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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Omnisend
Score 5.1 out of 10
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Omnisend (formerly Soundest) is an email marketing solution built specifically for eCommerce platforms, from the London based company of the same name.
$0
Pricing
Marigold Engage+
Omnisend
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free plan
$0
Standard plan
$16
Pro plan
$59
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Marigold Engage+
Omnisend
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$16 Month
Additional Details
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Omnisend offers three pricing plans: Free, Standard and Pro.
Using Free plan you'll be able to explore all of Omnisend's features (emails, SMS, push notifications, popups, segmentation, analytics, etc), send up to 500 emails and push notifications, plus 60 SMS per month at no cost.
The standard plan starts at $16 per month, you get everything in Free, unlimited web push notifications, a customer success manager and 24/7 support.
From $59 per month, you can use Pro plan and send unlimited emails and push notifications, get advanced reporting features, a dedicated Customer Success Manager, and priority 24/7 support. You'll also get free SMS credits equal to the price of your plan.
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.
It's kind of an automation workflow, but for example you can set up a popup to appear at a specific time on a specific product page and offer the visitor something. The visitor then signs up and then (after you've set up your automation sequence) that visitor gets a specific welcome page based on the popup they signed up through, and then a specific order confirmation email and everything else flows from that specific popup. That's great because it's allowed us to sort of fine-tune our offerings to get our visitors' emails in the first place and offer, for example, someone browsing a product page for 3 minutes something different than someone staying 20 seconds on the homepage and then leaving.
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.)
Initial setup wasn't firing right, support issue was handled pretty quickly and easily.
It does not go back and put previous orders/customers into the automation. It will only work with go-forward customers from the time you install the product. (At least that's what the outcome of our support inquiry told us...).
Would like to see more sample templates and campaigns.
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.
Support is weird. They ask you to keep everything in one thread, but they can't see your replies if they forward it to tech, and things easily get lost. Also tech support is HORRIBLE, they just seem snobby, and give horrible advice liek to test things on a live version vs staging
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.
We can create marketing campaigns that can span across multiple channels so that we can reach more customers regardless of the platform they are using. The system combines multiple channels into a single workflow for maximum engagement. Comes with various features that make it easy to personalize messages based on the customer's journey.
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.
ROI has gone up when compared to other email marketing. Our open rates have increased and naturally also our conversion rates. Both in absolute and percentage terms. I don't have hard figures with me, but I'd say we've almost doubled what we've done with other email marketing apps.
