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.
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Oracle Marketing
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Oracle CX Marketing (formerly Oracle Marketing Cloud) is a solution designed to enable marketers to plan and execute automated marketing campaigns via email, display search, video advertising, and mobile while delivering a personalized customer experience for their prospects.
I have used CheetahMail for four years. It is known for volume batching. Also it has unique features like bulk-creation of dynamic content, which is what Eloqua is lacking. However, Eloqua outruns CheetahMail with the automation as it can be easily configured, while CheetahMail …
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.
A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities. Less favorable for the people who want to have something at a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing much in detail.
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.)
Integration options outside of auto-syncs. I am currently having an issue trying to find an adapter to use with Eloqua to API into our data warehouse but keep the functionality on the Eloqua side.
To provide more transparency and visual details of the syncs (integrations of outside data) from any other system that is feeding Eloqua, like what is being updated or changed, better explanations of errors, drill down to newly created records.
Custom Objects - Need to have a way to create CDOs outside of just form submissions and uploading of lists, like if you needed to import a file nightly to feed that CDO data but automate the import and make sure it maps to a contact record.
Import of data from a file on SFTP - There is no way to filter or create logic to control what is being fed into Eloqua. Currently, that manipulation has to be done by the IT side first. Less flexibility.
Better auditing capabilities within the canvas. meaning, sometimes if something is changed or not working the problem may not necessarily show up in immediately, the pattern could take a while to present itself. For example, the feeders into the program. If there is a problem, I don't know that maybe contacts are not entering the program until we do reporting that month and realize there was a lull of contacts going through. Then we have a whole month of missed records or other potential data issues. When you get do large and your Eloqua machine is very robust, the harder it is to see everything
Be able to add more than 250 custom contact records. That definitely inhibits my organization in how we need to use that record.
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,
We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.
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.
Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.
There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.
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.
We found that we often were telling support people how the system worked. Because we were on E9 that created a lot of support issues as well since few people on the support team seemed to know how E9 worked. That was mostly okay except when we had major system issues (like SSO preventing us from logging in after an update), it became really hard to get answers that weren't vague. It was always the issues that had the highest visibility within the organization (like with Sales) that seemed to take forever to resolve and didn't have a clear escalation path. When Oracle switched Eloqua over to the Oracle support portal it just got worse
They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.
After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”
Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout
I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.
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.
It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.
Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.
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.
We are able to use it to help our clients scale through testing
We have been able to measure the impact of our events and sales events so we can determine which events to continue in the future and determine future investment
Launch a new brand out of Eloqua and measure awareness
