Marketers are finding ways to enhance their marketing efforts in order to meet customers’ needs at a high level and improve performance and revenue. And the increasing competition requires them to be effective in each step to stay ahead of the competition. So, if they use traditional manual ways to perform their marketing activities, it would be a time-consuming and tedious process. This is where Pardot is useful for marketers. This popular software for marketing helps them automate marketing activities through its analytics and AI capabilities. It also unites sales and marketing teams to increase overall performance and leads. I’ll discuss Pardot, its alternatives, and more in this article. Let’s begin!
What Is Pardot?
Pardot, now called Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (SMCAE), is a go-to choice for many Salesforce customers who are looking for a B2B automation tool. It is actually a lead generation and nurturing platform that comes with many features and benefits to boost your marketing efforts. Pardot enables organizations to measure and track the effectiveness of communications, gain complete insight into audience behavior, and personalize relevant content across campaigns based on a number of criteria. With Pardot, marketers can move their customers through a secure sales funnel. The tool makes it super easy to design effective emails and engage the target audience with the right content. In addition, you can ensure you are interacting with the right audience at the right time and in the right tone. This helps the sales reps close more deals based on the available information. Furthermore, marketers will get a stunning opportunity to team up with the sales team efficiently and quickly using Pardot’s functionalities. You can track users’ every step and record marketing ROI. This way, you can enhance customer experience and customer base while generating more data-driven solutions to register more growth. Pardot is tightly integrated into Salesforce’s core objects. The price point even makes it more accessible to various organizations. It’s useful for multiple use cases, including email marketing, forms, engagement history, segmentation, grading, scoring, lead qualification, search marketing, marketing analytics, multi-channel marketing, and more.
Marketing Automation with MCAE
Pardot or MCAE lets you automate repetitive tasks and save your time to focus on big goals. MCAE offers never-ending features to the marketing teams to enhance their business by enhancing their customer base. You can discover the complete suite of automation tools to generate more pipelines, empower sales, and create relevant connections in order to close more deals faster. Here’s how B2B marketing automation can help you boost your sales, increase your leads, and become more productive to transform your business.
#1. Marketing Automation
With powerful Marketing Automation, you can take the manual work out of sales and marketing tasks and help your team speed up the marketing process by:
Closing more deals faster with intelligent lead nurturing: Send emails automatically and perform all the marketing tasks based on the triggers like user interactions, time, and other custom parameters. Send effective messages with dynamic content: Use collective data to give a better customer experience, develop nurturing and email paths seamlessly, display targeted offers, and more. Connect with your customers at the right moment: Respond to the prospects and learn what is happening between sales. Get real-time alerts to connect with your leads when it matters and note the prospect’s actions. Detailed view of prospect’s activity: Create relevant conversations and target more sales pitches with the help of in-depth data about the activity of your prospects.
#2. Lead Generation
MCAE gives handy options to streamline the gathering process of high-quality leads. You can create landing pages with integration and custom layouts by using a landing page builder. With MCAE, it is possible to add forms to the pages to gather essential contact information about users. You will a complete statistics about paid and organic search, keyword performance, etc., so you can analyze each point and improve the SEO as well as SEM efforts. Besides, you will get a complete picture of the social media marketing campaigns and audience interactions, thanks to Pardot functionality.
#3. Lead Management
MCAE allows you to be in touch with your users through messaging based on the triggers, including time, interactions, and other custom parameters. You can collect the hottest leads with this marketing tool based on the grading and scoring metrics about users. The tool divides the prospects automatically into dynamic and targeted lists. It also helps you track customers’ interests and behavior to offer relevant content.
#4. Email Marketing
MCAE helps in performing email marketing campaigns effectively and efficiently. With a visual and user-friendly Email Builder, you can build responsive as well s bright emails tailored according to the customer’s wishes. Its useful features like schedule option, autoresponders, visual nurturing canvas, and more helps you send relevant messages to the customers and collect statistics about the best-performing content.
#5. Alignment with Development
The advantage of using MCAE/Pardot is that it will allow connecting sales and marketing reps to reach stunning results in customer relationship campaigns. You can easily track messages sent via Gmail, communicate with main prospects, and get real-time alerts immediately.
#6. ROI Reporting
You can analyze the impact of the sales and marketing efforts on revenue. Pardot creates multiple reporting, such as Lifecycle Reporting, ROI Reporting, and Advanced Email Reporting. In addition, it is now possible to connect different marketing tools and manage customer interaction across different channels.
#7. Artificial Intelligence
MCAE integrates with AI to improve sales and marketing efforts as well as engage more leads. You can monitor and analyze customer behavior, lead scoring, marketing campaign insights, and user engagement activity by using its Einstein tool. Machine learning lets you find qualified leads, use a customer-centric approach, view influence fields, and discover new audiences. Besides, there are other features that help your business scale and automate your marketing. They are as follows:
Building personalized and dynamic emails as well as landing pages with just clicks, not with the code Giving your sales reps full visibility into customer engagement and passing along leads seamlesslySegmenting easily based on the engagement with your survey, video applications, and webinarGetting B2B marketing analytics to see predictive insights in order to connect marketing back to the ROI statsAccount-based scoring to help sales and marketing align on the key accounts
Why Pardot (MCAE)?
Salesforce does not replace Pardot (MCAE) rather uses the same features and functionalities along with pricing and packaging. Let’s understand why Pardot is changed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Easy to recognize the consistency and functionality: Salesforce is changing its product names to make them more descriptive. It will help people choose a suitable product for their business and recognize the product’s uses easily.Platform unification: Salesforce segments each product under a platform section so that customers can easily search for their requirements. The main idea is to put each solution under a particular section. Flexibility and staying power: Coming up with a perfect name that describes the product functionality in brief through its name doesn’t need a further change in the future.
Businesses use MCAE for the following reasons:
Prospect or lead identification, management, and qualificationCampaign management, history, and hierarchiesFunctionality for social media, targeted marketing, and emailProcess standards and refinement through templates, segmentation, and automationLanding pages and forms that link data automatically to the prospect’s recordsReporting for connected applications, campaigns, prospect lifecycle, and marketing assets with tracking things, such as pipeline influence and campaign performance
Moreover, MCAE helps you find more leads, automate marketing, identify the hottest leads, maximize marketing ROI, manage your data, get powerful integrations, and more.
MCAE Pricing
Large companies and enterprises can grow even faster with different editions offered by Salesforce MCAE that fits your business processes. You can choose from the following pricing options:
Growth: It costs $1,250/month. It includes features such as lead generation, qualification, management, email marketing, email personalization, limits to 10,000 contacts, unlimited email marketing options, 50 forms and landing pages, the marketing calendar, A/B testing, and more.
Plus: It costs $2,500/month and includes advanced marketing automation, lead generation, qualification, management, email personalization, and advanced analytics. Advanced: It costs $4,000 per month for 10,000 contacts. It is the most popular pricing range that offers the same features as the Plus package with the extra option of developer sandboxes, business units, and AI for marketing and sales. Premium: Get enterprise-ready features, personalized product support, and predictive analytics at $15,000 per month for 75,000 contacts.
You can sign up yourself to take a FREE tour to understand exactly how it works.
Alternatives to Salesforce MCAE
#1. HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot offers marketing software to help marketers and sales reps attract more audiences, convert visitors into the right customers, and run complete marketing campaigns at scale. HubSpot Marketing Hub is an easy-to-use and powerful platform. The platform allows you to attract visitors through ads, social media campaigns, blogging, and more. It tracks ROI with attribution reporting. All the marketing data and tools are now under a single roof so that you can save time and get the context you require to offer a personalized experience. You can create content that your audiences crave and make it attractive so that your prospects don’t miss the offerings. Make a scalable strategy to attract more and more visitors and convert them into leads. HubSpot Marketing Hub provides popular features, such as marketing analytics, custom objects, salesforce integration, and more. HubSpot offers simple dashboards and a modern interface that is more user-friendly as compared to Pardot. It gives you the option for training and support, such as HubSpot Academy, where you enhance your skills on how to use the power of advanced features. In terms of automation, reporting, and customer support, HubSpot has the edge. Its pricing structure is very simple. You will get to use it for free, but you will find HubSpot branding. The basic pricing, where you won’t find any branding starts from $45/month. Get a free demo for all the premium editions. Pardot doesn’t provide any free trial, but you can take a free tour. Pardot can be out of reach for small businesses due to its high pricing.
#2. Adobe Marketo Engage
Make your customer journey smooth with Adobe Marketo Engage. It will help you track every behavior of your customers and engage the right customer. You can quickly scale the marketing campaigns and determine how channels and marketing impact your business revenue. Leverage built-in intelligence, sophisticated journey flows, and behavioral data to identify, accelerate, and engage your best options to make your buyer’s journey smoother. Adobe Marketo Engage offers content personalization, automation, impact analysis, marketing data environment, sales partnership, cross-channel engagement, and more. Take a personalized demo to understand engagement marketing solutions and in-depth product features covering nurturing, automation, email marketing, and more. You will get simple and capability-rich packages that help you elevate your customer experience and grow your business. Marketo Engage provides different templates with combinations of variables, modules, elements, and containers that you can use. In addition, you will get mobile-optimized email templates for FREE. The changes made to the template can be viewed in desktop and mobile formats. You can create, preview, and approve the forms as well as delete or rearrange fields and add them from the dropdown menu. Based on the visibility rules, you have the option to show or hide your forms. Marketo Engage offers location-based language settings, auto-fill for social media prospects, and progressive profiling for redirecting and previewing the thank page or the external URL. Compared to Pardot/MCAE, Marketo Engage wins in terms of pre-built templates, customization capabilities, delivery of more form-related features, social media campaigns, BI analytics, the marketing calendar, SEO, and more.
#3. Zoho Marketing Plus
Marketers and sales reps take benefit from the unified platform with Zoho Marketing Plus. It unifies all marketing activities and engages your customers across multiple channels. It can help increase the ROI of the marketing spend and enhances your team’s productivity. Since you might be managing different channels, marketing collaterals, messaging, industry reviews, and more simultaneously, you need high-impact and modern marketing campaigns for your team. Marketing Plus gives access to the right marketer, bringing the team together and allowing them to collaborate seamlessly. Marketing Plus supports SMS, events, social media, presentations, surveys, webinars, and emails so that you can spread your content across each channel where your customers are already there. Allow your marketing team to plan and execute campaigns with ease from a single marketing platform. Ensure your marketing campaign is a big success with Marketing Plus. You can create activities, track progress, assign task ownership, collaborate with your team, and give your audiences what they want in real-time. Zoho Marketing Plus is a better option for small businesses or startups as it provides a 15-day FREE trial. You will get the option of brand management, conversion tracking, multi-user support, etc. as compared to Pardot. Standard pricing is affordable for businesses of all sizes.
#4. Sendinblue Marketing Automation
Automate your sales and marketing processes in no time with Sendinblue Marketing Automation. With multiple channel support, be everywhere where your customers already are, such as email, SMS, chat, inbox, and more. Personalize every step of your audience by segmenting every customer in terms of their needs, locations, etc. You will get signup forms, Facebook ads, and landing pages to turn your visitors into valuable customers. Sendinblue’s interface is more eye-catching and pleasant to use. It’s an easier process of importing and categorizing contacts in order to communicate with customers. It offers a free test drive and is affordable for everyone.
Author’s Note
Pardot is undoubtedly an excellent marketing automation platform that comes with advanced features and offers many benefits to markers. It uses the power of automation and artificial intelligence to help you perform marketing activities from lead generation and nurturing to email marketing, social media targeting, and campaign management. You can also track your performance with detailed analytics and reporting. Overall, the platform is great for businesses and marketers with a good budget in hand. However, if you don’t find it that appealing for any reason, be it offerings or high price, you can look for Pardot alternatives mentioned above. ‘ Ultimately, choose the marketing automation platform that will suit your requirements and still come under your budget. And witness your marketing efforts come to fruition!
