Cheetah Digital vs. CrowdCompass vs. Swift Digital

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.

CrowdCompass was the best part of Cvent each time I used it, from the ease of use to the customer service and handholding. I would recommend it for anyone using Cvent Event Management for an in-person event. I know Cvent just rolled out their virtual event hub though, so for virtual and hybrid events that are employing the Cvent family of tools, I would probably say CrowdCompass is unnecessary.

Incentivized

it's well suited to a business that relies on constant email marketing and to keep in contact with leads or customers. This is the heartbeat of business and suits us. We can segment qualified leads, data scores, track campaigns and effectively save time to work on other customer campaigns. If you are a smaller business that only sends one email a month, it's not for you. This software is very sophisticated and can be technical in the beginning.

• 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 attendees with their personalized schedules at their fingertips.
• Facilitates networking through the ability to set appointments and send messages with other attendees, and inspires competition with The Game and Click challenges.
• Gives attendees the ability to view handouts, take notes and download the information to their personal computers when they get back to their offices.

Incentivized

• drag-and-drop campaign builder
• email templates
• lead scoring
• Analytics

• 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

• Last year, the gamification did not allow much customization, which was a shame. I hope that by the time I am ready to build my 2020 app, this function has been expanded
• The app to upload/edit push notifications was only available on iPhone so I had to have another team member handle that seems I have an android phone.
• Emails (invites, etc.) often go to junk.

Incentivized

• More email flexibility would be good.
• Simplify the modules-there is a lot, and it can be overwhelming.

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 using CrowdCompass for 3 years and it has all of the capabilities and functionality that we need, it's easy to use, and Cvent is always implementing new features and enhancements to keep up with the latest trends and technology.

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.

It is very easy to use as everything is very intuitive. Configurating an app does not take too much time at the end, especially as soon as you already have done one as you can dupplicate the entire content. This is very practical when you use the app for annual events. Also few elements are not updatable once the app is published. Of course you can't change the entire design and the security settings which is a good thing anyway, but the entire content can be updated which allows you to publish your app quite early in advance to boost the engagement without having to wait to have everything in your hands (for instance the speakers bios or abstracts). Plus by adding more content regularly it encourage your audience to come back also regularly to check what is going on before the event.

Incentivized

Have not had any issues with availability

Incentivized

Have had no issues

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

Once we paid for our apps, I felt like I was left to learn on my own. There are plenty of Help articles available, but no training sessions. I'm a visual learner and having to poke around and use trial and error to build the apps took way too much valuable time away from other parts of my job. It was frustrating and I brought it up with my CrowdCompass contact, but was told that they don't provide any training sessions and if I had questions I should refer to the Help articles or call support.

Incentivized

Our training team walked us through the first set up which really helped me to learn where everything is located as well as all of the features available

Incentivized

Don't wait to register with Apple and Google. You can do a lot of prep work prior to setting up CrowdCompass for integration.

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

Easier to use interface that directly links with our Cvent registration system. We switched due to this integration, the gamification improvements, the benefits for on-site check-in and session selections, and ease of design/use for our builder team. We have especially enjoyed the New Attendee experience over the look/interface of our previous apps

Incentivized

We looked into Swift based upon a recommendation. We have previously used ActiveCampaign but found it very clunky for what we wanted to use it for. We also looked into Pardot, but was on the other end of the spectrum, it had far too many features, complexities and required an implementation specialist at our expense of $15K. Swift was just the right fit for us, and we like knowing that our data is kept in Australia

works great no matter what type of program or how many people attending

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

• Positive - CrowdCompass has allowed us to eliminate paper programs thus saving thousands of dollars in printing and labor
• Positive - the ability to send push notifications when there is a change to the schedule is something a paper program could never do
• Positive - adoption rates have been so high we are looking into using the program for more and more events

• Better lead quality
• Has allowed us to close clients quicker.
• Higher ROI
• Access to much more targeted customer data
• Getting used to the software took more time thn anticipated