Cheetah Digital vs. SharpSpring (discontinued)

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.

SharpSpring is great for creating and tracking campaigns that span multiple channels. With the Salesforce integration, we are able to keep our Sales team focused inside Salesforce without them needing to learn a new tool. Our Marketing team uses SharpSpring to nurture leads before handing them off to the Sales team. Though the features are available, SharpSpring would not be suitable for social media management or blogs; our third-party tools do a better job at that.

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

• Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
• The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.

• 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

• The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
• Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
• If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.

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,

We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.

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.

This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.

Incentivized

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

The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.

Incentivized

Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.

Incentivized

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

We use different CRMs for different clients, mostly due to budget and other requirements. SharpSpring from Constant Contact is in the middle, price-wise, but is slightly more user-friendly than ActiveCampaign when it comes to certain things, such as drip campaigns and workflows. Though the price can be prohibitive to some clients, it is extremely robust. I definitely prefer the list-building, the ability to send smart emails and the WYSIWYG editor.

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

• Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
• Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
• Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
• Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
• Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.