Drip Ecommerce CRM vs. Marigold Engage+

Drip is my top recommendation for most people who have an existing business and audience and want to move beyond basic email broadcast and drip campaigns and start building out more personalized sequences. I don't recommend the tool for people starting out, or for anyone that isn't bringing in solid profit every month as there are cheaper tools out there to get started with.

Incentivized

Cheetah Messaging is great tool for marketers in order to manage different campaigns. Various aspects of the tool such as personalization, reporting & analytics, bulk user management, segmentation help the marketers a lot with their day to day work. Cheetah Messaging would be less appropriate for user having bulk databases.

Incentivized

• I think the workflows from Drip are particularly well done. It is easy to see how someone might work their way through my system.
• It is easy to set up the campaigns as Drip walks you through each step.
• Drip shows you how many people have been on your website and how your forms are performing well.

Incentivized

• They offer a best-in-class view of the customer email experience - through all levels of a customer journey.
• Our account team has taken the time to dedicate to our brand and understand our goals and objectives. They tailor recommendations to what is best for our unique customer experience.
• The CheetahMail platform is user-friendly and is continuously going through enhancements to improve the experience.

Incentivized

• Pricing is a bit on the higher side but well worth it so long as you're using it
• Direct integration with Salesmate vs going through Zapier

Incentivized

• 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

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 decided to move away from Mailchimp when they announced the changes to their service plans. We cast a wide net and ended up boiling it down to Drip, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Constant Contact. They all have a similar set of features, but Drip was willing to work with us on price instead of simply referring us to their tiered plans. Even though they don't have a direct integration with our e-commerce platform it was obvious they were willing to help us make the connection via their API.

Incentivized

To be honest, all ESPs at a core level offer the same features to manage an email program effectively. The true decision making then is based on what their specialty service(s) may be. ExactTarget is a wonderful UI and integrations across many channels, but it is quite expensive and really for large enterprise organizations. Yesmail does have a great creative-services department. Strongmail, although good, does not offer any significant difference in the market, but price is slightly less so aren't bad solutions. DREAM is probably the "middle" between a Cheetahmail and ExactTarget from a UI look-and-feel and functionality perspective, and their data access is quite good. Cheetahmail was selected in the end because it offered more than a smaller ESP for functionality for larger enterprises, but was still within a cost range that was affordable for my company. (In fairness, there was also an existing relationship with Experian on non-email data services which also made extending the relationship make sense.)

• We've seen a 45 percent increase in customer survey completions, due to automated reminders and campaigns.
• We've seen a 10 percent increase in customer traffic on our website.
• We've seen a 300 percent increase in online credit applications on our website and form conversions.

Incentivized

• Web-based customers have gone up.
• Though the customers have gone up, we don't see a significant increase in our policies sold.
• Communicating with CheetahMail is also fair when having to debug problems, which is good but there are a bunch of problems with some emails that lead to communication in the first place.

Incentivized