Emma by Marigold is an email marketing solution. Its key features include mobile-ready design templates, email automation, audience segmentation, and dynamic content. The software includes integration with third-party CRM solutions, ecommerce platforms, and social networks.
$500
per year per user
Marigold Engage+
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
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.
Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.
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.
Enterprise-level email marketing with multi-level account structure allowing for multiple users at different levels to send campaigns
Easy-to-use WYSIWYG email template editors to create dynamic emails with enhanced personalization through merge-fields
A large API index that connects to many different platforms and the ability to work with Emma support to create new connections to new platforms as needed
Their customer service leaves something to be desired. We ran into an issue with one of our campaigns, and we decided to reach out to support, but they didn't get back with us until 3 hours later! Time is money!!
We don't like that their photo editing capabilities are limited, you can only choose small, medium or large photos with no way to resize to exact dimensions. Makes emails a bit of a pain
The upgraded premium tools are buggy and leave something to be desired as well – it's a shame.
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.)
Emma has been a great tool for our marketing. It's easy to use and I've had no issues in the almost two years we've been with them. It's really been a great way for us to stay connected with customers that takes no time to setup and send
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,
While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!
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 hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.
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.
At the time we made the decision to move to Emma, my organization was using both MailChimp and Constant Contact. Emma's drag-and-drop template editor surpassed both, and even editing the pre-made template HTML in Emma was easier. List management was much smoother than the clunky Constant Contact and MailChimp lists we had. From a design perspective, we chose Emma for its ease of use in creating templates and modifying existing ones, as well as the ability to push out branded templates and brand assets through its master admin/subaccount capabilities. Emma's analytics and reporting were much less frustrating to navigate and understand, such that, rather than spending all of our time trying to make sense of the metrics from a campaign (which we were definitely doing), we were attracted to being able to report easily and then move on to determining how to make real improvements
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.
Stores using the platform have seen good deliverability stats. Open rates and click-through rates are high with the templates that Emma creates. We still face the challenge of getting more users on the platform.
User satisfaction is high for our users who are regularly using the platform.
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.
