Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. Campaign Monitor by Marigold

If you're a mid-size to larger business and rely on regular email engagement from customers, then Bronto Marketing Platform could be a potentially great partner if not game-changer for how you've been doing email campaign management previously. Their automation tools and development interface is amicable. The amount of data that's collected and available from engagement with subscribers through their tools can be overwhelming. Still, if you enjoy digging into every kernel of possible user activity information, you'll love it.

Incentivized

Campaign Monitor is undoubtedly one of the best software for managing email marketing campaigns; it is a robust platform and can be adapted to any company. If you are not a developer and don't know any code, it has many pre-made templates to use. I highly recommend Campaign Monitor; it is perfect, does what needs to be done, and is very easy to use.

Incentivized

• It's easy to work with – it has seamless integration across all platforms, which helps when you're working with big clientele.
• It's logically organized, which can't be said of all ESP's.
• It has the LIVE CHAT support. A lot of email marketing clients simply don't have that. It's the little things!

Incentivized

• Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue.
• The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement.
• I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level.
• The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys.

Incentivized

• Segmenting- although there's a lot that can be done with segmenting audiences, there's a bit of a learning curve when it comes to setting up segments. Wish it was more intuitive.
• Workflows- setting up automation workflows requires some practice and I've needed to consult a Bronto support person each time I set up a new workflow.
• Bronto Pop-up manager- we use this feature, not sure how common it is among Bronto clients, but there is overall some improvement needed with this tool. There is limited capability to update the look and feel of the pop-up manager, and we've run into some conflicts with other pop-ups on our website interfering with the Bronto pop-up.

Incentivized

• Managing different subscriptions requires some thinking and setup with custom fields/lists/segments. It's not really 'out of the box' to set up.
• The WYSIWYG editor is pretty locked down, which makes it idiot-proof, but would be great to have a little more control over padding, line height, kerning, etc.

Incentivized

Never really had any issues that caused out-of-the-ordinary frustration levels. Of course, you'll have days where the learning curve of using a tool gets challenging. Still, I don't remember ever really coming across an obstacle or roadblock while using the tool because of a feature or function it just couldn't do successfully or at all. Customer support was always available as needed, and it was generally easy to find answers to questions when they arose.

Incentivized

Usability is great. Very intuitive drag-and-drip metaphor for building automations. And the UI is very user-centric. It constantly prompts you with suggestions and next steps such that you hardly have to refer to the (excellent) documentation.

The templates, while useful, are very locked down, This makes it very usable from a novice's standpoint, but also very inflexible from a designer's standpoint. Creating several version of the email campaign and using A/B testing was a powerful and easy-to-use feature, and the system also provides the option of automating the sending of emails once an A/B testing criteria is reached

Incentivized

I never experienced any downtime.

No issues.

They used to be good, but they've evolved into a monolithic bureaucratic nightmare after the Netsuite / Oracle acquisition. Can't talk to anyone that actually knows the system and support tickets seem to go days or weeks without responses and resolution.

Incentivized

They have lots of videos on list importing / segmentation / report customization etc. when you sign on they give a link to online tutorials and documentation which is very helpful. They have very helpful PDFs on how to import / set up platform

Easy to set up.

Bronto hits the sweet spot for us. It is most similar to the Salesforce family of products. Salesforce however can feel cluttered and configuration and setup can be time consuming and confusing. Bronto is much more streamlined and also has features built in that may require additional purchases in the Salesforce world. Adobe Campaign is a very powerful solution and can do many things hard to achieve in Bronto. However, Campaign is much more of a developer tool where Bronto is easy to learn and use right out of the box.

Incentivized

The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.

Incentivized

• Offering great reporting for tracking everything. I can see what emails are working (I track on a monthly basis) and what people are clicking.
• A/B split testing lets us try different things. Try this and that.
• Creating lists and segments of subscribers lets us look at who is the best performing contacts. Really get 'into the data' and understand what is working and what is not.

Incentivized

• Because it's easy to use, we can design and send out newsletters easily and quickly, spending little time.
• It's a great tool for aggregating all of the things our organization is up to and making sure people are aware of them.
• Sometimes I wonder how many emails are sent to the Spam folder, but there are great tools to see how many opens you get.

Incentivized