Drip Ecommerce CRM vs. Sales Engine International

Drip is my top recommendation for most people who have an existing business and audience and want to move beyond basic email broadcast and drip campaigns and start building out more personalized sequences. I don't recommend the tool for people starting out, or for anyone that isn't bringing in solid profit every month as there are cheaper tools out there to get started with.

Incentivized

Increasing your contact limit can be very costly, so I would go in with a good grasp on where you'll be in a year or two, minimum, and try to plan ahead so that you're not trying to justify budget later on

• I think the workflows from Drip are particularly well done. It is easy to see how someone might work their way through my system.
• It is easy to set up the campaigns as Drip walks you through each step.
• Drip shows you how many people have been on your website and how your forms are performing well.

Incentivized

• CRM Integration - This product (Manticore) is extremely easy to integrate with Microsoft CRM and with Saleforce.com. It takes mere minutes to set up the integration and does not require IT support to integrate. Other systems I looked at required a days work for integration and an extra fee for integration and/or support.
• Marketing Automation - It is very easy to drag and drop actions for workflow development. Once an automated process is activated, it also shows you how many people are at what stage of the process and allows you to download these people at that particular step.
• Email Creation - Manticore gives you a variety of email creation options, Templates, WYSIWYG editor, and HTML code options. The tabs when creating an email are simple to follow and take you through each step to test and launch a campaign.

• Pricing is a bit on the higher side but well worth it so long as you're using it
• Direct integration with Salesmate vs going through Zapier

Incentivized

• Technical/customer support
• Overall compatibility with different internet browsers
• Email/template designer

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

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

Manticore hardly ever has "product down time" and almost never during a normal work day for our company

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

The Manticore team is very knowledgeable, I haven't had an issue where a ticket was left unanswered or unresolved

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

We decided to move away from Mailchimp when they announced the changes to their service plans. We cast a wide net and ended up boiling it down to Drip, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Constant Contact. They all have a similar set of features, but Drip was willing to work with us on price instead of simply referring us to their tiered plans. Even though they don't have a direct integration with our e-commerce platform it was obvious they were willing to help us make the connection via their API.

Incentivized

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.

• We've seen a 45 percent increase in customer survey completions, due to automated reminders and campaigns.
• We've seen a 10 percent increase in customer traffic on our website.
• We've seen a 300 percent increase in online credit applications on our website and form conversions.

Incentivized

• 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