Salesforce is a market-leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) service. While marketing automation isn’t quite the same as CRM (more on that later), it offers plenty of overlapping functionality. Salesforce’s Pardot solution is aimed directly at businesses that need to automate their workflow in order to ensure they can […]
Salesforce Pardot Marketing Automation – Prices and Benefits
Salesforce is a market-leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) service. While marketing automation isn’t quite the same as CRM (more on that later), it offers plenty of overlapping functionality.
Salesforce’s Pardot solution is aimed directly at businesses that need to automate their workflow in order to ensure they can keep offering stellar support to their clients.
Here, we’ll cover Pardot’s features, benefits, and pricing plans.
You’ll need to decide for yourself whether the service is worth subscribing to, although our marketing automation quotes collection form may help shed some light on the issue, offering you the ability to see exactly how much it will cost your business, and compare with competitor services.
Why Use Salesforce Pardot?
Getting new clients takes a lot more time and resources than just working hard to retain the clients you already have. But a growing business can easily lose track of leads or clients. It all adds up, and the business may ultimately die a death from a thousand cuts.
The solution? Marketing automation software. The best options will offer all the reminders and alerts that agents need to respond appropriately to the needs of their clients and leads.
What Does Pardot Do?
Pardot offers a huge range of features, but they’re all aimed at streamlining four main challenges for marketers: lead generation, lead management, sales alignment, and ROI reporting.
Lead generation comes from tools including social media tracking, landing pages and forms, lead deduplication, lead scoring, email campaigns, and A/B tests to better target landing pages or emails. Once acquired, leads can be managed through engagement and nurturing programs, which can be custom-designed with variable tags and automation rules.
Pardot’s sales tools include engagement campaigns, customer activity tracking, and CRM integration, bolstered by custom alerts. Finally, ROI can be tracked with tools that unpack trends in email metrics or lifecycle reporting, which can identify problem areas across your entire sales funnel.
How much will Marketing Automation cost your business?
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In this guide:
- Why Use Salesforce Pardot?
- Salesforce Pardot Pricing
- Salesforce Pardot vs Marketing Cloud
- What is marketing automation?
- Final Thoughts – Is Salesforce Pardot right for you?
Salesforce Pardot Benefits
By automating the menial tasks, Salesforce Pardot helps employees focus on the important elements of their workload. This ultimately lets agents generate more leads and boost customer satisfaction, leading to a resilient customer base and a healthier bottom line.
In fact, Pardot reports that its customers have experienced an average of 34% more sales revenue and 37% more marketing effectiveness after adapting their software.
Is that worth the cost? Here’s how much you’ll be paying for those benefits.
Salesforce Pardot Pricing
The Pardot marketing software is available from Salesforce through three plans: Growth, Plus, and Advanced. Each plan supports up to 10,000 contacts with a monthly charge, and is differentiated by which features are included.
Businesses must get the Salesforce CRM first before adding Pardot. You’ll need to visit our salesforce pricing page to get a handle on the complex pricing scheme for the main Salesforce plans and tiers, but here’s a table that covers the main pricing and feature differences between the three Pardot plans.
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How Much Does Pardot cost?
Growth costs $1,250 per month, Plus costs $2,500 per month, and Advanced costs $4,000 per month. Each plan is billed annually.
Salesforce also sells another add-on, Salesforce Engage, which can be added to the base Pardot price for $50/user/month. This feature helps sales teams better communicate with clients through alerts and trend reports.
Depending on the plan, certain features may cost extra, though you’ll need to get in touch with the Salesforce team directly to confirm details. All three plans include a user forum, live weekly training, on-demand training videos, and a success specialist team.
Here’s a quick overview of the difference between each of the three Pardot price plans.
Pardot Growth
Growth offers a full range of basic features, including email marketing tools, tracked social posts, engagement programs, in-depth prospect tracking, ROI reporting, custom fields, user management, and customizable URLs. Users can also benefit from lead nurturing, deduplication, and scoring. Available integrations include EventBrite, Webinar, Olark Chat, Native CRM, and Google AdWords, although the Google AdWords integration comes at an additional cost.
Some features on the Growth plan come with more limitations than the other plans. Growth is capped at 50 landing pages, 50 forms, 50 automation rules, 5 engagement history dashboards, 10 competitors monitored, 100 SEO keywords monitored, and just 3 SSL vanity domains.
Other features are only available at an extra cost, including multivariate landing page testing, email preview analysis, advanced dynamic content, social profiling, and advanced email analytics.
Pardot Plus
Plus includes all the Growth features and more, as well as higher caps. Forms and landing pages are unlimited under Plus, for example, while feature caps extend to 100 automation rules, 10 engagement history dashboards, 25 competitors monitored, 250 SEO keywords monitored, and 10 SSL vanity domains.
New features include an integrated marketing calendar, A/B testing for emails, multiple lead scoring categories, multi-touch attribution models, and API access to 25,000 calls per day.
Plus includes all of the extras that Growth users would need to pay for. It also allows users to pay extra for a few features that are entirely locked away from those on the Growth plan, including custom object integration, custom user roles, and a dedicated IP Address.
Pardot Advanced
Finally, the Advanced plan includes all the features from Plus, as well as extended caps including 150 automation rules, 20 engagement history dashboards, 100 competitors monitored, 1000 SEO keywords monitored, 20 SSL vanity domains, and API access to 100,000 calls per day.
All the extras that Plus users need to pay for are included at no extra charge under the Advanced plan.
Advanced also includes one feature entirely unavailable under the Growth and Plus plans: Salesforce’s Einstein AI, which powers lead scoring, behavior scoring, and campaign insights.
How Many Pardot Users Can I Have?
A business’s Pardot users are directly tied to how many users they have licensed for the main Salesforce CRM plan.
In other words, the base monthly price for the Salesforce Pardot marketing automation software will stay the same, no matter how many users are added. Instead, the total cost for the Salesforce CRM will go up as users are added, since it’s charged on a per user, per month basis.
Salesforce Pardot vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce offers two marketing services that may seem the same on first glance: Pardot and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
They’re both aimed at marketing teams, but with one main difference: Pardot is primarily for B2B marketing with a focus on email, while Marketing Cloud is targeted at B2C marketing and includes more granular advertising tools. Your business will not have to subscribe to Marketing Cloud in order to get Pardot.
That said, there’s plenty of overlapping features and abilities between the two, and both services can be used to stand in for the other in a pinch, even though their workflows are different.
The nitty gritty here is that Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2012, long after they had already built up a customer base of Marketing Cloud users. They didn’t want to lose their customers for either service, and so they now run the two services simultaneously in the slightly confusing way that any modern conglomerate operates. Go figure.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation software makes work easier for marketing teams. It automates rote tasks, aids collaboration, and tracks ROI to troubleshoot entire workflows.
It’s distinct from customer relationship management software, which is more sales-oriented, although the features can overlap and the two services work best when integrated.
Customers’ needs must be addressed in order to maintain satisfaction, and as a company adds more and more customers, the challenge to quickly generate and manage leads can spin out of control. With marketing automation software, businesses can trim the fat from chores that would otherwise begin to drain energy from a marketing team as the operation scales.
Final Thoughts – Is Salesforce Pardot Right for You?
On one hand, Pardot is on the expensive side. But its range of features is comprehensive, and the cap of 10,000 contacts might make it a more cost-effective option compared to other software services, which charge a premium for a higher cap that your business ultimately won’t come close to hitting.
Ultimately, you’ll need to decide for yourself if Salesforce Pardot is worth the cost for your business.
We’d recommend trying out a demo or a guided tour – after filling out our custom quotes form to get boutique estimates from the best of the best marketing automation vendors out there.
Salesforce Pardot FAQs
Is Pardot a CRM?
Pardot is a marketing automation software, not a CRM software. While CRM tends to focus on streamlining sales, Pardot focuses on streamlining marketing.
Granted, the two softwares have some overlap, given that marketing and sales teams must work together. Pardot does include plenty of features that can help sales teams, from analytics and SEO to its Google AdWords integration.
What Is the Difference Between Salesforce and Pardot?
Salesforce is a major CRM software provider. They acquired the marketing automation service Pardot in 2012, and now sell monthly subscriptions to it as an add-on to the Salesforce CRM.
As a company, Salesforce includes a raft of software services, with Salesforce Pardot serving as its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to marketing automation specifically.
Is Pardot Owned by Salesforce?
Yes, Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2012 for $96 million.
How Do You Pronounce Pardot?
Pardot is pronounced “Par-DOT,” with a hard T. That’s right, folks, this isn’t French: It’s actually a Latvian word meaning “to sell.”
Is Pardot Better Than Hubspot?
Pardot and Hubspot CRM are both high quality options, with good support, fair pricing, and plenty of features. Hubspot offers a wider range of benefits, as it’s a general-purpose CRM rather than a marketing automation solution, but Pardot comes alongside the Salesforce CRM, so its users will have a similar software functionality overall.
They each offer different benefits and come with different pricing plans, so it’s tough to empirically state which is best for you specifically. For a more in-depth look at what each service offers, check out our Salesforce vs. Hubspot comparison guide.
