Cheetah Digital vs. ClickDimensions

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.

ClickDimensions is great for SMB companies looking for an easy to use, robust platform especially in situations where there are only a few people within the Marketing Department.

Incentivized

• Internal management - This is a great web-based tool that allows our users to see what emails go to whom.
• Organization - Many layers of organization for templates since there are many types of remarketing emails that we send out.
• Historical Records - CheetahMail sends us the raw text files of all email actions so we can upload them to our database.

Incentivized

• The nurture campaign builder was great. Easy to use and to follow along with.
• The drop and drag editor was easy to use and you could start using it with no training.
• I always like when a service offers a certification for their product. ClickDimensions training was easy to follow, gave good content/tips/tricks and really helped me learn the platform.

Incentivized

• 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.)

Incentivized

• Creating lists based on customer email behaviour was technically possible, but in practise nearly impossible
• Managing customer preferences and subscriptions felt extremely convoluted
• Interfaces generally not intuitive
• Reporting was not in the class of competitors
• Deliverability - seems like in onboarding basic things weren't checked off. We really needed a platform expert to implement.

Incentivized

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,

I see no reason for us to deprecate use at this point. It is important for us as a business to maintain our partnership with them and keep on the pulse of leading technology. ClickDimensions is a marketplace leader for the world of marketing automation, and in coordination with CRM, it's all the more relevant.

Incentivized

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.

I want to stay neutral. It's not that this product doesn't have appealing features or capabilities, it's that they aren't consistent and stable. So you lose data or your data is not accurate. Or some connection fails and the workflow doesn't trigger as it is supposed to, or the visits or clicks or other metrics contain bad data one month, then the next they're back to normal. This company needs to focus on getting their core product right and not on new features.

I've been very satisfied with the support given by Cheetah, they are always asking and looking for areas where they can help you improve upon your business. They are very knowledgeable and are able to quickly find any answer you are looking for.

Incentivized

You submit a ticket and they will always come back asking for more information. So the next time you try to be proactive and add that information to the original ticket, but then they come back and ask for something else. It gets to the point where you have to believe it is a stall tactic. You ask for more detail into their processes and you get the runaround. 9 times out of ten they will point the finger at Dynamics 365 as the culprit. It is like pulling teeth to get to Tier 2 support and then the questions start all over again, even if you send screenshots.

I believe Cheetah DMS is a bit more complete and a lot more complex to use than Mailchimp. Mailchimp was born as a mail marketing service while Cheetah has always worked across the whole online advertising spectrum making it a better solution for clients that need a certain level of service and sophistication.

Incentivized

Clickdimensions is severely impeded by its integration into Dynamics CRM. Consequently it lacks the Intuitiveness of HubSpot, and the straightforward usability of MailChimp. It is a perfect system if you want to exist entirely within Dynamics, but it requires a high degree of expertise in Dynamics to get maximum value out of it. We're currently migrating to HubSpot, and while the initial integration is proving challenging, I already sense we will be able to deliver a lot more of our marketing goals much more easily, and see an ROI.

Incentivized

• Our efficiency has decreased with CheetaMail actually. Too many service calls to find out why something isn't working as expected, account setup questions, issues with PiP, takes too long to get a simple form built, customer service response time, etc...
• Reporting is not very streamlined. This has caused us to take our reporting offline and use a method with better visibility.

Incentivized

• Tracking Email Engagement by customer is much easier. Real Time Stats/Email Engagement Report already built in.
• Lead scoring helps develop more qualified leads.

Incentivized