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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SessionM
Score 10.0 out of 10
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SessionM is a customer engagement platform that combines customer data management, loyalty program and offer management, and cross-channel campaign management (SMS, email, push, and in-app messages).
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Pricing
Marigold Engage+
SessionM
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Marigold Engage+
SessionM
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Marigold Engage+
SessionM
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Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
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.
SessionM is ideal for enterprise restaurants, brands, and organizations to build and drive loyal behaviors via technology platforms. They've built their system via robust APIs integrations, but are now diving into a white label app system that allows smaller brands (100 units+) to utilize their incredible technology in their own brand, as opposed to just bigger players. They're the best at what they do.
Using data science to determine guest tendencies and actions: their system is incredibly smart and tracks historical actions to guess/estimate future actions, and creating programs to influence those actions.
Integrated communication platforms to speak to all of our guests within various tactics—email, push notifications, text messages, in-app messages, etc.
Loyalty management & CRM: creating and managing a program that runs consistently across the system.
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,
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.
SessionM was light years ahead of Fishbowl, in the data science tendency assumptions that are built into the system, plus they don't offer an app for your brand to use. You'd have to employ a 3rd vendor to manage that. It's also important to note that SessionM sees ALL guests and POS content in the system, not just loyalty identified transactions.
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.
Our work with SessionM has been so incredibly impactful to our brand loyal guests, and the value they bring to our brand. For example, our loyal guests are worth $100+ more than our non-loyalty guests.
