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 by Marigold is great at both scaling up as you grow (i.e. for a startup or if you're starting fresh on building a subscriber list) and providing more than just basic templates and tooling. We vetted across a lot of different options to account for where we were starting and where we hope to grow into with our opt-in email marketing, and Campaign Monitor stood out.

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

• I'd prefer a central contact list with tags, rather than multiple lists. I can have one person on 5 lists and that counts as 5 subscribers.
• While the email builder is very good, I'd prefer more customisation options.
• Updates they make are good, but are perhaps a little slow.
• I'd like better mobile compatibility. I get that might not be possible for the email builder (although aiming for that would be great) but for lists, reports etc there's no reason that shouldn't be mobile-compatible or have a mobile app.

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

It flexes with us both because of the tiered pricing, and due to the comprehensive tools available. We're able to go from one newsletter to many, and few automations to many very easily while not paying for a Cadillac when what we need is a sturdy crossover.

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.

It's a very user friendly tool and a highly intuitive interface. It's really clearly thought out, so from a users perspective it feels very simple. By comparison, we've also used Mailchimp, and when comparing one to the other, the Mailchimp dashboard is far less logical and intuitive.

Incentivized

I never experienced any downtime.

There have only been a couple of instances where it's been down and this has typically been middle of the night type situations that were planned downtime so they could work on maintenance. They provide notice well ahead of these instances. I've never noticed a surprise outage.

Incentivized

No issues.

I have noticed no slow page loads within the design interface or reports. It's all quick, even with list uploads which are notorious for being clunky in other systems. It's all been quick and easy for us.

Incentivized

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

We haven't had to use support yet.

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

It is so easy to use, and the things you'd want to have as you scale and get to a more complex email marketing approach are all there. From automations to lots of mobile responsive templates, it's easy to set up what you need and then customize for your brand.

Incentivized

I did not use the professional services

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

• Private-label reports that are visually appealing and easy for clients to understand
• The 'Worldview' map feature is a MAJOR setting point and hit with clients, as they can watch a realtime map of their emails being opened in specific locations across the world, and instantly see when a recipient clicks a link in their email.

Incentivized