Cheetah Digital vs. Cordial

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.

Cordial has multiple options to create a message: single campaign, automation, orchestration and sculpt templates, which are drag-and-drop type functionalities but each of these blocks are based on HTML content so a user needs to be technically savvy. I would avoid using HTML includes as it is not possible to see which include a customer received. The team is fabulous, they know the tool and are dedicated to the success of the business. They are quick to respond and provide feedback. Reporting and analytics are very manual if you are combining multiple days in a test.

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

• Provides helpful desktop and mobile previews.
• Sends emails reliably.
• Allows for pretty robust audience rules.

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

• Some of the tasks on the platform are still technical in nature and often requires the help of a developer or technical marketer. But I've witnessed great strides towards accessibility and ease of use for non-technical marketers over the past three years.
• A lot of the templating must be built from scratch.
• Deliverability insights (out of the box) could be expanded further.

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,

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'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

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

Cordial by far has the best UI for simple navigation

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

• Best to manage your clients' business.
• Not ideal for freelancers.

Incentivized