Likelihood to Recommend 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 SendFox is perfect for when you are needing to send emails irregularly to a medium-sized list and don't want high fees. Whilst there aren't fancy templates like other services, this can be perfect if you are just wanting to send simple, quick emails vs more in-depth graphical ones. It's great for smaller businesses as well due to the low cost.
Read full review Pros 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 Easy to send emails as an automated sequence or single blast email. Can break customers into separate lists but still only charged per contact. Charges as a lifetime deal for so many contacts rather than monthly. Read full review Cons 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 More customization in the email builder. More customization on the smart pages (aka Landing page). Forms have low customization and older style graphical look. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 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 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 Mailchimp costs a lot once you get into the 4000 contacts range and features that SendFox has integrated are in a higher cost plan from
Mailchimp . Drip is in a similar range cost-wise. It costs more per month than I paid all up. For a business that relies on email marketing as an income strategy, these tools are perfect, but for my business which uses it intermittently to supplement things like group challenges, it's more applicable to go with a tool like SendFox.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 It's been the service I've used for daily emails for group challenges - Meaning that I had a service that was cheaper than others AND was reliable. When the customers got the emails reliably, I retained them, customers. It has been less flexible in terms of customization - This hasn't had a tangible benefit but may have had a lead-on effect of the emails not always looking as professional to the customer. It is much cheaper than other services meaning I've saved likely $2000+ based on the size of my email list (which is a lot for my small business!). Read full review ScreenShots