How to Migrate from Pardot to HubSpot

Your B2B marketing strategy and approach matter more than your tool when focusing on marketing automation. Because of that, you should only develop your business based on something other than a marketing automation platform but the other way around, such that you can produce relevant lead data or marketing and sales results. After all, there are custom connectors and add-ons for these tools for you to choose from, to invest in marketing automation campaigns for your lead generation efforts.

Marketing automation helps by adapting to how the business works. Customizing the tools with the right add-ons can help you reach your goals faster and easier, thus improving your marketing and sales funnel and generating qualified leads. While Pardot remains a trendy choice, its email marketing-centric approach enables businesses to solve only parts of their strategy. If this is your case for your marketing process, read more to learn how to migrate from Pardot to HubSpot.

If you are still on the fence about migrating your marketing automation system from Pardot to Hubspot, check out this guide to marketing automation from The Pardot VS Hubspot Migration and Switch Guide.

What Makes HubSpot a Better Marketing Automation Tool?

Instead of forcing businesses to create their automation strategies around email marketing automation campaigns, HubSpot takes a more wholesome approach. This effective marketing automation platform addresses the entire marketing funnel and assists businesses in convincing and converting website visitors to the point where they turn into brand evangelists. These are just some of the benefits of marketing automation.

How Does the Marketing Automation Migration Work?

The migration phases might vary, depending on the platforms you're switching to and from. When moving from Pardot to HubSpot, you should expect the following:

Initial setup
Pardot export
HubSpot-Salesforce integration
Content migration
Automation
Going live

How long the migration takes is really up to you and depends on how fast you go through each stage or if you benefit from a marketing team's efforts.

How to Migrate Your Marketing Database

The data collected by your CRM system from forms, landing pages, and other connected apps are stored in the Prospects section of Pardot. Migrating the data is as easy as selecting "CSV export" from the Tools dropdown and importing it into HubSpot's Contacts tool. Check the "Switch to Full Export" option so that custom-field data makes it to the new marketing automation platform.

Migrating Email Content Between the Two Platforms

Pardot focuses a lot on email marketing and is adequate for businesses building their strategies around email. That being said, HubSpot is no stranger to email and relies on it through many stages of the full-funnel approach. Therefore, when transitioning from Pardot to HubSpot, you must migrate the email marketing content and the templates you intend to use for your sales and marketing campaigns.

Pardot stores email content in the Email tool, and so does HubSpot, but there's no way to export it. In short, you will have to copy the content of each message individually. When it comes to email templates, you have multiple options for making the transition. Simple templates may not even require to be moved over, as HubSpot's default template can easily take its place. To migrate heavily customized templates, save the HTML code of each of them and get a developer to import them into HubSpot.

How to Migrate Automated Marketing Campaigns

Marketing automation campaigns in Pardot feature two main components: automation rules and drip programs. You can import both of these into HubSpot's Workflows tool. However, you should take the following two aspects into account when performing marketing automation workflows and automation campaign migration:

Trigger criteria (known as Lists under HubSpot, these are the actions needing to take place before automation rules or trigger programs)
Delays and actions (these are used for establishing the intervals between two automated email campaigns, for example)

Documenting the entire automation process facilitates the transition. However, since some elements may migrate differently, you might have to spend some time fine-tuning the details.

Migrating Landing Pages from Pardot to HubSpot

Much like email automation content and templates, migrating landing pages and templates for these happens similarly. The content can either be copied in a text file or saved in HTML format. Simple landing page templates can be quickly rebuilt using HubSpot's default templates. The more complex ones should be protected as HTML code and imported into HubSpot by a developer.

At first glance, migrating the assets from Pardot to HubSpot might seem easy, but marketing automation is never easy without challenges. We will go over these inbound marketing tools, as well, in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned!

Still, if you conclude that Pardot is adequate for your business needs, you can discover the aspects that make this platform unique here. Feel free to contact us to discuss any challenges you've encountered during migrating from one marketing automation software to another.

We'll walk you through every transition step to ensure that your benefits use the new marketing automation tool to its fullest potential!