Drip Ecommerce CRM vs. Marigold Engage+

If you're looking to take your email program to the next level with automation, you definitely need to consider Drip. Their support team is always timely and helpful whenever we've needed guidance on the platform or using the API. They are constantly improving their tools. It never feels stagnant or lacking in critical features. Their prebuilt workflows make getting started very easy and you can start driving more revenue almost immediately.

Incentivized

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.

• Simplicity + power. Drip is one of the quickest platforms to use in terms of setting up simple drip email sequences. Yet it also packs enormous power if you need to do complex automation.
• Drip's direct integrations with other systems mean you can easily create hyper-personalized communications and anybody can set this up.
• Drip's Javascript embed is easy to setup and great for helping to build deeper insights into customer behavior as well as triggering automation.

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

• Possibly more email design templates for "new" users to automation, HTML coding, integrations, webhooks, etc.
• Any supported integration partners are always good to see. They have expanded in this area, recently.
• Some sort of WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop email editor, wouldn't hurt.
• Sometimes, when trying to implement advanced HTML coding to an email template, the code doesn't stick, save or format as "native HTML."

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.

Again, this is dependent on the use case. If you are a small- to medium-sized business that doesn't have a sales team, this is likely a great product for you. It is also a good price compared to larger enterprise software. Other software I have used worked better for other companies I worked for, but Drip fits best for my current company.

Incentivized

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

• Saves hours of typing redundant emails
• Helps with our retention based on the constant contact with our current clients
• Keeps our prospects up to date as we move through the stages of the sales cycle which also increases our capacity to handle more volume.

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