This article touches on Pardot’s many features briefly, geared more towards giving summary of platform’s capabilities. For an in depth look at Pardot please visit their site at https://www.pardot.com/.

There are a few names in marketing automation platforms today and Pardot is one of them. Pardot was acquired by Salesforce in 2012 and ever since then it’s getting better integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem. Out of the box Pardot will provide you with many features you can start using.

1. Emailing: Pardot is mainly an email marketing tool. Pardot will let you build your emails in 3 different ways.

   1. The one I’ve used the most is by directly manipulating the HTML and CSS code.

   2. It also allows you to use its visual editor which handles basic operations well, but I’ve seen it mess the email styling quite a few times. Use it at your own risk and always test your email before sending it out to your audience.

   3. The new Pardot Lightning Email Builder. I’ve seen several demos on this and it looks promising but I also noticed that it’s lacking a lot of features that come with other drag-and-drop email builders out there. It has many dependencies not to mention that you will also need a Salesforce CRM integration to be able to use this new feature. I think this email builder is a first step in the right direction for Pardot and I hope that they will continue development on it.

2. List management: Pardot features a powerful list segmentation. You can create static or dynamic lists that match your criteria and use those lists to send emails to or as suppression lists.

3. Landing pages: Pardot allows you to build landing pages on its platform. You can use prebuilt templates or create your own. You can also use Pardot’s own forms and form handlers to capture converted lead data from your landing pages.

4. Forms and Form Handlers: These two need their own separate blog post. There are so many things to say for each of Forms and Form Handlers and pros and cons of using them. In my experience, I’ve found the Forms to work better in Pardot Landing Pages, and Form Handlers in integrating with forms that are used with websites and other platforms. They are both great features but you need to be very picky when it comes to which one to use for which purpose.

5. Dynamic Content: This was a great tool before the web browsers became finicky about third party cookies which is when I stopped recommending using. If you are planning on using be prepared to test it on as many browsers and devices as possible before pushing to production. Dynamic content will display a piece of content on your website depending on the value of a prospect field. For example if you may want to display product A to prospects who live in certain geolocations, and B to others on your website. This is possible with Dynamic Content but certainly be cautious when implementing on your website.

6. Variable Tags: These are similar to mail merge tags and pull a piece of information into the email like customized salutations, i.e. Dear %%First_Name%%. They are very useful for customizing your emails to your audience.

7. Page Actions: Pardot can listen to prospect visits on certain pages on your website and take action on that activity. For instance you may send an automated email to all who viewed the thank you page served after form submission, or you can use it to segment your prospects who view your product pages.

8. Engagement Studios: This is one of the most powerful tools on Pardot platform. This feature allows you to send prospects a series of emails at timed intervals. It also allows you to update fields, change list membership status, and take actions based on prospect field values.

Today, Salesforce markets Pardot platform as a B2B marketing automation tool. While Pardot is effective as a B2B marketing automation tool, I’ve seen it in use for B2C than B2B. So if you are marketing to your individual customer base rest assured Pardot can handle is just as well.

I contribute to Pardot user groups and love discussing challenges, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions about Pardot or if you have any tips you’d like to share.