Marigold Engage+ vs. Skai

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Marigold Engage+
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Skai
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Skai (formerly Kenshoo) is a cross-channel advertising solution for search marketing, social media and online advertising. The product aims to give advertisers and agencies the control and automation needed to make better investment decisions across search marketing and online advertising.
$10,000
Starting Price
Pricing
Marigold Engage+Skai
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Kenshoo
$10,000
Starting Price
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Marigold Engage+Skai
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Marigold Engage+Skai
Considered Both Products
Marigold Engage+
Chose Marigold Engage+
CheetahMail is a much more mature product than Yesmail, though many problems exist with both email service providers. Though some data can be missing, there is so much more data available with CheetahMail than our previous email service providers. The web-based management …
Chose Marigold Engage+
I have one example of a service that compares to CheetahMail and was a far better service operationally and was more intuitive. This was the e-Dialog email service where segmentations were easier to build and the UI was far more straight forward and easy to understand. I would …
Chose Marigold Engage+
Similarly, CheetahMail was easier to use with your own template. MailChimp is extremely user friendly though.
Chose Marigold Engage+
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.
Chose Marigold Engage+
Our employees are ESP agnostic and we try to support the ESP that our clients are using or want to migrate to. Typical ESPs in this tool chest are the Marketing Cloud (formerly known as ExactTarget), Silverpop, Adobe, and MailChimp for our smaller clients. In the last couple of …
Chose Marigold Engage+
CheetahMail is by far the most user friendly. Additionally, CheetahMail is consistent with quick sends and high deliverability.
Chose Marigold Engage+
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 …
Chose Marigold Engage+
We've evaluated 6 other email service providers and have come to the conclusion that CheetahMail is extremely lacking and consistently on the decline. They lack in innovation, in having the option to integrate data from other sources, in functionality when it comes to …
Skai
Chose Skai
I think Skai beats the competitors with its advanced bidding management system, this is a unique feature of them that if you implement properly, your accounts will surely benefit from this, especially if you have tons of data that the algo can learn from and optimize …
Chose Skai
I personally like Kenshoo better than Marin for a few reasons. When it comes to Ecomm Search, Kenshoo is far better in terms of available features, algorithmic bidding which is more focused on ROAS, and reporting especially for eCommerce. Marin is a good platform, especially …
Chose Skai
Google marketing suite - Good for Google but nothing else
Marin - Was very problematic and lacked easy of use & features
Chose Skai
We selected Kenshoo in 2017 due to its market presence and its notoriety. We learned about Kenshoo's integrations with internal data warehouses, and the bid management aspects were touted as first class. In practice, our unique marketing needs did not align with the limitations …
Chose Skai
Kenshoo's integration with sales and social platforms as well as search made it the only choice when it came to managing campaigns. Other interfaces may be simpler and quicker but Kenshoo's range of external integrations makes it more flexible for certain campaigns and the …
Chose Skai
I definitely prefer Marin for paid search only accounts. I select Kenshoo when my client also purchases Google shopping media, since their proprietary tools there are best in class.
Chose Skai
Some features of Kenshoo outshine other solutions we've evaluated. Kenshoo Infinity Suite is a great product for multi-channel management but overall is less favorable especially from a pricing perspective. We've transitioned several client accounts from Kenshoo to DoubleClick …
Chose Skai
An advantage that Nanigans has over Kenshoo is that their version of 'portfolios' didn't have any budget or flight length requirements and was extremely easy to use. They also offered 'affinity' segments. These are studies they would run on certain audiences that would result …
Chose Skai
Kenshoo is the best in class. With "time" being the most precious resource we have, Kenshoo allows us to get more done in the same amount of time as comparable products.
Chose Skai
I have not explored other platforms.
Chose Skai
While DoubleClick does not fully budget pace accounts I think it overall provides more accurate changes than Kenshoo. When our company selected Kenshoo we were told it would be able to manage hundreds of small accounts with small budgets. It is more designed for accounts that …
Chose Skai
Kenshoo Search offers keyword bid policies based off of sophisticated algorithms rather than simple bid rules. Also, the Kenshoo Desktop Editor allows for extremely easy bulk optimizations. Marin Software doesn't have bid algorithms or an easy-to-use desktop tool. These are …
Chose Skai
Very different tool that Hootsuite - which is a good tool for monitoring, but not for ad management. Kenshoo social was easily implemented since we use Kenshoo Search for paid program. When comparing tools, this one seemed to be the most robust and solved many issues we had - …
Chose Skai
Kenshoo is a more effective and user friendly platform than most competitors. Their tool is more expensive and like I said before, tailored to larger marketing budgets. They set them self apart with the ease of use, the Kenshoo editor, and cross channel functionality. However, …
Features
Marigold Engage+Skai
Ad Network Integration
Comparison of Ad Network Integration features of Product A and Product B
Marigold Engage+
-
Ratings
Skai
7.1
Ratings
4% below category average
Data Transfer00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
DSP integration00 Ratings5.70 Ratings
Ad Campaigns
Comparison of Ad Campaigns features of Product A and Product B
Marigold Engage+
-
Ratings
Skai
6.1
Ratings
24% below category average
Ad campaign creation00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Ad deployment00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Display advertising00 Ratings4.30 Ratings
Ad display and retargeting segmentation00 Ratings4.80 Ratings
Sequence targeting00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Ad Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Ad Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Marigold Engage+
-
Ratings
Skai
7.3
Ratings
6% below category average
Ad dashboards00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Ad performance reports00 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Ad conversion tracking00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Ad attribution reporting00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Cross-channel ad management00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Ad forecasting and optimization00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
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User Ratings
Marigold Engage+Skai
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.6
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Usability
4.0
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
3.6
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
2.0
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
3.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Marigold Engage+Skai
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Kenshoo Search may not be appropriate if you don't spend much on search engine marketing. It also may not be appropriate if you don't care about tracking conversions and are only concerned with increasing awareness. Or, if you care about tracking conversions but don't expect to capture many, Kenshoo Search may not be necessary.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Customized reporting. There are many features that users can't report out on in power editor. Kenshoo makes it incredibly easy to get everything you need for a raw data dump.
  • Automation. Whether it's automated rules, portfolios or refreshing CRM uploads, Kenshoo helps cut some of the manual tasks out of the process making me more efficient.
  • Staying up to date with Facebook product updates. I can appreciate that Kenshoo does an exceptional job and ensuring new capabilities in Facebook are ready for use in the Kenshoo platform as well.
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Cons
  • 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.)
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  • Syncing - I have had many issues where syncs would time out, or not show that changes were posted to Facebook.
  • Library - if there was a library for targeting settings that could be saved and easily accessed and input into new campaigns, that would be very helpful.
  • Updates - seemingly basic tools that a social management platform should have often taken a long time to be released.
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Likelihood to Renew
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,
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It's great to have a product like Kenshoo Social. It has a lot of data and is a great tool to use. Honestly, I think we would have looked somewhere else if we didn't have some much data and time invested into the platform. We had used it across search and social, so we invested a lot of time to get it running smoothly. It is very expensive and we think we could have gone elsewhere to get the same results over time. Once they have your data and the system is running smoothly, it's very difficult to go elsewhere
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Usability
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.
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Set-up like other marketing platforms. If you know Google Ads, you know Kenshoo
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Support Rating
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.
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Very responsive and bring fast answers for problems
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Alternatives Considered
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.)
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While DoubleClick does not fully budget pace accounts I think it overall provides more accurate changes than Kenshoo. When our company selected Kenshoo we were told it would be able to manage hundreds of small accounts with small budgets. It is more designed for accounts that would be spending minimally thousands of dollars a month. We had extreme issues with Kenshoo budget pacing and increasing our bids. Overall it did not meet our needs, and we will be switching vendors at end of contract
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • ROI is harder to track due to reporting/column & time frame default tech in my humble opinion but generally better results when compared to other products
  • Since the interface is difficult to navigate and paid search is a reactive medium, can produce barriers to change.
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ScreenShots