Cheetah Digital vs. SwiftERM

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.

SwiftERM only works on specific ecommerce platforms including Magento, Shopify, Woo Commerce, and OpenCart. It is intended for regular communication with consumers who visit that retailers site more often. so it works well for food and drink, fashion and pet food etc. People selling beds or something which you buy less frequently would get lower returns.

• 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

• Automatic email marketing
• Predictive analytics
• Publicises our Trustpilot product ratings

• 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

• Introduce an SMS version
• Making the reporting system more idiotproof

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.

It is the only system we have able to find in the world that is 100% automatic. There is an element of automation in many email products, but these always require some input, if only setting the distribution time. No other analyses down to individual consumer level. No other system in the world is authorized to send Trustpilot product ratings in outbound emails. This really is superb.

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

Setting up is a simple plugin. I did my own in three minutes including the registration. As it is automatic, there is no need for training or paying for users, etc. In six years we have never needed any support, but I know there is a team of developers there if that day ever arrives.

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

Mailchimp, DotMailer, Emarsys. But none of these does exactly what SwiftERM does, leaving us in a situation where we now run both SwiftERM and Mailchimp.

• 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 initial ROI was over 4,000%
• It has freed up many days each month spent segmenting audiences.
• Our customer churn has been reversed.