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.
N/A
Validity Engage
Score9 out of 10
N/A
Validity Engage is an email marketing platform for high-volume enterprise marketing teams. It covers competitor intelligence, contact validation, design and testing, deliverability, and live email monitoring.
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.
Proofing your emails is necessary. This is a tool that allows you to see how your email not only renders on multiple devices but how it performs. Some email building platforms will tell you their drag and drop templates are ready to go, however they stop short of analyzing accessibility, checking links, load speed among other things. I've also experienced drag and drop template issues as new email clients are released. Validity Engage provides peace of mind that you did your due diligence on crafting your email. While Validity Engage does provide some reporting you will not see every typical analytic an email report offers. However, you can use your Validity Engage data to enhance your email reports which in turn creates a robust view of email performance.
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 haven’t explored the personalization features in depth yet, aside from using the Add-to-Calendar option, but we're excited to dig in further. Tools like live polls offer an easy way to boost engagement in our product marketing emails, and we see a lot of potential in using these templates to enhance personalization moving forward.
Validity Engage’ continuing education resources have been really helpful. I recently read an article on email deliverability that offered practical insights my team can apply moving forward. I especially appreciate how Validity Engage uses real examples and stats from the brands they work with—it makes the content feel actionable and relevant.
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.
I've not seen many limitations but I have noticed that sometimes emails sent from our CRM take too long to land in Validity Engage, or sometimes don't land at all.
As a beginner it was quite difficult for me to make my way around the platform - I thought "Create new" CTA was actually creating something new, maybe "Import from CRM" would have been more understandable. There were a few others but I remember this one.
In the Emails section, whenever I hover over an email, I want to be able to copy the subject line instead of getting the different CTAs appear intrusively (Summary, Builder, Previews & QA, Proof, Analytics, Monitor) - maybe these could appear on the bottom of the textbox, instead of them being imposed on top?
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'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
It's one the best tools that we've found for this type of tool but we would like some additional features like spell check so if there's a platform that features that with everything else Validity Engage has, then we'd potentially look to move over to that platform instead. However, we are overall pretty help with 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
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
Validity Engage has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.
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 have never had a problem with Validity Engage being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Validity Engage was back up and running in a very short time.
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. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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
As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Validity Engage is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost.
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
Absolutely fantastic support. It runs circles around the competition. They regularly reach out and chat, even if it's just to see if there's any issues we need to discuss. They clearly want the business and don't forget you once you sign the contract which is an issue with other similar services.
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
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. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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
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. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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
I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Validity Engage, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.
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 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.
This is not applicable to my role as I have used Validity Engage to test emails since I have started. Because of the ease of use, timeliness, consistent quality, and affordability that Validity Engage offers, I haven't found the need to look at similar products or organizations. If all of these features continue to stay strong, I don't plan on changing providers.
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
With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Validity Engage has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions.
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
Validity Engage saves our team so much time by making the QA and email review process so much easier, streamlined, and efficient.
We often send out campaigns out to thousands of members, and Validity Engage gives us the assurance and peace of mind that everything is working as it should before it gets sent out.
Decreases the number of email review cycles we go through.
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
