The Bronto Marketing Platform was an email marketing solution from Oracle which was acquired from NetSuite in 2016. It was optimized for creating automated, yet personalized emails, and subscriber profile segments, analyzing click and visit behavior, and tracking geolocation. It has since been discontinued.
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Mad Mimi
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Mad Mimi is an email marketing solution targeted at SMBs, designed to be intuitive and straightforward. It was acquired by GoDaddy in August 2014 to expand their small business support offerings.
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.
Mad Mimi is perfect for scheduling remainder emails. For instance, if you need to remind a client about a pending order next week, you can schedule the remainder email today and it will be sent exactly the date and time you want it to even if you are out of office. If you need to contact thousands of people at a time, Mad Mimi can be used to send the emails all at once to all of them, especially for marketing purposes and newsletter purposes.
I've been on the free plan for years and it has suited me very well. It's reliable and has all the core features I need at the moment. Considering how all the online tools can add up, this is right for my business.
Mad Mimi has a super-simple interface, and it's drag and drop, so I don't have to spend a lot of time designing each email. Although you can customize with your logo and colors.
There are several free add-ons, which allow for a limited amount of automation. I would recommend taking advantage of the RSS feed, webform, and drip campaign features.
You can segment your list into as many groups as you like, which makes for more effective email marketing.
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.
The ease on adding links, such as unsubscribe links, is not as easy as it is with other email service providers. Creating simple tags that take the place of a link could help a lot, especially for those not as familiar with HTML.
Perhaps a way of archiving old emails, or hiding them from the past emails area. It can look a bit cluttered, and can be confusing in some circumstances.
Providing some learning material, or at least a more thorough overview of email marketing, and the user interface would be of great use to beginners.
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.
Pretty simple, I know I'm getting what I pay for and a little more. Although simple and easy for the new user; a more seasoned marketer can still get the most from MadMimi. Especially if the primary purpose is to generate strong brand loyalty with effective communication that integrates your various outlets: MadMimi makes it easy for your customer to pick-up what the business owner wants to relay.
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.
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.
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
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.
Constant Contact is the Goliath of the industry and to us, it was unnecessarily complex and expensive. We chose Mad Mimi, after looking at several other new offerings and we've been extremely satisfied with our choice of Mad Mimi.
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.
I've spent 3 years creating blog posts, and it is only now encompassing the breath that allows me to draw upon this pieces as a reusable resource, but now this is happening.
I preferred the Mad Mimi platform to Mail Chimp, and I suspect it continues to offer advantages. I felt Mad Mimi did themselves a disservice by failing to support their free subscriber service to the same extent that Mail Chimp does. When one's mail list gets sufficiently large, then it does pay to pay them, but not in the context I was using it.
It seems that Mad Mimi is targeting direct marketing purposes, as this is a use where ROI is more easily measured.
