Cheetah Digital vs. Right On Interactive

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

Right On Interactive is well suited if you need to bring in lots of data from numerous sources and be able to reference across tables to build a detailed segment. This also lends it to being more useful when a company has people that know data and have the time to dive deep into it to build lists. For teams without multiple people or dedicated people to use the system it can be cumbersome.

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

• It is able to pull in as many data sources as you would like.
• It is easy to connect data across multiple sources to create segments.
• Forces you to think about your customer lifecycle to get the most out of the software.

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

• The interface is improving in recent months but it still has a way to go to catch up to competitors.
• The system seems to be reactionary when building out campaigns instead of more proactive. You can go through the entire campaign setup and forget to check one box at the very start and have to go all the way back to just pull in a piece of personalized data.
• Could use more integrations with marketing softwares.

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

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.)

• 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

• It saved us a bunch of money in getting a higher tier of SFDC. The workflows it allowed us to create (using their staff writing MySQL) saved us having to double our SFDC spend to get workflows.
• It allowed us to easily send emails to people added into SFDC campaigns buy external sales staff which saved time from manual emails.
• The time it took the marketing team to create the campaigns could've been faster.

Incentivized