Marigold Engage+ vs. Right On Interactive

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.

Right On Interactive is well suited if you need to bring in lots of data from numerous sources and be able to reference across tables to build a detailed segment. This also lends it to being more useful when a company has people that know data and have the time to dive deep into it to build lists. For teams without multiple people or dedicated people to use the system it can be cumbersome.

Incentivized

• Internal management - This is a great web-based tool that allows our users to see what emails go to whom.
• Organization - Many layers of organization for templates since there are many types of remarketing emails that we send out.
• Historical Records - CheetahMail sends us the raw text files of all email actions so we can upload them to our database.

Incentivized

• It is able to pull in as many data sources as you would like.
• It is easy to connect data across multiple sources to create segments.
• Forces you to think about your customer lifecycle to get the most out of the software.

Incentivized

• 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.)

Incentivized

• The interface is improving in recent months but it still has a way to go to catch up to competitors.
• The system seems to be reactionary when building out campaigns instead of more proactive. You can go through the entire campaign setup and forget to check one box at the very start and have to go all the way back to just pull in a piece of personalized data.
• Could use more integrations with marketing softwares.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It saved us a bunch of money in getting a higher tier of SFDC. The workflows it allowed us to create (using their staff writing MySQL) saved us having to double our SFDC spend to get workflows.
• It allowed us to easily send emails to people added into SFDC campaigns buy external sales staff which saved time from manual emails.
• The time it took the marketing team to create the campaigns could've been faster.

Incentivized