Likelihood to Recommend Sailthu is perfectly suited, no matter what level of technical skill you have or support from an Engineering team. That said, it includes many advanced features which can only be fully utilized when integrated with custom webhooks and after receiving customer data sent via their APIs. There may be easier solutions out there for less technical users or for people wanting a simpler setup to begin with.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Personalization - one of the most important things you can utilize when emailing people. Segmentation - Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based off their criteria; there are so many different fields to choose from. We use this mostly for geo-targeting and engagement. Analytics - post-campaign analytics are very easy to look at, customize your view, and download as a csv to share with your team and company. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Giving more practical examples of technical setups, sometimes the only way to understand it is to see it. Can't filter lists by date created or date modified, particularly needed when tracking down a specific list or looking to remove older lists. Can't set up automated data dumps to an email address, has to be sent via API. Jake Bodmer Senior Marketing Manager - Audience Growth & Retention
Read full review 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.) Read full review Likelihood to Renew The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.
Read full review 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,
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Sailthru provided a powerful, easy-to-use platform that was able to adjust to the needs we had at Dotdash. It was able to support the simple campaigns where we would send static creative to all recipients and the complex dynamic campaigns where we were customizing content. The scale and flexibility really made it a great platform for us to use.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before. It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP. We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots