Getting new clients and retaining old ones take up a lot of time and resources. A growing business can also quickly lose track of its existing clients or leads. Slacking off in nurturing clients can lead to the death of any business. The solution? Marketing automation software.
Marketing Automation Software
A marketing automation software is a tool that helps you automate all of your marketing tasks, streamline workflows, and measure the outcomes of your campaigns. They can act as a central marketing database and help you create personalized, segmented, and timely marketing experiences for your customers. Good marketing automation software can help you determine the success of an entire marketing campaign. There are lots of them out there but one powerful tool dominating the market today is Salesforce Pardot.
What Is Salesforce Pardot?
Salesforce has two marketing automation products – Salesforce Pardot and Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud is typically used as a B2C tool, while Pardot is used for B2B.
Pardot provides targeted email campaigns, email automation, ROI tracking, and lead management for marketing organizations. For organizations that already use Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution, Pardot can sync with the CRM and offer better performance. This syncing can also reduce the time for analytics as compared to other marketing automation tools. It is ranked among the top in the G2 Crowd Grid for Marketing Automation.
Pardot Pricing
Salesforce Pardot offers four marketing automation plans - Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium.
Pardot Growth - $1,250/month
Salesforce Pardot Growth plan contains all the basic features of Pardot - email marketing tools, engagement programs, tracking social posts, ROI reporting, custom fields, user managements, in-depth prospect tracking, and customizable URLs. You can integrate Pardot Growth with your native CRM, Google AdWords, Olark Chat, Eventbrite, and Webinar.
The limit of Pardot growth is 100 SEO keywords monitored, 50 forms, 50 landing pages, 50 automation rules, 10 competitors monitored, 3 SSL vanity domains, and 5 engagement history dashboards. Other features are available at an extra cost.
Pardot Plus - $2,500/month
Salesforce Pardot Plus includes all the features of Pardot Growth features and more. The landing pages and forms and landing pages are unlimited for Plus. It includes 250 SEO keywords monitored, 100 automation rules, 25 competitors monitored, 10 SSL vanity domains, and 10 engagement history dashboards. Other features are available at an extra cost.
Pardot Advanced - $4,000/month
Salesforce Pardot Advanced includes all the features of Pardot Plus. The extended limits are 1000 SEO keywords monitored, 150 automation rules, 100 competitors monitored, 20 SSL vanity domains, 20 engagement history dashboards, and API access to 100,000 calls per day. Salesforce Pardot Advanced also includes a new feature - Salesforce's Einstein AI.
Pardot Premium - $15,000/month
Salesforce Pardot Premium includes all the features of Pardot Advanced and additional enterprise-friendly features. The biggest benefit to this plan is the expanded cap on contacts - 75,000.
Which Plan Is the Best?
If you are just starting out, the Plus plan is a great choice as it includes all the primary features that you will need. However, if you want to gain the full benefit from all the complex features powered by AI insights, you can sign up for the Advanced plan.
Here is a full list of the features available for all plans so you can decide what’s best for you:
Growth |
Plus |
Advanced |
Premium |
|
|
Monthly bill |
$1,250 |
$2,500 |
$4,000 |
$15,000 |
|
Yearly bill |
$15K |
$30K |
$48K |
$180K |
|
Contacts |
10K |
10K |
10K |
75K |
|
SEO keyword monitoring |
100 |
250 |
1,000 |
1,000 |
|
Competitor monitoring |
10 |
25 |
100 |
100 |
|
Custom user roles and permission |
No |
Costs extra: $500/mo |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Custom Object Integration |
Not available |
Costs extra: $400/mo |
Included |
Included |
|
Custom Object Integration |
None |
25,000 |
100,000 |
100,000 |
|
Files hosted |
100 MB |
500 MB |
10 GB |
10 GB |
|
B2B Marketing Analytics Plus |
Not available |
Costs extra: $3,000/user/mo |
Costs extra: $3,000/user/mo |
Included |
|
B2B Marketing Analytics Plus |
$50/user/mo |
$50/user/mo |
$50/user/mo |
$50/user/mo |
|
Engagement history dashboards |
5 |
10 |
20 |
20 |
|
Additional contacts |
$100/10K contacts/mo |
$100/10K contacts/mo |
$100/10K contacts/mo |
$100/10K contacts/mo |
Benefits of Salesforce Pardot
It offers a huge range of benefits, but they're all aimed to tackle the four main challenges of marketing - lead generation, lead management, ROI reporting, and sales alignment. Here are some of the most important benefits:
- Calculate the real ROI of all the marketing efforts with intelligent reporting and gain new insights to maximize future marketing efforts.
- Connect with customers on a personalized level and optimize efforts using spam analysis and A/B testing.
- Provide a high-level view of the sales cycle to show where the prospects are slacking off in the sales funnel.
- Customize content with readymade templates for forms, emails, and landing pages and use the list of prospects to run a lead nurturing program.
- Differentiate lead grading (prospects who are of interest to the company) and lead scoring (prospects who are interested in the products) for better market analysis.
- Align and integrate all the sales and marketing efforts to build a strong sales funnel.
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Here’s What You Can Do Next
We highly recommend Salesforce Pardot for your business because of its broad array of features, its customizable functionality, and flexible reporting abilities. That said, there are a variety of other Salesforce tools that can help you excel in your career. According to Glassdoor, there are over 300,000+ Salesforce jobs available and Salesforce jobs are increasing at a speed 1.5x more than other similar roles. If you want to learn more, you can sign up for Simplilearn’s Salesforce Certification - Administrator & App Builder Course which will help you learn and master the concepts of being a Salesforce Administrator and App Builder through hands-on experience. You will learn how to create applications using Salesforce Lightning and configure Salesforce to collect, analyze, and retrieve vital customer information. With this course, you pass two Salesforce certification exams in one go. Sign up today and get one step closer to your dream career.