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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Revinate
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Revinate is a hotel reputation management tool, with email marketing tools, surveys for customer feedback (to drive reviews to Google and TripAdvisor), and a dashboard to monitor all online reviews and social media mentions.
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.
Revinate is a great platform for smaller-sized hotels who do not need the advanced functionalities of a larger ESP like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You do not need coding experience, but if you would like to custom-code your emails you can do so. The automation features leave room for improvement as does its reporting features
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.)
Streamline how we answer reviews further. I feel like we should not have to log into Revinate and log into third party sites to answer reviews. Revinate would have partnerships with these third parties to streamline the review answering process.
I also don't like how Revinate will not give direct access to Wyndham franchise users. We have to log into a MyPortal account and then into Revinate using the MyPortal link. It would be more efficient to have direct access and capabilities.
Make your report creation area user-friendly. You don't offer much training or help assistance in learning to create reports.
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.
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.
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.
Revinate is perfect for our small-to-medium sized hotel clients who do not need a more advanced ESP. If you have a larger client that needs more advanced features, I would suggest using Salesforce. If you require more in-depth reporting and automation features for a small to mid sized client, Mailchimp is also a great choice. I do not recommend TravelClick for any clients.
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.
Our ROI with Revinate has helped us take back some of our OTA revenue, and for the first time ever, our brand.com revenue outpaced our OTA revenue, due to our email campaigns. We are a small indie hotel and this is crucial for us.
