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.
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PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
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PFL helps businesses deliver authentic moments by
creating impactful direct mail that is data-driven, bringing measurement,
personalization, and predictability from digital to direct mail. PFL offers direct mail that is... Simplified: PFL simplifies direct mail execution by managing the entire process under one roof from strategy and production to delivery and measurement. Engaging: Supports engagement that results in action by paring digital tactics with memorable…
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.
The reason it's not a seven or above is purely because of the timing of a solution we had requested originally back in August 2023. It's now February 2024, and we're waiting for a wow-factor pitch deck. Previously, we only received a demo recording and an order form quote. These truthfully aren't helpful enough to convince and sway our senior leaders into spending the $35k+ investment into the PMC.
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.
Personalization: It allows us to create highly personalized direct mail pieces tailored to individual recipients. For instance, we can include the recipient's name, relevant product recommendations, or even custom images that resonate with their preferences.
Multi-Channel Integration: The platform seamlessly integrates with our existing digital marketing tools and CRM systems. It enables us to orchestrate cohesive campaigns that combine email, social media, and direct mail to reach our target audience through multiple touchpoints.
Automated Workflows: PFL offers robust automation capabilities, streamlining the entire direct mail process. We can set triggers, such as website visits or email engagement, to automatically trigger the sending of personalized direct mail pieces, ensuring timely and relevant outreach.
Variable Data Printing: The platform simplifies variable data printing, enabling us to print custom content for each recipient efficiently. This is particularly useful for A/B testing different messaging or designs within a single campaign.
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.)
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.
The UI is friendly, clear, and accessible, and I access it directly through the interface (Salesforce) that I perform my function in every day. It is intuitive to navigate, and I am able to find most functionalities I need without the need to consult an admin and/or support teams.
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.
Only thing holding me back from a perfect 10 would be the timelines for involving the technical team on occasion. There have been a few times where the PFL technical support team has been booked up for days or more than a week out which can delay our project timelines. This doesn't happen often, let me be clear. But when it does, it's usually at the worst time for our campaigns.
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.)
JourneyMail is one I have evaluated. It did not seem as full featured as PFL Direct Mail Platform, nor did it integrate with the rest of the Salesforce products like PFL Direct Mail Platform (journeymail ONLY integrates to marketing cloud). My customers tend to be cross-cloud and own multiple products and want solutions that can integrate across their stack easily.
It does take a while to launch or re-launch a campaign, which can make it difficult to pivot quickly. However, if you're integrated with Marketo, then PFL is as scalable as your database and marketing strategy! The sky is the limit in terms of creativity. Post launch, the program is hands-off apart from report monitoring and potential optimization tweaks.
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.
