suited for email marketing, offering features like personalized email campaigns, lead nurturing, and detailed analytics to improve overall email marketing effectiveness.
If you still have second thoughts on Pardot implementation, turn to us for a free consultation
Our deep understanding of Salesforce platform ensures successful handling of projects in any domain
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