Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. VerticalResponse

Bronto is a very professional application in the email marketing use space. It has a straightforward and simple interface but it is still a powerful and customizable experience. Most tasks are easy, and you can usually find a way to do things outside the norm with ease. It is a good platform for users new to the email marketing world but grows with their needs and abilities.

Incentivized

For businesses requiring advanced email marketing features like sophisticated automation, in-depth analytics, and extensive customization, VerticalResponse might fall short due to its limited featuresVerticalResponse is ideal for small businesses or freelancers who need a simple, straightforward email marketing tool. Its ease of use and basic features make it suitable for those without extensive technical expertise in email marketing

Incentivized

• Chat support. They are the professionals behind those keyboards. Not asking someone else. Them. Right there. Get your answers fast and accurate.
• Detailed tracking information. Sends, delivered, clicks, conversions. Anything and everything you want to know about how your emails are doing is tracked. I keep my own reporting separate in an excel sheet, but they have great reporting.
• Automated messaging rules. Set and forget emails that hit the customer with the right information exactly when needed. The workflows allow for some REALLY cool & complex set ups too.

Incentivized

• The tools that they provide you with for building out emails are particularly easy to use. I love the drag and drop ability that gives anyone the opportunity to build professional looking emails without any extensive experience.
• With the majority of people checking emails on mobile, it is necessary to have highly responsive designs and this tool does all the work for you, no developer is needed and that is a MAJOR plus.

Incentivized

• Reporting has been much improved in the last 12 months but still has room to improve. Often the view and format of reports varies depending on where you are looking at the data.
• Although the feature IS coming, we have been looking for transactional messaging for our CRM since we signed with Bronto. Given we use Netsuite, who owns Bronto, we expected this feature much sooner.
• More real-time and personalized content within Bronto would be welcomed.

Incentivized

• The type face is small. Not sure if this is to avoid overwhelming the reader, but I could see this being an issue with vision-impaired people or people who don't see small print well.
• Sometimes I find it takes multiple clicks to make one simple change. I wish there was a search field at the top of the screen that allowed me to jump directly to a client's entry to update it there.

As with anything, it's not perfect but it's more than suitable for our needs. I'd like to see continued growth and updates from Bronto and I'm excited to see what they have planned for their users down the road. Our clients (and my superiors) have been very happy with the performance of the software so far. It's going to be a great year for us

Incentivized

Product is easy for both technical and non-technical people to use. A cost effective solution for sending out large number of messages. We can manage unsubscribes by individual accounts, so we can have multiple multiple accounts combined to maximize our buying power on credits. Effective API for sending/receiving data makes tool a valuable asset.

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.

I truly love this product. We are moving to an all-in-one system next year and my greatest fear in doing so is how much I will miss this platform. Although we are excited for things ahead, I will always keep Vertical Response in my back pocket incase I don't love the new platform as much

Incentivized

I never experienced any downtime.

Never had an issue with uptime

No issues.

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

At Vertical Response the help desk associates are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. You can tell they enjoy what they do. And clearly, they are well trained because most times, the first point of contact is able to resolve any issue you may have. There have been very few times where an associate has needed to get back to me or escalate me to a supervisor

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

Basic functions and online help...we used what was needed, at the time, and will continue to explore other online trainings as our functional needs expand

Easy to set up.

Salesforce integration never worked right. We had to abandon.

Bronto Marketing Platform is much more of an enterprise solution than I believe many of these other options are within the email marketing campaign world. Their amount of features, data collection, and management and even help support was impressive. This was especially true during our launch efforts with the initial release of using their tool. If budget costs could be a concern, then you can be successful with some of the smaller options available. Still, the Bronto Marketing Platform makes it pretty easy to define some exact costs and actual ROI for improving your email campaign efforts that can help justify the expense of the tool above others.

Incentivized

I am a true believer in Vertical Response. So much so, that this is the first and only software I have used for this type of marketing. When this program was first launched it was a godsend - truly innovative for its time. And in the years since, I have continued to implement this software at three other winery properties because there is nothing else I want to use

Incentivized

• Our email list was aging, and based on Bronto recommendations to clean out our list, we were able to increase our average open rate from 21% to 28% over the course of 12 months.
• We were able to increase our list size by about 25% over the course of 24 months by cleaning our lists and subsequently starting the pop-up manager on our site.
• We're able to maintain a healthy click rate- about 30%, with the straightforward template options in the WYSYWIG editor.

Incentivized

• We were able to blast out promotions our company was having to customers which created an increase in business.
• By blasting out any service issues, it keeps our customers informed so that they are not wondering what is going on.
• Allows us to store unsubscribed emails so that we are not constantly pestering people who do not want to be emailed.

Incentivized