Likelihood to Recommend Act-On simplifies the creation of landing pages, web forms, email campaigns, and other types of marketing automation. Designing a customer journey using the workflow builder (a nurturing flow) is possible. It is used in various ways and in a variety of contexts. Tactical's knowledgeable support team helped us unlock Act-On's potential for complex integrations and marketing campaigns. In some areas, it would be beneficial to improve functionality.
Read full review We used the Manticore Marketing Automation solution for almost/just over 2 years, and initially, it was a great solution. Everything just seemed to work. When Manticore Technology, Inc. and Sales Engine International merged on May 31st of 2012, the overall product quality began to decline. As browsers and other programs (like our CRM environment) went through updates and new releases, Manticore just didn't keep up. Parts of the program became incompatible with certain browsers, forcing us to change where and how we logged into the back-end of the system. It was a silly workaround, but not the end of the world. When we learned that other client-facing portions didn't work with certain browsers, we brought it to their attention, and were told that we needed to find some way to work with it, and that the changes to the system were not possible. We ended up having to change our 200+ landing pages/forms, and could no longer have the State/Province field as a required field for registrations. That is just one example of our experience, and there have been others that are just as troublesome.
Read full review Pros Establishes a simple but very decisive way of how to perform specialized marketing work. It includes the monitoring of advertising networks or account management on digital platforms and social networks. The support is solid; it takes all the suggestions and doubts I have regarding the software. Read full review Awesome integration with CRM/SFDC. Support is US-based, free with subscription, and very helpful. Best workflow capability (drag and drop) I've seen in any comparable product. Custom templates are available for purchase and are great for branding. Easy to use landing pages. Read full review Cons The designer tools, especially for emails, were often difficult to use. The formatting of the text would be all over the place and change / refuse to change at random. Moving boxes around was shifty and sometimes nearly impossible. It just wasn't customizeable enough. No "undo" functionality either. The only way to collect information expansively over time (there's a term Act-On uses for it, I can't recall) where it adds questions to the form each time a user fills it out, is if the person were to fill out the same form multiple times. I know this does happen for some websites/resources, but as a company that wanted to collect new information each time someone filled out any form, regardless of the resource or the URL, that was simply not an option, and that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I know it's not really possible to track someone but if they filled out the first part of the form and then it added new questions to answer, and then they submitted and got through the gating, that would actually be helpful. There was no "trash can" of sorts in case you deleted something by mistake. This could be so stress-inducing if it was a major project. My coworker did this once, contacted Act-On, they couldn't even recover it. Read full review List Building for Resends - I like to resend my email campaigns to non-openers and there is no easy way to pull this list within Manticore (If did not open this email is not an option). Typically I pull the report for the campaign, then re-import my list of non-openers to create a new list. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It's my single biggest asset in my current role. With limited resources, its enabled Anachron to punch well above our weight marketing wise and although we're still at the beginning of our journey I know the system can scale with us
Read full review I've been incredibly pleased with Manticore/SEI and have selected them at several companies now. It's worked in a variety of different business environments, both big and small, and everyone on both the sales and marketing side have been extremely pleased with the results
Read full review Usability It's good, but not quite brilliant. Some parts of the interface are still a bit outdated. The product has been evolving very fast, though, and I believe in a few months it will be up there with the best of them, interface wise as well.
Read full review Some of the actions require you to be in a specific section before actions are available to you, like adding a list. You first have to navigate to that section for options to be available to you
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have always found them quick to respond to my query by web inquiry. In those instances when I call, I have always reached help quickly. They are conscientious and skilled in discussing my concern and finding a solution to my problem. Other tech organizations should use Act-On as a model for top-notch customer service.
Read full review Manticore hardly ever has "product down time" and almost never during a normal work day for our company
Read full review Performance Great for the most part. Sometimes there are little lags, but that's likely because I'm requesting to see a lot of data at one time.
Read full review Email campaigns are deployed instantly when you launch, unlike other Marketing Automation tools I've used in the past that queue emails in batches and can take hours to complete a send
Read full review Support Rating Since we start using Act-on for ourselves and our clients, we have been supported very well. Often we need to integrate with legacy systems and we find the support team on our side during the whole endeavor. Always asking if they can help us further, always willing to do a better job. The support of Act-On is one of the main differentiators
Read full review The Manticore team is very knowledgeable, I haven't had an issue where a ticket was left unanswered or unresolved
Read full review In-Person Training Dan D. was great. He took the time to understand how I needed the program to run, and was very flexible to our special CRM setup.
Read full review Online Training Act-On had a lot of resources, and their staff was great at answering any questions I had to make sure we got started on the right foot. Looking back, I would have preferred some additional training sessions since we didn't have any previous experience with Marketing Automation and best practices.
Read full review Training was done online, but was one-on-one, giving me a lot of time to ask very specific product questions. They also walk you through setting up a test campaign, email, and landing page
Read full review Implementation Rating What impressed me most is that Act-On showed full committment in making our implementation successful, even when it required additional support from their team. This gave me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. Most other software software vendors are not anywhere close to being this responsive and effective
Read full review It was the easiest integration and implementation that I've ever experienced. I've implemented other CRM integrated services before that provided the same services as Manticore that were extremely technical and expensive to integrate with Salesforce.com or Microsoft CRM Dynamics, or just plain couldn't integrate
Read full review Alternatives Considered Act-On is easier to use than
Marketo , but not as visually appealing and user-friendly as
HubSpot . It's much better than
Pardot , as
Pardot feel clunky every step of the way.
SharpSpring is comparable because of its price point but surpasses Act-On in its tools and intuitive interface. We selected Act-On because of the pricing model and thought all things would be close to parity with other options. It depends on the team you have. If you have developers and a marketing team that knows some html/css, you can get by with Act-On.
Read full review We migrated to Marketo approximately 6 months ago, and were extremely happy with the change. Besides the higher sticker price and the "everything's a sales pitch" communications from Marketo, we can't find any fault. Sales Engine International - Manticore (commonly referred to as Manti-beast internally) created many problems for us. And while they did integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics environment, the software quickly ate through our purchased storage and forced us to constantly purchase more. That alone cost us many hundreds of dollars in Microsoft Dynamics CRM storage every year. And, when confronted about it, Manticore support flat out lied about how much storage their activities were taking up in our system. So, while it integrates, it's a very poor integration.
Read full review Scalability Before I feel like I need more features, the Act-On customer service reps are contacting me telling about new features as part of my account.
Read full review Return on Investment With the Automated Series, we were able to put in place campaigns that generated revenue that took no time to continue running once set up. This was a positive feature allowing employees to work on another project while the campaign ran on their own. Read full review Errors in forms led to a decrease in registrations - found workaround to correct it, but was never informed of certain incompatibilities Reports have been inaccurate and very inflexible, and have not allowed for reliable forecasting/planning Read full review ScreenShots —