Cheetah Digital vs. Echobox Email vs. Mapp Digital

Cheetah Messaging is great tool for marketers in order to manage different campaigns. Various aspects of the tool such as personalization, reporting & analytics, bulk user management, segmentation help the marketers a lot with their day to day work. Cheetah Messaging would be less appropriate for user having bulk databases.

Incentivized

Echobox Email is great for news or article-based sites. It's the only platform we've used that allows editors to simply paste one link to include or override a story. The ability to automate fully or enable periodically is a time and money saver for us during holidays or employee vacations. The platform has been easy to learn and a great improvement over our workaround solutions in Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. Besides the platform UI and optimizations for articles (which is worth switching for alone), the AI/ML built in to the platform has already started showing improvements to our open and click rates. The personalized send time is a game-changer and the personalized story selection is a promising feature– we look forward to seeing how it plays out over time.

With this program, we're able to keep track of our marketing campaigns, as well as use additional features to enhance the product. A lot of the software's success may be attributed to its statistical capabilities. A large part of our company's growth has come from improving the product, which our staff does on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• They offer a best-in-class view of the customer email experience - through all levels of a customer journey.
• Our account team has taken the time to dedicate to our brand and understand our goals and objectives. They tailor recommendations to what is best for our unique customer experience.
• The CheetahMail platform is user-friendly and is continuously going through enhancements to improve the experience.

Incentivized

• Easy interface for everyone to learn
• Personalized send times have led to increased open rates
• Ability to automate whole campaigns by theme or category
• Responsive support team that has already incorporated feedback

• API functionality, alongside reporting, is unparalleled in an environment where you may not have IT support to build out tools.
• The user interface is easy to understand, allowing users to have control over the creative delivery for MIME, HTML, text and mobile ads.
• It allows deliverability experts to throttle deliveries by selecting mailing domain and IP pairs, granting access to stats on these individual paired delivery tools.

• 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

• Stories on Facebook
• More editing options for photos (e.x. layering, pixelating)
• Define also seconds when scheduling

• I have used Blue Hornet over the last few years as it is the selected email platform used by my content provider. I have never used a more glitchy platform! Every time I use it I run into broken links, glitches and kinks. Their tech team is very quick to blame your machine - but I have access to several machines on all major OS platforms, and I run into the same issues every time.
• The Blue Hornet user interface is poor and clunky. They have a great looking homepage - but you can tell that there focus is on selling and not on current clients. This is plainly apparent by the fact that the login button is buried at the very bottom of the page and difficult to find the first time you look for it. Not to mention the fact that the user interface itself is nowhere near as smooth and polished as their branded website is. Additionally, their reports are often inaccurate.
• I would suggest any serious marketer looking to execute an email campaign with Blue Hornet to look elsewhere. I have reached out to my content provider to ask that they provide support on a different system - and was kindly informed that they are working around the clock to make this happen due to the overwhelmingly negative criticism of Blue Hornet from their clients.

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,

It has helped increase traffic via social media, which was something crucial for us. This came without extra working time. On contrary, it saved us time.

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

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 has all the features we need and is performing better than what we used previously. The support/development team has been very open to feedback and is actively working on new features and improvements. Any shortcomings (which may not exist for long) are very minor compared to the benefits and features specifically built for news/articles.

Once you start using the product a lot and are taught how it works, it's pretty simple. You just need that initial training and to use it a lot to get used to it.

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

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

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

To be honest, all ESPs at a core level offer the same features to manage an email program effectively. The true decision making then is based on what their specialty service(s) may be. ExactTarget is a wonderful UI and integrations across many channels, but it is quite expensive and really for large enterprise organizations. Yesmail does have a great creative-services department. Strongmail, although good, does not offer any significant difference in the market, but price is slightly less so aren't bad solutions. DREAM is probably the "middle" between a Cheetahmail and ExactTarget from a UI look-and-feel and functionality perspective, and their data access is quite good. Cheetahmail was selected in the end because it offered more than a smaller ESP for functionality for larger enterprises, but was still within a cost range that was affordable for my company. (In fairness, there was also an existing relationship with Experian on non-email data services which also made extending the relationship make sense.)

Echobox Email is specifically built for article-based newsletters and pre-selects content based on your criteria so the editorial team is not starting from scratch. Article-based emails can also be fully automated which was not possible in Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor before. Our web development team no longer needs to build custom solutions to integrate with the ESP and instead can focus on other projects.

Mapp Digital offers a unique breadth of services which other software failed to offer. The AI based insights Mapp provides are very accurate and useful in order to create hyper-personalized re-marketing campaigns for our customers. Also, the customer experience analytics that Mapp offers are informative and helps us to take decisions based on those.

Incentivized

• Web-based customers have gone up.
• Though the customers have gone up, we don't see a significant increase in our policies sold.
• Communicating with CheetahMail is also fair when having to debug problems, which is good but there are a bunch of problems with some emails that lead to communication in the first place.

Incentivized

• Increased open rates 17%
• Higher click totals overall

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.