ActiveDEMAND vs. Cheetah Digital Customer Engagement Suite (discontinued)

When choosing a marketing automation system, it is important to think of what exactly you want it to do. I think no matter what you are hoping to get out of a marketing automation platform, you can achieve it with ActiveDEMAND. It can be used for simple/basic marketing email sending and campaign execution or it can be used to develop a microsite, create sales and marketing kiosks, run multi-step campaigns, host protected assets or whatever you want to do with it. You can easily choose (or ignore) the modules and features to be as creative as you choose to be.

I think that Cheetah is specifically well suited for personalized, relevant messaging to customers. They help provide tools to give users the ability to create campaigns that will generate positive interpretations and help move your business forward.

Incentivized

• Customer Service - this company EXCELS at customer service, always answering our questions and being helpful.
• Innovative Ideas - they stay on top of the trends in marketing, offer ways for us to incorporate these items into our efforts.
• Friendly staff - the staff at ActiveDEMAND are great to work with and are responsive to our needs.

• It offers social media tracking, which is a big competitive advantage against its rivals.
• Email targeting options are better than MailChimp.
• Good price.

Incentivized

• Reporting - Though the reporting is extensive and very very good... I sometimes miss a simplified view of email opens/clicks/link clicks etc.
• Don't get me wrong, you can get to this data in ActiveDEMAND relatively easily, the default views through the campaign dashboard are just quite detailed (which some people would probably prefer) and I just don't think that we need that level of reporting on first glance. That being said, I do love the option to drill down and uncover the complex detailed data when i do want it (ActiveDEMAND is very good at this).
• One element of reporting that I would also like would be an event registrant report showing all registered people (this part exists) and their responses on the registration form they completed to register for the event. (These things would be dietary restrictions, industry, customized responses to other event related questions).
• I also wish the reports autorefreshed more frequently.
• ICS Files - Right now there are work arounds for loading an ICS file (Calendar meeting invite file) that can be accessed in campaign assets. I just wish this was more native to the tool.
• Archive Filing - Now, first of all, it is so amazing that ActiveDEMAND even has an archiving feature... I LOVE this. One small downside, however, is that the archiving cannot be organized using a folder structure or anything. I would like to be able to group my live events together, then group my webinars together etc.

• I would love more ability to create programmatic campaigns that follow customers on a lifecycle.
• Continue to improve the user interface to make all features more usable to their users.

Incentivized

Cheetah has never been known for its customer service and the few times I had to contact the answers I got were either incomplete or not really useful for the problem I was having at the moment. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in this aspect.

Incentivized

Vertical Response wasn't a full marketing platform at the time when we used it, but it was clunky and the tech support wasn't easy to use. I like the one-on-one response we get from ActiveDemand and really being on a first name basis with the folks there

They are very comparable to each other. Cheetah is a little more user-friendly and the customer service is much better, but Responsys had more features that I liked to use.

Incentivized

• Simplified email marketing and event management
• Better tracking of leads
• Better intelligence about which initiatives are working well and where future opportunities lie
• Less reliant on IT department/third party to execute our online marketing

• It has raised costs due to its price, reducing ROI.
• However, we have gotten good results and great CPAs with them, improving margins.
• It has allowed us to be faster on testing, improving ROI in the long term.

Incentivized