CoSchedule provides a content calendar, content optimization, and contentmarketing products, with users among 50,000 marketers worldwide, helping them organize their work, deliver projects on time, and prove marketing team value.
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Marigold Engage+
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Marigold Engage+ (formerly Cheetah Messaging or CheetahMail) is an email marketing platform. It is optimized for delivering segmented email marketing campaigns with security in mind. It also integrates with any third-party CRM software.
CoSchedule is great for businesses or agencies who need an overview of all their marketing efforts, and who want to establish collaboration between multiple departments. The calendar view is one of the best we've worked with and makes it easy to see exactly what's happening. There is some slight clunkiness when it comes to admin-related tasks, and a few things aren't easy to find, but there's great support.
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.
The import Google Doc to WordPress functionality never worked successfully or reliably for me. So I just manually copy and paste Google Docs to the WordPress editor instead.
The social sharing counter was not that helpful, because it only counted Facebook and Google+. Who uses Google+ anymore? Plus, now they don't even show the social counter in the monthly calendar view. so you can't see the numbers without doing some extra digging.
In the monthly calendar view, some titles get cut off if they don't wrap cleanly in the day's box. So I would make it look cleaner instead of having words broken up by a hyphen.
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.)
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 didn't have to use their official support, but I can say that they put out a lot of content online to help users. Their YouTube page has quite an array of tutorial videos explaining how things work and how to get the most out of their tools. If you're struggling, before picking up a phone or blasting off an email, try searching for your problem on YouTube or their forums.
Account reps have a quick response time but a very slow resolution time. Because account reps do not have technical knowledge, there is a long long lead time between flagging a problem and tech team resolution.
CoSchedule provides collaborative planning of projects. The calendar view is very well designed. Meetings and tasks can be scheduled and tracked easily. Whatever is being done, no matter how big the task/project is, it gives a bird-eye view of everything. Additionally, it also integrated very well with WordPress. Their customer service team is also very helpful.
CheetahMail is very far behind these other providers. Specifically in Lyris we could build forms that automatically generated code connected to specific lists and be up and running in less than a few hours. With CheetahMail that would take days and developers at times.
Probably too early to tell for certain but it is definitely value priced right now. Fully developed content management platforms are running in $15-$20k per year range and more. You can get into a CoSchedule solution for $
Team has found it easy to sign on and review tasks so this is a big time saver. More could be done to enable Guests easier access to content they need to review
It's way faster that other scheduling apps we have tried. The fact that it runs on a cloud based app or inside your Wordpress app is a real plus. Auto save feature also means you don't have to remember to save your content.
The customer service team at CheetahMail was good and efficient. It is always a frustrating experience to call in when your stuck on something but the CS team did a good job of quickly and effectively helping us when we called them for support.
Compared to other ESPs that our employees support, this platform was quite easy to learn and the documentation provided often helped us figure things out without having to go and call CS.
