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.
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.
The best scenarios would be email marketing campaigns such as eBlasts, Evites and newsletter/notifications. I believe Streamsend would be less appropriate for overall branding campaign and strategy.
Streamsend reports allows us to see who is opening our email blasts and it even pinpoints how many viewers then go onto look at our social media sites and website.
Streamsend allows you to go back and review past email blasts. This prevents me from creating marketing material similar to what I have done in the past.
The site shows you who's email address was undeliverable. This helps me to weed out any old e-mails or individuals who requested to block the blasts.
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,
The renewal process is easy and doesn't require much thought. Our accounting team already has Streamsend as an approved vendor. We are happy with Streamsend and how it works. Switching email systems would require training and a learning curve that will be difficult to schedule in a busy department. The quality and reliability of Streamsend is something our team and attorneys trust.
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.
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.
I saw an impact on our ROI when using Streamsend for our weekly newsletters, since we used them as a redirect back to our website for new business
The only negative impact I can think of would be the loss of some our registrants through our email database. Some thought that we sent out Eblasts and newsletters to frequently.
It did help with faster lead conversion as we saw higher traffic and visitors to our website through direct click-through from our email campaigns
