Marigold Engage+ vs. WideOrbit

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.

I think for the purpose of our business, WideOrbit is one of the better systems I have worked on. No system is every perfect, but WideOrbit seems to be a lot better than the system we've worked on in the past. The fact that it is able to integrate other third-party systems into it is also very helpful. We have recently moved to a new avail system for our sales executives, and the fact that they can easily transfer avails and schedules into the order system in WideOrbit is very helpful.

Incentivized

• 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

• Wide Orbit offers a wide variety of reports, as a user- you are able to maximize these to your advantage and include as much or as little information as necessary for internal use or for your clients.
• It's fantastic to be able to reference all of our orders in one place and track completion process from order entry to approvals and actual air time/run dates
• Very user friendly and efficient to use.
• The Revenue Reports are especially wonderful, and can be sorted according to whatever perimeters you desire.

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

• Would love to see the inventory codes in the drop-down menu stick like breaks and weeks..and not have to re-select each time for a report
• would like to have better functionality when exporting to XL or to PDF. Formatting could use improvement with output
• offer a monthly calendar of training opportunities like Nielsen offers

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.

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

I would say that WideOrbit is much better than Pilat in terms of its ease of use. One major factor was that WideOrbits customer support is stateside and easily reachable if help is needed. Pilat was located in Europe I believe and getting assistance was very hard. As far as just the overall day to day usage, WideOrbit is leaps and bounds better in the area of functionality

Incentivized

• 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

• The system doesn't seem to work well with any of our digital platforms. For example, we can input an order and track an approval process through our finance system and see the invoice, but actual execution of any digital assets are NOT done through Wide Orbit

Incentivized