Mailigen is a web based integrated marketing provider offering email, mobile and social marketing. In the SaaS platform, you can gather subscribers, prepare, send or schedule email campaigns and receive real time reports. One can leverage statistics for behavioral segmentation and lifecycle email marketing. Mailigen offers several integration points including online surveys that you can use to segment your audience and send personalized emails.
$10
per month
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.
Mailigen is great for designing and scheduling campaigns that do not require expert knowledge in the field. Creating specific lists, segmentation, & scheduling campaigns are very straightforward and user-friendly. Do not use Mailigen for email marketing blasts! If you are unable to provide documented evidence that the user 'Opt-in' to receive your campaigns, then expect the campaign to be flagged or contacted by your Mailigen Account Manager. You must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act ... no ifs, ands, or buts!
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.
Mail deliverability. MailiGen gets the mail delivered. We have our own data centre hosting and servers but struggled to get our bulk mails reliably delivered. Since we switched to MailiGen delivery rates have more than tripled.
Template editor and tools. There is a rich assortment of tools for preparation of mailers. They are easy to use and we often train customers is a single 2 hour session.
Mail List security and manageability. Cloud based mail lists are important best practices for some of our corporate customers, who often store mail address lists in Excel. These lists get lost, damaged and stolen. The MailiGen list management tools centralize list storage and provide tools for segmentation, importing and exporting.
Stats!! The mail campaign stats that MailiGen provides are world class. They are simple to understand and rich in depth. Our customers love the stats.
Segment creating could be more functional and may include statistics from previous mails. Time to time I need to use more advanced functions like "send information to people who clicked on link A".
It does not allow the user to choose mobile/tablet friendly templates. I'd like to decide myself.
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.)
We are satisfied with this cooperation and we don't see why we should change email marketing service provider at this point. Excellent service and rapid new feature development keeps us very satisfied.
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,
Although it is easy to use for basic users and people with no experience in e-mail marketing, but for more advanced users it still lacks functionality - really advanced filtering - on it's web interface. However everything is possible once you use API.
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.
Although time to time I send a support ticket, but more frequently I use the live support option on their website. I get instant feedback and feel that my problem is addressed immediately.
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.
Mailigen falls short to Listrak due to Listrak's far superior contact, conversion, and message analytics. Some features are unavailable or not easily integrated with the Mailigen platform compared to its competition, but features such as model acquisition & shopping cart abandonment are available. The ability to integrate such features into your website may be easier when using a competitors platform, but easy usability comes with a price. Extra perks such Coupon managers & etc. are useful features that allow you to generate Barcodes & QR codes, as well as track various data analytics when implementing this feature. Small items as such are what Mailigen lacks in comparison to its competitors, but their price point kicks the rest out of the water if you can live without some of the bells and whistles.
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.
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.
