Pardot Marketing Automation and WordPress: What You Need to Know

There are many marketing automation platforms, but larger companies and enterprise customers will typically choose one of the leading platforms, such as Salesforce Pardot. But what is it and what do you need to know when it comes to integrating it with WordPress?

What is Pardot?

Pardot is a business-to-business marketing automation tool that aims to align sales and marketing by helping marketers to nurture and warm up sales leads. The application captures customer information and tracks interactions, so that marketers can assess their relevance and nurture them appropriately. In this way, cold leads can be resurrected and nurtured.

The content delivered can be personalised so that specific offers are displayed, or emails are only sent according to the user’s preferences.

The leads are assessed via automatic scoring and grading methods, and if they start to show an interest, then real-time notifications can alert the sales team to follow them up.

With clear tracking of the customer’s journey, marketing can better identify what led to the conversion and in turn can more clearly understand which marketing efforts are generating the best return on investment.

It’s officially named Salesforce Pardot, as it’s owned by the CRM giant, Salesforce. It’s no surprise therefore that the marketing automation solution combines seamlessly with Salesforce products for a truly integrated sales and marketing stack.

Pardot is billed annually, with an annual contract, and costs either £800, £1,600 or £2,400 a month for up to 10,000 contacts. The price varies depending on the exact functionality required. Optional engagement functional can be added at an extra cost.

How does Pardot integrate with WordPress?

There is a WordPress plugin – created and maintained by Pardot – that integrates the two platforms. It is free and is installed in the same way as other WordPress plugins.

Once installed and activated, some Pardot account login details, a user key and campaign tracking code need to be submitted, to connect your WordPress and Pardot accounts. This only needs to be done once.

What functionality does a Pardot/WordPress integration bring?

When the Pardot plugin is activated, a Pardot button is added to the WordPress Visual Editor toolbar. This allows you to insert forms and to add dynamic content to your WordPress pages and posts.

It’s quick and simple to do, and no coding is required. Instead, the plugin adds shortcodes into pages and posts, and widgets in sidebars.

What is the support like?

Support for something like this may be handled by your IT department or digital partner, but even so it’s good to know that the WordPress plugin appears to be updated regularly – at the time of writing, the most recent update was two months ago. And there is a good level of support provided via the plugin’s page on the WordPress.org website, with queries responded to swiftly.

Conclusion

In summary then, Pardot integrates easily with WordPress. It benefits from good levels of maintenance and attentive support, and is simple to add some of the Pardot functionality to your WordPress website.