Cheetah Digital vs. Pinpointe On-Demand

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.

Pinpointe is perfect for managing large numbers of contacts, including gathering new contacts and storing them throughout your databases, which can further be broken into lists and then individual tags for sorting and sending. Where it really excels is in the email marketing sector. We are able to send as many as several hundred thousand emails per hour, making sure all of our customers get time sensitive marketing material quickly.

• 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 detailed statistics page is really helpful.
• Excellent and flexible Builder.
• Customer Service responds within one hour.
• Stock photos included.
• Database separation & sub-accounts.
• Excellent multi-inbox previewer available.
• Responsive templates.
• Invaluable webinars and training.

• 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

• Depending on the amount, when I am in the middle of uploading a list of contacts I get bumped out and have to submit a request to increase my dataset. That being said, our company as a whole is happy with what Pinpointe provides us with as is.

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,

Pinpointe On-Demand is a critical component of our marketing infrastructure and we will continue to use it to support our email marketing requirements

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

They are quick to respond to requests, usually within an hour. If they don't have an immediate fix to a problem, they let me know what the status is and what they are doing about a request. In some cases, if the development team needs to be involved because a bug is found, they have fixed and patched the system same day. Rarely do I ever get that kind of customer support response with any other company. They don't have a premium support tier because they treat every request with the same level of professionalism and response time (again, to at least let you know it was received and an actual person is looking at it, even if they are busy with other requests).

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

Pinpointe is a great #2 for specialty campaigns. Our bounce rates were higher than with other providers. Pinpointe's detailed reports and interface are a step above the competition.

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

• Our ROI has gone up significantly since using Pinpointe.
• We are able to use the coding to implement a join form on our website directly so we don't have to download from our website and upload to Pinpointe each time we want to add our contacts.
• Our emails show up white-labeled so it is our own branding on all emails.