Marigold Engage+ vs. YuMe

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.

Ask advertisers what they would like to see offered from publishers that they aren't currently seeing in the space. Also, ask advertisers what their current challenges are or what they have noticed their clients pushing for recently

• Internal management - This is a great web-based tool that allows our users to see what emails go to whom.
• Organization - Many layers of organization for templates since there are many types of remarketing emails that we send out.
• Historical Records - CheetahMail sends us the raw text files of all email actions so we can upload them to our database.

Incentivized

• The industry is constantly moving towards cross-device targeting and some advertisers are lagging behind in this regard. Many do not offer the ability to target on Connected TVs, which YuMe does. This is appealing for some of our clients that are more open to testing the latest technologies.
• YuMe's sales staff are all very knowledgeable about their products, but not too pushy when it comes to getting on the plan. They try to add value to the meetings not by just pitching their products, but by educating us on industry trends and latest technologies.

• 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.)

Incentivized

• It would be interesting to see YuMe to provide ad solutions that are aimed to drive in-store traffic. Many videos are often geared towards engagement or the % of video completes, but it'd be helpful to see more ad formats that are able to track in-store sales outside of having the ability to print out a coupon.

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,

YuMe's service was strong. They were able to regularly provide reporting and analytics. Whenever we reached out to make optimizations, the YuMe account management team was very responsive and would provide follow ups in a timely and professional manner. YuMe was also able to provide competitive rates and deliver all the inventory that was agreed upon on the IO. Many publishers that under deliver often get cut from the plan the next time around. This was not the case for YuMe

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.

Incentivized

YuMe is considered a leader in the video advertising space. YuMe had a very large array video ad formats that made it very flexible to run with them even though the creative and assets would change from campaign to campaign. YuMe also has a very strong portfolio of clients that have worked with them in the past. We have also requested to see the site list and there are many premium publishers that fit well with our target audience

• 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.

Incentivized

• YuMe has driven a higher number of video views and video completions so that the overall campaign has strong performance metrics. YuMe also provides a great deal of reach and scale for campaigns due to its ability to offer more competitive and cost effective rates