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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WhatCounts
Score 9.0 out of 10
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WhatCounts is a popularly-used, global enterprise level suite of email marketing tools from the company of the same name founded in 2000 and headquartered in Atlanta, GA. Their customers range from Costco, FoxNews.com, the Seattle Times, Red Lion Hotels, and number over a thousand.
Central to the platform is... email. From that it handles advanced segmentation, customer lifecycle building and automation, and personalization. WhatCounts bills itself as a full service marketing agency with…
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.
How big is your email list? For the money WhatCounts allows us to manage a large list and gives us great tools. If you have a small list this product might be more than you need. How many emails do you want to send? WhatCounts charges by the email and of course you get a better price per email the more emails you send. If you will not be sending many emails or are sending to a small list WhatCounts might not be the right tool for you.
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.)
Some of the list management tools were hard to find at first but now I use them every month. If I could change one thing I would allow the account details filter window to show all the available slots with no scrolling and I would add a feature to set / reset all selections on the dropdowns.
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.
We have a great representative. She schedules regular calls with our team and helps us learn new ways to use the tool. We get great personal support. I know she has many other clients but I always feel like she has time for me and genuinely enjoys working with our team.
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.
Whatscount have always provided data to evaluate about the campaigns and its responses. More customization are present to add create campaigns that resonates customer needs. The reports provided us insights about the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and decide the areas to improve customer attraction.
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.
