Cheetah Digital vs. Webtrends Optimize

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.

Webtrends optimize is a marketing solution aimed squarely at transactional and eCom based websites. I would only recommend a colleague to engage with the solution once the marketing dept is at a point where their website is fully optimized in regards to SEO and all the other fundamentals in order to truly build upon what Webtrends can offer. This shows you an easier way of measuring your ROI and the money you will invest with the tool-moving forward.

Incentivized

• 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

• Intuitive test set-up makes for a low learning curve.
• Ability to create custom data tables which enable exporting of visitor level data for more in-depth analysis outside of the Webtrends Optimize platform.
• Visual Editor WYSIWYG interface enables non-technical users to easily execute basic tests.

• 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 cost is a factor. When you're trying to save money, particularly as a startup (a lot of our clients are up-and-comers) it has to be seen as an investment...but the cost to implement the system is fairly large.
• There's a bit of a steep learning curve, you can't just dive into the program.
• It's not impossible but it's not as easy as snapping your fingers to easily implement the program cross-platform.

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,

Difficulty was getting business units to take the time and spend the money to test, and then implement, best options.

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.

Set up of basic tests that do not use segmentation or targeting is an intuitive experience that can be learned quickly by new users. However, as the need for segmentation and other more advanced capabilities arise, the experience begins to degrade.

zero complaints. I'm not aware of it ever failing.

Zero complaints. It seemed to do its job quickly and accurately.

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

The support from the team at Webtrends Optimize is unparalleled. There is always someone to consult should there be any issues.

Online training was ok. Because every test is a custom test, there's only so much that can be covered in a generic lesson.

Implementation was pretty straightforward

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

Webtrends Optimize can be used for much more complex tests, allows better conversion tracking and data collection. Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is suitable for smaller, simple projects. Webtrends Optimize comes with an excellent consultancy that could save you a lot of time and resources

• 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

• So far we haven't seen an ROI that we can accurately measure due to only running a couple of tests that haven't resulted in direct, site wide changes. However, we have learnt a lot about how to set up the right processes and documentation.