Pardot for Finance – When Does Pardot Work and When To Stop Using It
If you are using Salesforce the common sense thing to do is use their marketing automation tool Pardot also known as Marketing Cloud Account Enagementment
Pardot is a marketing automation platform targeted at Salesforce software users. It’s a fit for B2B enterprises and medium-sized businesses, but it may be price-prohibitive for smaller businesses without a large enough marketing budget. Pardot best serves businesses with traditional sales organizations that work to close each unique deal while simultaneously generating more leads to pitch and nurture. We have found that Pardot, along with Marketo and Eloqua, is one of the most popular email marketing tools used by medium and large funds. However, as Salesforce look to merge Pardot and Marketing Cloud there will be a lot of enterprise functionality that is going to get removed or diluted. Pardot’s may be price-prohibitive for smaller funds without a large enough marketing budget. Pardot best serves funds with traditional sales organizations that work to close each unique deal while simultaneously generating more leads to pitch and nurture – which is not the way funds are sold.
The main benefits of Pardot are:
Landing Pages and Forms
You can generate sign-up forms to provide an important customer touch point as well as create branded landing pages.
Email Blasts
You can send an email blast to all subscribers or a group of subscribers. You can also target groups by engagement history or geographical location.
Reports
Reports are generated so you know who is interested in your emails via open, clicking, and reply rates.
Lead Scoring
You can build profiles for individual leads and track any interactions your marketing or sales teams have with individual leads.
There are points with Pardot, especially for fund managers, where its usefulness stops. Especially in the fundraising process.
Many of our clients come to us after transitioning away from generic email providers like Pardot, Eloqua and Marketo. Some of the biggest challenges our clients have faced with Pardot are –
Email Delivery
Email delivery for Pardot is better than average in the finance sector but still sits behind a few suppliers, including us.
Email Designer
The email designer is very rudimentary and time-consuming with limited testing abilities across different devices.
Support
Support is a paid feature and you are not dealing with asset management specialists.
Integration
Pardot and Salesforce are two different products and if your business rules do not fit their connector, from our experience, you have a lot of custom-coding that is required.
Automation
Provides very simple automation and reporting that does not help the asset-raising process. The reports and automations – the ones that meet our client’s requirements – which are not provided by Pardot- include the following:
