Pardot Announces Spring 2011 Cloud Marketing Automation Release
New Features Include Content Tagging, CRM Integration Enhancements, Gmail Support and Deeper Reporting, All Designed to Make SMB Marketers More Productive
Pardot, the fastest-growing provider of cloud marketing automation software for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced the availability of the latest version of its award-winning marketing platform. Pardot’s Spring 2011 release makes Pardot easier to use and more flexible, to accommodate the marketing preferences of every client. The release offers dozens of enhancements including tighter integration between Pardot and Google and Pardot and major CRM systems, as well as improved content organization and new reporting capabilities.
“Our customers have been asking for features to help streamline their marketing and sales processes and integrate views on prospect activity between marketing automation and CRM,” said Zach Bailey, Vice President of Products for Pardot. “Our latest enhancements satisfy those needs and provide better insight into ROI from Pardot, at the same affordable monthly price.”
Spring 2011 Pardot Product Highlights:
Tags: Just as with blogs and social media, Pardot now allows users to tag any piece of content with keywords that can help organize all activity related to an account, campaign or event. Tagging makes it easier for SMB marketers to filter and search for information by keywords, much like folders and labels in e-mail systems. Tags can also be used to run custom reports.
CRM enhancements: Pardot integrates with major CRM systems such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite and Microsoft. In the Spring 2011 release, Pardot has added opportunity synching for select CRM partners, which automatically merges information about a prospect between the CRM system and Pardot marketing automation software to more easily generate ROI metrics. Secondly, “flexible data synchronization” gives marketers more control over how data fields are mapped between CRM and Pardot, which is particularly useful for companies that have customized their CRM. Finally, account synching enables customers to group all lead generation activity related to an account in one place. This helps avoid the situation of duplicate outreach, and helps consolidate all account-related activity for improved tracking.
Gmail plugin: With SMBs increasingly using Gmail and Google Apps to run their businesses, Pardot now allows sales and marketing users to track Gmail messages sent to prospects in Pardot. This is the latest feature in Pardot’s Google integration, which currently tracks both paid and natural prospect search terms and allows URL tagging from Google Analytics. Pardot also supports tracked email messaging through Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail.
Enhanced reporting: Pardot Spring 2011 includes better reporting for lead nurturing, also known as “drip marketing” campaigns, which automate follow-up activities with active prospects. To more easily track these programs, Pardot now enables users to simply click a link to review all prospect nurturing activity. Pardot automatically calculates ongoing results of the nurturing program, so that users don’t have to do any report creation.
“We’ve been extremely pleased with Pardot and the positive impact it’s had on our sales and marketing organizations,” said Anthony Donelli, senior marketing associate for Reflexis, a workforce management and task execution software vendor for major retail organizations. “Our sales team has really embraced the prospect activity tracking capabilities in Pardot, which has enabled us to get deeper and more meaningful insights into the needs of each prospect. Pardot’s drip campaign tools have been great as well. Automating this process frees me up to work on other revenue-generating projects. Overall, Pardot has been a great fit for our business. The product is easy to use and affordable, and ROI was fast and significant.”
SMB Focus
Unlike its competitors, Pardot’s solution was designed for the SMB market (companies with under $50 million in revenue), though the system’s flexibility enables larger organizations to leverage the software as well. Since January, Pardot has added more than 150 new clients, making it the fastest-growing provider of cloud-based marketing automation software for SMBs.
About Pardot
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation software provider that increases revenue and maximizes efficiency for companies with multi-touch sales cycles. Pardot’s lead management software features CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability. Pardot’s pricing plans start as low as $500 per month, and plans do not require contracts.
About Reflexis Systems, Inc.
Reflexis workforce management & task execution solutions help retailers and their suppliers execute their strategy flawlessly and uncover profit. The integrated Reflexis platform of labor budgeting / forecasting / scheduling, time and attendance, task management, and KPI / compliance solutions enables retailers to align store labor / activities to corporate goals and institutionalize best-practice response to real-time metrics. Reflexis customers, many of which are Top 250 global retailers, have reported dramatic improvements in store-level compliance with corporate strategies; higher productivity of merchandising, field, and store management; and increased sales and profitability. Reflexis Systems, Inc. is privately held and headquartered in Dedham, Massachusetts. For more information, visit wwwreflexisinc.com.