Autoklose headquartered in Toronto provides an SEP solution, presenting a combined package of sales email automation and tracking, contact and email campaign management with sequence templates and optimization, sales intelligence with contact verification, follow-up tracking, and integration with commonly used CRMs (e.g. Salesforce), marketing suites (e.g. Hubspot), and email marketing tools (Mailchimp) to coordinate activites between them.
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Marigold Engage+
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Marigold Engage+ (formerly Cheetah Messaging or CheetahMail) is an email marketing platform. It is optimized for delivering segmented email marketing campaigns with security in mind. It also integrates with any third-party CRM software.
If someone only runs a campaign using email and telephone communication, Autoklose is perfect, and I highly recommend it. If someone uses a more diverse set of tools and wants a more complex type of sequence, Autoklose does not allow their users to program communication tools that some other tools and software allow.
I think CheetahMail, being one of the main ESPs in the market, is a quality choice. However, I would suggest that it's really only valuable for a bit larger of an organization, generally having staff of 100+ and revenues in tens of millions -- this is mainly to justify the amount of investment required, so may be cost-prohibitive to some. You also need to make sure that you understand the entire "level of support" you will gain through your specific contract.... the key is understanding what types of resources are within your organization (who's doing the coding? who comes up with the next campaign? What's the overall strategy?) Depending on these questions and resources, may help determine your final needs from a services point of view. CheetahMail can provide a wealth of various services specific to needs (and changes over time as your business changes), but a clear understanding of what you have before you bring them on will really help getting up and running quickly. Also be sure to truly understand the costs for the initial integrations, setups, IP senders, etc.
AutoKlose uses your own email, (e.g. Microsoft Outlook), so it runs the risk of exceeding the Microsoft Message Rate Limit, which can be problematic for your Outlook account.
Additional throttling limits for the SMTP Authentication protocol are:
30 messages per minute
Recipient rate limit of 10,000 recipients per day.
Exceeding these limits will cause the following issues:
Exceeding the per minute limit causes email delivery delays, any excess in message submission will be throttled and successively carried over to the following minutes.
Exceeding the per day limit causes the following error message:
The organization of CheetahMail could at times be better, as you create more and more mailings, they just pile up in a long list. It would be useful to be able to create folders to store specific mailings in. (ex. editorial, newsletters, marketing, etc.)
As I have begun exploring competitors, I've come to realize that every competitor offers so much more functionality and integration than CheetahMail does. When we first signed our contract, CheetahMail was much more innovative and at the forefront of email. Since being bought out by Experian, we've seen a huge decline in service and innovation. They have laid off much of their staff and moved their account representatives to Costa Rica. They also heavily rely on on third parties which you will have to pay large amounts of money for while other Email Service Providers have integrated new technologies into their platform. You will get more for your money going to a different email service such as Responsys, Silverpop, Listrak and the like,
Whether it's setting up integrations, creating email campaigns, managing conversations with prospects, Autoklose is a well-designed tool that provides clarity along the way for users to find their bearings, and understand what to do. The help documentation is excellent, the support is great, but the tool is built in a way that simply makes sense when you're using it.
CheetahMail has a high learning curve to master and requires a lot of backend work with tech teams to set up. Navigation is not the best and everything that should be automated is still extremely manual.
Our Autoklose rep is amazing! Jelena has always gotten back to us within 24 hours, despite living on a different continent. She is completely proficient with the tool and is usually able to answer our questions with a brief email or short virtual meeting.
Account reps have a quick response time but a very slow resolution time. Because account reps do not have technical knowledge, there is a long long lead time between flagging a problem and tech team resolution.
I think that I have already said it, Autoklose has much better support and is really quick to set up and use compared with any of the other systems that I have used over the years.
CheetahMail is very far behind these other providers. Specifically in Lyris we could build forms that automatically generated code connected to specific lists and be up and running in less than a few hours. With CheetahMail that would take days and developers at times.
I feel the increased prospect engagement and business opportunities created supported the cost. In my industry 1 customer can support positive ROI.
I saw an overall increase in mass emailing effectiveness and we were able to automate majority of our campaigns which increased productivity for marketing & sales.
The customer service team at CheetahMail was good and efficient. It is always a frustrating experience to call in when your stuck on something but the CS team did a good job of quickly and effectively helping us when we called them for support.
Compared to other ESPs that our employees support, this platform was quite easy to learn and the documentation provided often helped us figure things out without having to go and call CS.
