Marigold Engage+ vs. WideOrbit

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

WideOrbit has the lead in sales reporting and account management. Once you get your templates created, it is easy to switch between accounts, agencies, reps, etc to drill down to the analytics you need. WideOrbit offers greater flexibility than its competitor when comparing features to support station management.

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

• WideOrbit does a good job of helping to maintain revenues associated with TV and digital sales.
• WideOrbit also does a good job of allowing different people to manipulate necessary things to make sure dollars are accounted for and spots air.
• WideOrbit is fairly user-friendly, and when it does get hung up, they provide excellent customer service support.

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.

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.)

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

• 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

• 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