What is Salesforce Pardot Used For: Meaning, Features & Use Cases

Amidst the myriad of marketing automation tools available worldwide, it might be difficult to choose the one most suitable for your business needs. Salesforce Pardot, now rebranded as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), has gained an outstanding reputation for its reliability and robust features tailored for marketing and sales teams, and may become your go-to choice for marketing automation.

Quick summary of Pardot:

• Marketing automation platform targeting B2B business;
• Predominantly used by medium and large B2B companies, with relatively small databases, long sales cycles, and deals closed for high values;
• Features include lead scoring, lead management, marketing campaigns management, and ROI tracking;
• Pardot is now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE Salesforce);
• Can be integrated with Salesforce CRM and third-party marketing tools.

What is Salesforce Pardot?

Pardot (aka Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) is a Salesforce-based marketing automation platform used for streamlining B2B marketing. Core Pardot features include lead generation, lead nurturing, tracking customer interactions, and measuring marketing campaign effectiveness.

What is Salesforce Pardot Used For?

Pardot is a marketing automation solution that was primarily designed specifically for B2B sales of businesses and enterprises, used for lead scoring, email marketing, campaign management, ROI reporting, and many other essential activities. While Pardot is not exclusively limited to B2B scenarios, it is, however, ideal for companies with a deliberate sales cycle, which requires longer consideration time and is therefore often associated with B2B sales.

Some key uses of Pardot include:

• Lead Generation. Pardot allows businesses to capture leads through forms on their website, landing pages, and other marketing channels. It automates lead qualification processes, ensuring that sales teams receive high-quality leads ready for conversion.
• Lead Nurturing. With Pardot, marketers can create personalized email campaigns, drip campaigns, and targeted content to nurture leads throughout the customer’s journey. This helps in building relationships with prospects and guiding them toward making a purchase decision.
• Email Marketing. Pardot provides extensive email marketing capabilities, including customizable templates, automated email workflows, A/B testing, and detailed analytics. It is possible to send targeted, relevant, and personalized emails at the right time to engage prospects and customers effectively.
• Campaign Management. Pardot enables businesses to manage and track their marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including social media, paid advertising, and events. It provides insights into campaign performance, ROI, and helps optimize marketing strategies based on the collected data.
• Sales Enablement. Pardot can be integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud, providing sales teams with marketing insights, information about leads and prospects, activity tracking, and engagement data. This helps sales reps prioritize leads, personalize outreach, and close deals more effectively.

Overall, Pardot is an ideal tool for automating the essential marketing processes in the business, like lead generation, customer engagement, and conversion increase, leading to ultimate revenue growth.

What is Pardot in Salesforce Product Suite?

Being a part of the extensive Salesforce ecosystem, Pardot exists as an independent product but can be integrated with other Salesforce or third-party products, if required. If combined with Salesforce Sales or Experience Clouds, Pardot may help organizations streamline, analyze, automate, and evaluate the success of their sales, marketing, and support processes.

What Does Pardot Do?

In essence, Pardot functions as a strategic marketing tool that allows companies to pinpoint potential customers with the highest likelihood of conversion. This is achieved through targeted communication strategies and personalized advertising campaigns, which ensure that all the prospects receive relevant messages at optimal times, maximizing engagement and increasing conversion rates.

What are Main Pardot Features?

Pardot provides a range of marketing automation features which depend on the pricing plan. You can choose the type of subscription depending on your business needs and requirements.

The most sought-after features of MCAE Salesforce include:

• Lead Generation. Create and manage forms, landing pages, and call-to-actions (CTAs) with the help of drag-and-drop builders. This Pardot feature allows you to capture and segment the leads from various channels.
• Lead Nurturing. MCAE Salesforce allows you to automate personalized email campaigns and customer journeys in order to nurture leads for marketing qualification.
• Lead Scoring. Salesforce Pardot allows you to assign scores to leads based on their interactions and engagement levels to prioritize follow-up. This is done with a manual lead-scoring program that allows marketers to either choose default settings for lead scoring and grading based on given criteria or to customize the lead scoring rules to better meet their internal criteria. In the advanced versions of Pardot, driven by Einstein, AI can automatically assess if the leads align with your criteria of an ideal customer profile by analyzing past conversions.

Active Prospects in Pardot (MC Account Engagement)

• Lead Grading. Evaluate leads based on their fit with your ideal customer profile to focus efforts on high-potential prospects. Based on the crucial account data, Pardot can help you analyze crucial account data to identify accounts with the highest likelihood of making a purchase. With an advanced subscription plan, it can be automated using the Pardot feature of Einstein AI. Moreover, Pardot has robust lead segmentation functionality via static and dynamic segmentation lists, which are extremely important for creating personalized campaigns.
• Lead Scoring Categories. You can customize lead scoring criteria and categories to align with your business goals and priorities.
• Email Marketing. With Pardot features for email marketing automation, design and send targeted email campaigns with customizable templates, A/B testing, and analytics.

Email Templates in Pardot (MC Account Engagement) | Ascendix

• Cross-Campaign Management. Salesforce Pardot enables users to track and analyze marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including social media, PPC, and email.
• ROI Reporting. With Pardot you can measure the effectiveness of campaigns and track ROI with detailed analytics and reporting tools.
• Delivering Tailored Content. It is possible to create, deliver, and automate sending your personalized content to leads based on their interests, behaviors, and demographics within the MCAE Salesforce.
• CRM Integration. Pardot can be integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM in order to drive sales through synchronizing lead data and tracking interactions, which would result in streamlined sales and marketing alignment.
• Analytics and Reporting. Pardot provides you with access to advanced marketing analytics, dashboards, and reports to monitor performance and make data-driven decisions. While Einstein AI and real-time analytics are available only in more expensive plans, the standard reports and dashboards can be found in all types of subscriptions. The latter ones should be tuned along with the lead management process, but with a more expensive plan you can get Einstein AI tool with automated data analytics.

Pardot (MC Account Engagement) Reports | Ascendix

• Social Media Marketing. With Pardot, you can manage your social media accounts, like Twitter and LinkedIn, directly from the tool. It is possible to monitor social media interactions, schedule posts, and track engagement to enhance social media marketing efforts directly from Pardot.
• Website Tracking. Pardot enables you to monitor the website visitor behavior, page views, and interactions to gain insights into lead interests and engagement.
• Lead Lifecycle Management. Except for lead generation and nurturing, it is possible to define lead stages, statuses, and transitions to manage leads effectively through the sales funnel.
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Target and personalize marketing efforts in Salesforce Pardot for specific accounts or industries to drive account-based marketing initiatives.
• AI-Powered Insights by Einstein AI Salesforce. Pardot utilizes AI and machine learning capabilities for predictive analytics, lead-scoring optimization, and data-driven marketing strategies. It must be noted, though, that Einstein AI is available only in more advanced and expensive types of Pardot subscriptions.
• Security and Compliance. With all Salesforce products, you can ensure data security, GDPR compliance, and email deliverability through built-in security features and best marketing practices.

Is Pardot Part of Salesforce?

Yes, Pardot, now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, is a part of the Salesforce products ecosystem. MCAE Salesforce (formerly Pardot) is a marketing automation platform provided by Salesforce. The tool can be easily integrated with other Salesforce products if necessary.

Salesforce Pardot (MCAE) offers a range of features that help B2B businesses streamline their marketing and enhance sales effectiveness. It allows users to create and manage marketing campaigns, automate lead nurturing processes, track customer interactions, analyze campaign performance, and generate insightful reports.

As Pardot is a part of Salesforce, it can be integrated with other Salesforce products, such as Salesforce Sales Cloud, Experience Cloud, Tableau, and others, which enables smooth data synchronization between marketing and sales, support, data analytics, or other teams, leading to enhanced collaboration and improved efficiency.

Is Pardot a CRM Tool?

No, Pardot is not an independent CRM tool on its own. It is a marketing automation platform that may work alongside CRM systems like Salesforce Sales Cloud. Pardot focuses on marketing activities, while CRM systems like Salesforce Sales Cloud are designed to manage customer interactions, sales processes, and customer data.

However, Pardot may be integrated with CRM systems like Salesforce Sales Cloud. Such an integration enables closed-loop reporting, where marketing efforts can be directly tied to sales outcomes. This allows for better measurement of marketing ROI, campaign effectiveness, and overall business impact.

Moreover, if Marketing and Sales Clouds are synchronized, both marketing and sales teams get valuable insights into all the lead data, activities, interactions, account engagement history, lead scoring, and behavior tracking.

Due to this, businesses get the chance to synchronize marketing and sales efforts, streamline lead management, and improve overall customer relationship management.

Who Uses Pardot?

Pardot is mainly used by companies in the US and working in the Computer Software and Informational Technology industries in the B2B sector. Typically, Pardot is utilized by small and medium-sized businesses, with 50-200 employees and $1-$10 million dollars revenue.

Some of the companies using Pardot are:

How Much Does Pardot Cost?

Salesforce Pardot has several types of subscriptions: Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium. The Pardot price will depend on your business requirements and the functions you want to get in your software.

Pardot Pricing

What is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a new name for Pardot, the B2B marketing automation solution provided by Salesforce. Its purpose is to optimize and manage marketing efforts so that they fulfill the business sales objectives, allowing companies to enhance their marketing effectiveness, increase conversions, and build lasting customer connections.

The name ‘Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’ (MCAE) Salesforce, which replaced the former name ‘Pardot’ in 2021, appeared as a result of strategic Salesforce rebranding. The initial purpose behind it was to highlight the connection between two major Salesforce marketing instruments – Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. Having replaced ‘Pardot’ with ‘Marketing Cloud Account Engagement,’ Salesforce showed that Pardot is part of a comprehensive suite of Marketing Cloud solutions within the broader Salesforce ecosystem.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), formerly Pardot, is designed to help B2B businesses engage with their target audience, nurture leads, and optimize cross-channel marketing campaigns. It combines marketing automation capabilities, data insights, and personalized communication to enhance customer engagement and boost sales conversions.

Pardot: Meaning of the Name and History

As was already mentioned, ’Pardot’ is the old name for the tool currently called ‘Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’ within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. ‘Pardot’ meaning is ‘to market’ or ‘to sell’ in Latvian. Initially, Pardot was developed and launched in 2007 by co-founders David Cummings and Adam Blitzer.

In 2012 the company was bought by ExactTarget, and in 2013 ExactTarget was purchased by Salesforce, which is when Pardot became a part of the Salesforce ecosystem. Finally, in 2021 the name ‘Pardot’ was changed to ‘Marketing Cloud Account Engagement,’ to highlight its belonging to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud suite. Currently, MCAE Salesforce continues to develop as an independent Salesforce product for B2B marketers.

Ascendix: Your Partner for Pardot Excellence

Do you want to use Pardot to enhance your marketing activities and boost sales but are unsure about the implementation process? Ascendix provides consultancy and Pardot implementation services to guide you.

Already invested in a Pardot subscription but understand it doesn’t justify the investment? Or maybe you are experiencing feature malfunctions or need an outside perspective on your marketing strategy?

Ascendix can help to optimize your usage of Salesforce Pardot and boost sales with its help. We will identify and solve the problem effectively, helping you increase the benefits from Salesforce as well as revenue.

Our Salesforce and Pardot consulting services can help you make the most of your Pardot and Salesforce investments. As your reliable assistants, our goal is to enhance product utilization and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Based in Dallas, Texas, Ascendix Technologies is a certified Pardot and Salesforce consultancy, and an AppExchange app development company. As a Salesforce Crest Consulting Partner, our team possesses over 120 Salesforce certifications, showcasing our expertise across all the products of the Salesforce ecosystem.

Ready to discover the full capabilities of Pardot? Schedule a free Salesforce consulting call with us today.