Pardot and Marketing Cloud have been two leading Salesforce marketing automation tools since 2013. By 2022, over 37,000 companies have integrated Pardot with Salesforce and over 22,000 businesses have used or use Marketing Cloud based on Infoclutch.com and Enlyft.com stats.
Compare Pardot vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing and features to pick the solution that fits the needs of your business best.
| Market Segment: B2B | Market Segment: B2C |
| Pardot Pricing Starts at: $1,250 /month/up to 10,000 contacts | Marketing Cloud Pricing Starts at: $400 org/month |
Pardot Key Features:
| Marketing Cloud Key Features:
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Pardot Add-Ons:
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud Add-Ons:
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Pardot (rebranded to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is a B2B (Business-to-Business) marketing automation solution that was created by David Cummings and Adam Blitzer in 2007. It was purchased by ExactTarget in 2012 and then was finally acquired by Salesforce in 2013.
“Pardot” in Latvian means “to market or sell,” which illustrates its main purpose best. It helps companies build meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales teams to close more deals.
In 2018 Salesforce built the Pardot Lightning App to align better marketing and sales activities and easily integrate Pardot with another Salesforce product – Sales Cloud.
In the same year, Salesforce launched another product version – Pardot Einstein. It is powered up with AI (Artificial Intelligence) features for:
Pardot Add-On Products:
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a B2C (Business-to-Consumers) suite for empowering digital marketing teams with an all-inclusive set of social media, email marketing, and digital advertising management tools.
It was officially created in 2013, right after the acquisition of three powerful solutions:
After that, in 2014, Salesforce united Radian6 and Buddy Media into Social Studio.
Now, Marketing Cloud is a large group of marketing automation solutions including:
Similarly, Pardot, Marketing Cloud has a list of add-ons to power up the core features of these packages.
Salesforce marketing automation is a technique for streamlining marketing processes and managing campaigns via multiple channels.
Also, marketing automation simplifies:
When marketing automation is used effectively, it leads to increased revenue and maximized efficiency. Based on Sales Fusion’s research, 77% of businesses saw an increase in lead conversions after implementing marketing automation tools.
Moreover, your employees can streamline repetitive tasks and reduce human error at the same time. On top of that, good marketing automation tools encourage business growth and scalability.
As we’ve already mentioned earlier in the blog post, both Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud were created to automate and improve marketing activities.
But, at the same time, there is a certain difference between Pardot and Marketing Cloud. It is mostly related to pricing, features, and purpose.
Pardot Pricing Plans range from $1,250/month to $15,000/month based on included functionality set and contacts you want to engage with. Like any other Salesforce product, Pardot subscriptions are paid annually.
* Please note: Quantity of Contacts is not limited by edition. You can purchase additional ones at any moment. And depending on your need you can expect discounts from Salesforce.
Pardot’s Growth edition includes all the basic features users need to get started — including CRM integration, in-depth tracking, lead scoring and grading, email marketing, lead nurturing, and engagement reporting.
Pardot’s Plus edition offers all the features of the Growth edition together with B2B Marketing Analytics for the marketer who wants to analyze better marketing performance.
Besides that, Pardot users enjoy out-of-the-box, custom, and embedded dashboards, advanced dynamic content, Google AdWords integration, and more.
Pardot’s Advanced package offers AI-powered features like Einstein Attribution, Predictive Lead Scoring, Behavior Scoring, and Campaign Insights. You can also get access to custom roles and permissions, custom object integration, a dedicated IP address, and API access up to 100K calls per day.
Pardot Premium edition offers the capabilities for complex marketing teams that need to digitally scale their efforts. It includes enterprise-ready features like Pardot Business Units, Developer Sandboxes, B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, and Premier Success.
You can check more information on different pricing details on the Pardot plans page.
Pardot offers various add-ons to enhance key features among which are Salesforce Engage, B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, and Engagement History Dashboards.
(billed annually) | With this solution, you empower sales and service reps with marketing automation and enable them to reach out to prospects and customers with the right message at the right time. | |
| It gives access to a complete analytics platform for B2B marketers within Salesforce as well as AI-driven marketing insights with recommendations. Analyze what marketing campaigns perform best and why. Predict what will likely perform next. |
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| Visualize engagement results with dashboards that can be easily connected with your leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities. |
The Most Recommended Salesforce Add-Ons in 2022. Check What Our Consultants Have to Say About Them.
Pardot is a feature-rich tool whose functionality varies significantly from edition to edition. It helps move your visitors and prospects through a sales funnel which begins when you create marketing materials to generate interest in your products and ends when qualified prospects are assigned to a sales rep.
Pardot Settings
Pardot easily integrates with Salesforce and is designed to improve:
Here is a detailed Pardot marketing suites comparison chart:
Pardot Marketing Suites Comparison
You can add a Pardot Tracking code to your website to oversee the actions of visitors and prospects such as clicking on links, viewing pages, or downloading information.
Pardot Website Tracking
Pardot is great on its own, but it’s even better when integrated with other products. You can extend Pardot’s capabilities by connecting it, for example, with social media accounts.
Pardot Twitter Connector
Pardot can be easily connected to your existing forms.
Pardot Form Handler
Also, at an additional cost, you can enhance Pardot with Salesforce Engage, B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, Custom Object Integration, Custom Permissions & Roles, Google AdWords Integration, and Advanced Email Analytics.
Pardot helps to track email opens and enable A/B email testing. It provides guidance for email sending reputation and deliverability so your emails will less likely hit the Spam folder.
Pardot can boost email marketing automation in Salesforce and provides a confirmed Opt-In Process to verify the authenticity of email addresses & requests.
Prospects in Pardot
All accounts in this tool include an unsubscribe page. You can also create Email Preference Pages.
Pardot enables sending operational communications to prospects who have opted out of marketing communications.
“ Besides a marketing automation tool, there are two other things that have an impact on an opening rate: Subject and Preheader. These 2 words are small steps in creating your email templates. It is really important to prepare quality, catching Subject and informative Preheaders if you want to guarantee a high opening rate. ”
All Active Campaigns in Pardot
Besides that, Pardot empowers admins to control which email content users can change.
Pardot has a variety of excellent tools to automate the processes. The image below can help you decide what tool to use.
Integration with 4 custom objects is only available out-of-the-box in Pardot Advanced.
Custom objects are read-only in Pardot, so any changes that need to be reflected in Pardot must be made on the Salesforce side.
In order to use a custom object field in emails or dynamic content, a formula field must be created on a standard object record to map to the custom field.
For integration, all Salesforce fields must be mapped to an existing field. Otherwise, you need to create a new field in Pardot. Adding a field in Salesforce does not add a field to Pardot.
Salesforce Reports for Sales Guide: What Metrics to Track and What to Place on Dashboards
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journeys
Salesforce Marketing Cloud unites numerous products under one hood with their own pricing plans and core features. Let’s discuss them in greater detail.
(billed annually) |
Salesforce CDP helps marketers personalize the customer experience across marketing, service, and sales segments.
It enables marketers to capture, merge, and segment all their customer data.
With Salesforce CDP, you can:
You can enhance Salesforce CDP with Support and Success plans and other add-ons, apps, and additional Salesforce products that will fit the needs of your industry.
Leverage our stellar team of Salesforce Admins and Consultants.
Loyalty Management enables aggregation of all loyalty member data to get a 360-degree view of member details and loyalty activities.
Besides that, this product suite helps:
Loyalty Management Features Comparison
You can expand your Loyalty Management capabilities with Tableau CRM for Loyalty Management to empower it with advanced AI insights.
Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing Suite can be easily integrated with the Sales Cloud. On top of that, it provides features to:
Email Mobile and Web Marketing Suite Features
Social Studio offers seamless integration with core Salesforce products like Service, Sales, and Marketing Cloud to extend the social strategy of your service, sales, and marketing teams.
Thanks to features available in the Social Studio package, you can:
You can boost social media activities with Einstein Vision for Social Studio for $1,250 org/month and get deeper AI analysis.
Or add social listening for Weibo and other media, and advanced sentiment for traditional and simplified Chinese at $ 5,000/org/month.
You can get Advertising Studio at $ 2,000/month and use your CRM data for managing your digital advertising at scale.
With Advertising Studio in Salesforce, you can:
Thinking of Implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Pardot? Check What Hidden Cost Has Salesforce Implementation
Interaction Studio is a universal suite that centralizes marketing activities to view, track, and manage the customer experience in real-time. Also, it helps humanize every moment and optimize your impact.
Interaction Studio is available upon request at custom pricing.
Datorama is a one-stop-shop platform for monitoring and managing marketing data, investments, and KPIs.
This marketing suite enables:
Datorama aka Marketing Cloud Intelligence Features
As a part of Marketing Cloud, Salesforce offers a Google Marketing Platform that allows synchronizing Analytics 360, Optimize 360, and Tag Manager 360 with Salesforce.
It’s offered in two plans: Google Analytics 360 and Google Analytics 360 + Optimize 360.
These packages enable tracking robust reports and dashboards to see how your website and app users are navigating your pages and content to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Thanks to Google Marketing Platform, you can share audiences created in Analytics 360 to Marketing Cloud for messaging across channels and view web analytics reports to measure performance.
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Salesforce CMS helps create sites, portals, and forums with a declarative builder at $ 10,000 org/month. Users can publish and manage any type of content like a blog or a banner and share content across every channel where your customers can engage with your brand like emails, websites, mobile apps, portals, etc.
Salesforce CMS enables giving content managers control of who can edit and where content can be shared. It provides file & image storage of 5TB files and images associated with CMS articles and other pieces of content within Salesforce CMS.
Besides that, you can quickly maximize in-build tools within CMS with unlimited out-of-the-box integrations like:
We can help you effectively migrate to Pardot, synchronize it with other marketing tools and apply the best practices.
If you have a B2C, highly transactional business, Marketing Cloud can be a better fit for you. This suite is geared towards larger databases with smaller value sales.
If you run a B2B company with smaller databases but higher volume sales, that needs an advanced email marketing platform, then Pardot can be a better fit.
The main advantage of Marketing Cloud over Pardot is that it is more versatile. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can manage your social media marketing activities via different channels: email, social media pages, and SMS, analyze marketing data, and launch digital advertising campaigns.
On the contrary, Pardot has more advanced features for launching and managing email marketing campaigns.
Pardot Published Email Templates
It can automate your marketing activities and unite your marketing and sales departments so they can work better together.
Pardot Reports
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Salesforce Integration Guide: Top Tools You Need To Connect Right Now
A B2B, or “business-to-business” and a B2C, or “business-to-consumer,” are two separate business models that serve different types of customers: other businesses or direct to consumers.
A B2B company offers products or services to other businesses. A B2C company provides products or services directly to individual consumers.
Pardot is positioned for B2B marketing specifically, so its strengths lie with aligning marketing and sales, lead management and automated actions, as well as marketing campaigns.
Marketing Cloud offers greater capabilities when it comes to social media marketing and advertising, plus SMS campaigns. It focuses more on the B2C brands that communicate one-to-one via social or transactional mobile messaging.
However, both B2C and B2B companies can benefit from Pardot as their chosen marketing automation platform, and likewise, both B2B and B2C companies can leverage all advantages of Marketing Cloud.
If you are still hesitant about which marketing automation tool to choose and how to optimize it best, contact our Salesforce consultants. They will help you select the best product and guide you on how to get the maximum of its benefits.
Yes, Salesforce helps automate marketing activities via email marketing, social media management, content management, and digital advertising tools. Proper implementation of Salesforce helps increase marketing ROI by 37% on average.
Yes, Pardot belongs to a larger Salesforce product group – Marketing Cloud, along with other suites like Loyalty Management, Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing, Social Studio, Advertising Studio, Datorama, Google Marketing Platform, and Interaction Studio.
Pardot is positioned for B2B marketing to align marketing and sales, lead management, and automated actions. However, there is no rule that says B2C companies cannot benefit from Pardot as their chosen marketing automation platform.
In 2013 Salesforce purchased Pardot as a part of ExactTarget. At the same year Pardot was included in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Anzhelika specializes in B2B content marketing and has in-depth expertise in promoting the company's products and services through high-quality content. On the Ascendix Technologies blog, Anzhelika shares her insights of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM tips & tricks as well as overviews of new CRM tools and technology trends on the market.
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