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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Textmagic
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Textmagic is an SMS communication platform for businesses. It facilitates direct engagement with customers through messaging, offering tools for marketing campaigns, customer support, and notifications. Its suite of features includes personalized messages, automation capabilities, and detailed analytics, providing a solution for businesses looking to harness the immediacy and reach of SMS.
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.
TextMagic is a wonderful solution for small businesses or non-profits just adding an SMS text service to their marketing outreach program. Very easy to set up and use. Customers seem to like SMS as a method of communication. Easily lets you keep in touch with them at a very nominal cost. Immediate feedback if they respond to your text on the dashboard through chat.
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.)
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,
I am very happy with how TextMagic is working. I don't see a reason to spend time searching for another solution when this works great at a good price. Customers have shown a good response to the text messages we have send. Very small percentage unsubscribed (but that was automated/easy).
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.
It has been very easy to use TextMagic to set up. The calculator showing character count which relates to cost is easy to see and adjust. The scheduling portion is also easy to set up and edit if needed. You can see history to copy wording if you need to. I have suggested to other friends that do not have a text service.
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.
TextMagic just worked. Where Trello seemed like we needed to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it working, TextMagic was simple to set up. Everything seemed streamlined and easy to manage.
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.
