Robly is an email marketing solution designed for small businesses. It's key features are its ability to auto-resend unopened emails, pop-up widgets, and proprietary AI-powered software that sends emails based on schedules specific to each recipient.
$19
per month
Sales Engine Media (discontinued)
Score9 out of 10
N/A
Sales Engine International was the company resulting from the merger of Manticore and Sales Engine in 2012. Their product had email marketing and landing page functionality. The product provides connectors to both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. Primary customers were SMBs.
The product is discontinued.
I would absolutely recommend Robly to my colleagues. I have used Robly for over six years now and have found so many positives over my years of using it! It provides an easy way for us to keep our contacts organized, and we can easily embed forms into our website. When comparing Robly's pricing options with other email platforms, it won by a landslide. Some small aspects of the program may seem a little outdated, but I have everything I need and more!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
Robly constantly updates the status information of each email that is sent from its platform, which helps to ensure that there are no problems reviewing the number of people among the targets that could be interested in our service or product, and become customers, when it is necessary to identify them from those who are not, and that otherwise would cause high error margins in the reports.
The software has a visual power that is very easy to extend through third-party platforms, allowing us to create content in services such as Photoshop, which we can then include in mailings, although it is also feasible to import the content in the traditional way, through image formats. Among these, the best one to work with is PNG, which allows us to remove the background content so that the important section of the image fits better with the format of the e-mails.
Robly works with services based on the optimization of group projects, whose integration serves to send emails to all participants equally, and that these are kept constantly notified about updates to the work, and can be coupled well in advance to these updates, so that no confusion arises at the time of unifying the work sent and points within the same should not be exposed.
In reality, Robly's technical support is something we have never had the opportunity to interact with, as the platform is not so buggy that we would need to contact them for advice. In any case, they are likely to show promising results considering the quality of the service.
It has been very easy to get familiar with the functions Robly has to work with advanced email address database configurations without losing track of the progress of each campaign, and this is thanks to the well-optimized structure of the platform.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I don't have many cons for Robly. One thing that would be helpful is concerning adding a set of emails to the contact list. It would be nice to receive a list of emails that are not added and a reason why (e.g., duplicate, etc.).
I have noticed that when I am editing an email campaign, at times it will unexpectedly stop showing me the text editing menu bar, and there doesn't seem to be a way to call it back up. This can be resolved by saving and exiting the campaign and then reopening, but it breaks into my work flow and is an inconvenience. I have not been able to find a pattern for the occurrence of the glitch.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
Because we like the price and value. The annual subscription model allows us to maximize usage without worrying too much about cost, being a small mom and pop outfit.
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
Overall Robly's usability can be considered easy and intuitive. For experienced marketing professionals this program would not be challenging to navigate even on the first uses. There may be a slight learning curve for amateur users but overall it is fairly simple and easy to use and creates professional results.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
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
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
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
Robly has much of the same functionality as Constant Contact. I find Robly's interface to be more intuitive. Robly allows us to upload as many images and documents as we want, without charging us extra. Robly's subscription price is lower than Constant Contact. Their newsletter archiving is also more robust. With Constant Contact, I felt "nickled and dimed." Not only is Robly's base price lower, it's the price! You can upgrade to unlock more sophisticated features.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
