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Bronto Marketing Platform has proven to be a valuable tool for various use cases based on user experiences. Users rely on Bronto to send …
Overview
What is Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued)?
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…
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Popular Features
- Email deliverability reporting (58)9.494%
- Dashboards (57)7.878%
- Standard reports (56)7.878%
- List management (56)7.474%
Pricing
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What is Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued)?
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…
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What is Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued)?
The Bronto Marketing Platform aims to help organizations of all sizes grow revenue, save time and optimize marketing resources. By delivering powerful and flexible email marketing solutions that work seamlessly with numerous ecommerce platforms, Bronto's goal is to allow brands to maximize the value of customer data so they can deliver irresistible customer experiences. According to the vendor Bronto solutions incorporate best practices from 16 years of email marketing success and are used by over 1500 of the worlds top brands, including Rebecca Minkoff, Theory, Lucky Brand, Trek, Ashley Homestore and Christopher & Banks. The vendor offers more information and a free product tour on their website.
Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) Features
Email & Online Marketing Features
- Supported: WYSIWYG email editor
- Supported: Dynamic content
- Supported: Ability to test dynamic content
- Supported: Landing pages
- Supported: A/B testing
- Supported: Mobile optimization
- Supported: Email deliverability reporting
- Supported: List management
- Supported: Triggered drip sequences
Reporting & Analytics Features
- Supported: Dashboards
- Supported: Standard reports
- Supported: Custom reports
Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) Integrations
- NetSuite ERP
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Shopify
- Shopify Plus
- Magento Commerce Cloud (formerly Magento)
Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) Competitors
Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | English-speaking countries |
| Supported Languages | English |
Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Email deliverability reporting highest, with a score of 9.4.
The most common users of Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Bronto Marketing Platform has proven to be a valuable tool for various use cases based on user experiences. Users rely on Bronto to send targeted email marketing campaigns, including promotional emails, newsletters, and important pre-delivery information. With Bronto's workflows and automation features, users can improve their email marketing strategies over time and effectively nurture leads. The platform's tracking capabilities provide valuable insights into email performance through click tracking, interaction monitoring, and conversion tracking. Additionally, the API integration allows users to tie Bronto tightly into their websites and third-party applications for seamless communication. Users appreciate Bronto's built-in features, particularly when creating email content with DreamWeaver. The software's ease of use and flexibility make it suitable for mid-cap and larger businesses in need of comprehensive features and functionalities. Overall, Bronto Marketing Platform serves as a complete email management solution, supporting sales and marketing efforts across multiple brand sites within organizations.
User-friendly Workflow Interface: Users consistently praised Bronto Marketing Platform's workflow interface, describing it as highly impressive and one of the best they have seen. Many users found it easy to use and intuitive, allowing for quick email creation without any hassle.
Flexible Customization Options: The flexibility of Bronto Marketing Platform was highly appreciated by users. They specifically mentioned its robust API, which enables them to customize the software according to their specific needs, even if the software doesn't initially have the desired functionality. This customization capability has been a valuable asset for many reviewers.
Powerful Segmentation Tools: Users highlighted the usefulness of Bronto Marketing Platform's custom segment tool, considering it to be fantastic and best-in-class. Many users mentioned that it allows them to create pools of subscribers based on any criteria they can think of, which is crucial for sending targeted and relevant email messages. The segmentation functionality in Bronto Marketing Platform has greatly contributed to successful email marketing programs for numerous customers.
Pricing Structure: Some users have expressed frustration with Bronto's pricing structure, finding it problematic and lacking transparency. They feel that they are being charged for features that should be included or were previously included in the software. There is a perception among some reviewers that the pricing practices are deceptive, suggesting a need for more transparent pricing on Bronto's website.
Customer Support: Several users have mentioned experiencing difficulties with Bronto's customer support. They express frustration with longer response times and difficulty in getting answers and resolutions to their issues or questions. This dissatisfaction seems to have increased after Bronto was acquired by Netsuite, with users feeling a lack of internal communication and external updates post-acquisition. Some users also mention difficulties with Bronto's billing department and the effort required to obtain credits.
Lack of Commerce Features: Users feel that Bronto is slow in introducing features geared toward commerce. They mention that simple tools like Cart Recovery are not included in the platform and have to be paid for as separate apps. Users compare Bronto to competitors like MailChimp and feel that Bronto lacks useful third-party apps. They also mention instances where third-party companies had a terrible experience trying to integrate with Bronto, with the business development team not responding or ignoring them.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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July 31, 2018
Powerful but not as user-friendly as others
It is being used by the marketing department to send emails to segments for various campaigns. It helps us get the proper content only to those it applies to.
- Segmentation- you have a lot of control over who gets what, when
- Reporting- you can easily see stats on campaigns
- The drag and drop feature when creating emails is clunky and can be frustrating. It gets the job done and having the customization without having to know HTML is nice, but it feels like they dropped the ball on this one. It feels almost like they made sure the concept worked, then never went back and finessed it to be user-friendly.
- The amount of users who can be editing an email- other platforms - I have used have real-time updates from multiple users. If 2 people are in it at the same time, only one set of changes is made.
July 31, 2018
AB testing is useless
Bronto is used by creative to upload HTML coded emails. It is used by the email marketing manager (me) to schedule and segment those emails, as well as report on email metrics.
- UI/UX
- A/B testing... need to include confidence interval into the equation used to determine a winner. Currently, Bronto declares an email a winner if it has one more of the KPI, even though there's no statistical significance. Other platforms do better.
- A/B testing... segmentation isn't random enough. I ran multiple AA tests and there was 95% confidence one email performed better than the other... this was based off 120,000 emails measuring sent vs received. This type of test should never result in a winner with statistical significance.
- Data reporting... data that's able to be exported should be much more customizable. I literally waste hours transcribing certain data by hand.
July 31, 2018
A happy customer
Bronto is used primarily to drive ticket sales to our venue, but is also used as a retailer. Over the course of 12 months, 80% of its use is to drive ticket sales. One department manages Bronto, but it aids all aspects of our operation. The largest business problem it addresses is awareness - when our events are and what is being featured.
- The platform is very user-friendly. The addition of the Drag-and-Drop editor has made everything infinitely easier when it comes to organizing a clean layout for a message.
- The customer service is top-notch, from a live chat for support to the Bronto blog to the account manager. It's extremely rare there's a time where I have a question or issue that can't be solved.
- Automation campaigns are extremely easy. Setting up triggers and entry points are quickly completed on the front end and reap strong rewards on the back end without having to think about it.
- I think a cleaner dashboard could help. The current one seems out-of-date and not as sleek as it could be.
- The ability to host more than 100MB of content would be a great addition.
July 31, 2018
Bronto for Awareness
We use Bronto to send press releases as well as subject-specific emails related to healthy living and specific diseases, as well as notifications for student recruitment events. The platform is used across the organization. We don't do much tracking via Bronto, so it's mainly a way to organize our mailing list, standardize our templates, etc.
- It's easy to upload new lists/contacts
- Easy to modify templates
- Bronto could do a better job providing metrics across the organization. Right now you can dig into specific mailings and groups, but it's difficult to get a universal view.
July 31, 2018
Scrappy Marketer Doing Scrappy Things
[It's being used] For outbound marketing efforts in the digital marketing department. It helps us to build loyalty and engagement with our consumers via segmented marketing initiatives.
- Analytics
- Consumer segmented emails
- A/B testing
- Scheduling emails
- Do not have any examples at the moment
July 31, 2018
Bronto is a big upgrade from our previous ESP
We use Bronto to create and send transactional emails and marketing emails for our company. Our marketing department handles the marketing emails and our web and ecom teams handle the transactional emails. Bronto has made it very easy for us to manage all of these emails in one tool and schedule batches of emails to send.
- Bronto allows us to very easily manage the dozens of transactional emails that our company sends every day.
- Having all the email templates in one place makes it very easy to make a change that can affect all the different emails that need to reflect the change.
- We are able to schedule batches of emails to send to our customers so we do not have to manually do this. This also helps us avoid the spam folder.
- We ended up designing all of our emails on our own because of the limitations that Bronto had in regards to design.
- We had some problems with the initial import of our contact list. The customer service team was helpful in getting this solved, but we have since had issues with our contact list.
- Along these lines, while the customer service team was able to help us, they were not incredibly quick to get back to us and keep us updated on progress being made.
March 20, 2018
Bronto is user friendly
It is being used by my department. It is very user-friendly. The only issues I have is receiving responses from our account manager.
- Immediate chat help
- Easy to use platform
- Detailed reporting
- Account rep help
March 20, 2018
Bronto Marketing Survey
At the company I am working at we use Bronto daily. It is a very organized software program that keeps each of our daily tasks separated nicely and provides easy access. Specifically, we use it in our e-commerce department, but other departments have used it as well. It addresses all of our e-commerce and e-marketing supplies. It has a great setup so we can check up on items from the past and add new ones every day.
- Organized platform to quickly access what you need to use at all times.
- Great customer and site support. Can provide help with any issues.
- The tabs and sections on the site are detailed and helpful for data separation.
- Could have a faster loading time, sometimes freezes for a while.
- Have more multiple access to a few things at once, constantly having to go back then forward again.
It's being used as a communication tool between marketing and final customers. Is not just for sales purposes but also to nurture the relationship between brand and customer.
Is being used only in our department for promotions, newsletters, sensitive information, etc.
Is being used only in our department for promotions, newsletters, sensitive information, etc.
- Web forms are really useful when we are looking for new acquisition.
- Pop-ups are really good, the fact that we can connect them to our website is pretty cool.
- I really miss the old reporting system.
- The fact that we need to create segments in order to get opens, not opens, clicks.. etc., from sent deliveries is kinda annoying based on the fact that before it was a lot easier to get the info.
March 16, 2018
Long time Bronto user
Bronto is used to primarily promote ticket sales for our minor league baseball team. We do occasionally promote non-ticket events. Our primary departments that utilize Bronto are our marketing and ticketing departments. We maintain contact with our fans with digital newsletters and/or team updates with the purpose of initiating ticket sales (sometimes tickets sales may relate to individual games, other times to ticket/season packages). On rare occasions, we offer access to our Bronto email database to select sponsors of the Knights.
- Bronto is a valuable asset to us for its ability to track ticket sales (click-thrus that amount to purchases).
- It's a nice benefit to have the scheduling features that Bronto offers for sending email blasts to our segmented groups.
- The email reporting is very detailed and informative and gives us valuable data about adjusting email content and delivery schedules.
- The ability to extract user data fields to include within emails is a great feature, but sometimes it gets forgotten and is not promoted enough imo within the user portal.
- Would like to see Bronto offer some sort of RSVP type features/services for using Bronto to manage event registration (which we send email notifications for quite often).
March 16, 2018
Bronto took us from zero to hero in 2 years
Bronto is used to support sales and marketing on 2 different brand sites within 1 parent company. We send all of our promotional marketing with Bronto, as well as nurture new leads through a number of campaigns aimed to educate and convert. We also use Bronto to provide important information to customers of our top channel partner before delivery in an effort to reduce customer service calls.
- The message editor is easy to learn, easy to use, and allows you to build sophisticated messages with little to no development knowledge.
- The available feature set has allowed us to not only significantly grow our revenue from email marketing, but also allows for years of future growth and expansion of our email marketing programs. Key to this growth is a newer feature called Recommendations which serves up real time product suggestions based on browsing and purchase data of existing customers.
- When needed, the Bronto support team is knowledgeable, and quick to resolve issues, help us learn a new feature, or just point us in the right direction of solving our own problems.
- 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.
March 13, 2018
Very close to greatness
Bronto is currently being used to send newsletters, lead drip campaigns, and trade show lead emails. Only the marketing department uses it currently. It helps us keep our partners informed and helps us educate potential leads until they have a chance to be contacted by a rep.
- Netsuite integration: it helps lead and customer contact info integrate smoothly for email campaigns
- Detailed analytics
- Email automation
- Email design feature is clunky and could be more robust
- Some less popular email addresses (custom addresses) seem to not be accepted
March 13, 2018
My Bronto Marketing Platform Review
We use Bronto to keep in touch with our clients and make them aware of events and products which are coming up. Our organization specifically uses Bronto just in the marketing department. It addresses the problems we had with keeping in touch, while also being able to categorize our contacts and make sure that the messages specifically address their needs.
- Segmentation
- Automation
- Optimizing when to send messages
- Organization. Some things that you would want to do are very buried in the site.
- Can be frustrating to use, requires quite a few more clicks to create an email and being able to select some things can get quite difficult if you have a lot of elements.
March 12, 2018
Bronto - The Ugly Dinosaur That Gets The Job Done
We are using Bronto as a means to improve our revenue via email marketing campaigns. Additionally, it is being used as a tool to re-engage with customers who previously bought a product from us. It is solely being used in our marketing department although we are applying it to a wide range of circumstances based upon each individual department's needs.
- It provides a solid way of sending a lot of emails to a lot of different people across a lot of different account types (i.e. gmail or outlook)
- The analytics section is comprehensive and provides a clear picture of your customer's behaviors
- Segmenting is an easy and simple task
- The analytics section, while already very comprehensive, should add in even more ways to compare email campaigns to one another
- The email builder is adequate but can be a bit cumbersome when creating more advanced emails
- Improving the automation of emails is another way in which Bronto could improve
March 08, 2018
Bronto is a great choice
Bronto is used to manage our email marketing campaigns, and our transnational messaging. The solution is used by the marketing department to promote events, market products, and inform customers about the status of transactions.
- Ease to use interface
- Constantly adding new features to platform that make the solution stay current
- Reliable solution
- Template Marketplace to use already formatted templates in the Template editor. Yes, you can create your own, but sometimes it'd be quick to just pick a fresh template and make a few edits without having to start from scratch each time
- Static Blocks for the template editor - where you can save re-usable html content, not just images
- Hosting fees for images fees - it's ridiculous how much or that this is even a fee considering how cheap storage space is these days
March 08, 2018
Effective platform for base tactics
We use bronto for all marketing email, and we use it across the whole organization. It primarily supports our e-commerce business for outbound marketing, transactional emails, etc.
- Easy integration for transactional emails
- Good segmentation
- Overall basic reporting (open, click-through, etc.)
- Dashboard load time, specifically unsubscribe
- Personalization and customization is limited
- Integration with social media and other ad platforms
March 08, 2018
Bronto MFA Volunteer
We use Bronto to send out weekly newsletters from the volunteer department to our organization's volunteers. Our marketing team uses Bronto as well for weekly newsletters to customers.
- Great form of communication for our volunteers
- Easy to use
- Limited design capabilites
- Not intuitive, missing modern functionality other email platforms offer
- Too many steps to import lists, contacts, etc
March 08, 2018
Bronto is fine
[Bronto is being used] To send email newsletters to our listeners.
- It's reliable, I've never had an issue. They keep the platform bug free and updated.
- It's pretty intuitive for the most part.
- Training. Help users be successful without charging them an arm and a leg. It's too damn expensive.
- There are TOO many dropdowns/menus. Consolidate it to be more simple.
- The design templates kinda suck and seem to be stuck as the same from 10 years ago.
March 08, 2018
Bronto just works
We use Bronto to handle all of our email marketing, across various brands. It allows us to easily design, built, and send emails to a variety of customer segments. We have a relatively small team and Bronto support has been a great asset - whether it's working with support to help solve any technical questions we might have or working with a Bronto design specialist to help with the design and build out of the email.
- It allows us to easily connect with various customer segments.
- Bronto's workflow is as simple as drag and drop.
- Bronto's support is top notch. Whenever we have a question about the best way to do something or why something might not function as we expect, Bronto support is quick to help.
- Bronto could use design support as well - at least for the design around their unique functions (such as design questions surrounding Recommendations Premium)
- Automatic list backup or exporting. We have run into issue with our list having some issues and it would be nice if there was a way to automatically backup or export a master list from Bronto.
- Color coding of the various company sections. We have numerous brands attached to our Bronto account and it is easy to get them mixed up.
March 08, 2018
Bronto FTW
At Columbia's Office of Alumni and Development we use Bronto across the organization. I specifically handle marketing for the Office of Gift Planning within the larger Alumni and Development office. Using Bronto allows our central unit to distribute emails across all the schools and units within Columbia with efficiency.
- Friendly user interface: I appreciate that the user interface is generally intuitive and easy to use (also easy to teach others how to use).
- Ability to pull analytic reports that meet our needs: I am able to pull analytic reports with relative ease and the data suits our departmental needs.
- Copy and paste ability from a Microsoft Word Doc (sometimes the text formatting, such as the font/size/spacing, will be slightly off).
- Removing/swapping fields within an email template (I personally have difficulty with this - not sure if this is reflective of a larger user issue).
- Image editing capabilities (sizing specifically) within the WYSIWYG.
March 08, 2018
Good for retailers
We use Bronto as a bulk emailer across our entire organization. Although we are paying for all of the features, the truth is that we only use the bulk emailing services. The retail-oriented services are wasted on us.
- Technically up to date.
- Responsive customer service.
- Good job avoiding being black-holed.
- HATE the newish email creation interface, which uses blocks of content by content type. Not user-friendly at all.
- Use of a single email address as the unique identifier creates big problems for us. A unique user for us may have more than one account with us (i.e., one for each of their children). This makes it impossible for us to accommodate our users with more than one child.
March 08, 2018
Reliable Marketing Platform
We use Bronto for our email marketing campaigns primarily focused on client retention and reactivation. Email marketing is essential to our marketing efforts as it allows us to reach a much larger target at a lower cost and faster response time than other marketing avenues. Bronto's detailed reporting helps us identity trends as well as determine which processes work and which need reconsideration and/or attention.
- Fully customizable email marketing campaigns.
- Detailed reporting.
- Effective communication from support staff regarding some subjects.
March 08, 2018
Reflections on our Experiences with Bronto
We work with a beauty company based in Southern California, slicing and coding their marketing emails. They use Bronto to send these to their mailing lists. We upload the images to Bronto's hosting service, then upload the HTML code into the messages area, where we preview the email before notifying our client that it is done. We also incorporate some of Bronto's own dynamic code, to populate the first names of email recipients from the mailing lists, and to ensure compliance with anti-spam regulations.
- Bronto is easy to learn and use. It only took one conference call with Tami Urban, a Bronto consultant, to get started, and after that, it was fairly simple to learn the system more thoroughly. The interface and menus are generally fairly self-explanatory.
- The dashboards are easily customizable, so we can see only information, such as the remaining hosting capacity, that's relevant to us.
- Bronto has two different ways for us to preview our completed emails - the 'Show Preview' at the top of the section where we enter the HTML code, and then the web preview, which we can do after saving and closing the email code. The web preview allows us to test any hyperlinks contained in the email. Both previews allow us to see if there are coding errors or superfluous characters that need addressing.
- The section where we enter the HTML code updates instantly - we can see any changes we make to the coding immediately WITHOUT having to save it - that is a big time-saver!
- When we started using Bronto, and until within the past year, we were able to send test emails to our AOL or Gmail email accounts, even though the email we have our Bronto account under, through our client, is our AOL email. However, we were suddenly unable to do that anymore, apparently because we do not have a private domain. This has hampered our ability to thoroughly test the accuracy of our work! We would like to be able to utilize that feature again, with our existing email accounts!
March 08, 2018
Great if you use all it has to offer, and can afford it.
We used Bronto to send out all of our marketing and transactional emails. The transactional emails are filtered through Magento. For the marketing messages, those are done in-house and scheduled manually except for a few workflows and automated messages we have set up.
- Workflows
- Segmentation
- Scheduling email blasts
- Integrating with Magento
- Most add-ons are very expensive.
- Support to set up our API was pretty non-existent.
- Communication with our Account Manager has been slow.
- The data-retention period of 90 days is a joke.
March 08, 2018
Bronto is Outdated
Bronto is used as our main ESP and supports the bulk of emails sent from our email program. All of our marketing emails that drive sales deploy out of Bronto and some of our automated series deploy out of Bronto.
- Deliverability on our emails is always high, which is critical to the success of our email channel.
- The ability to only keep customer engagement data for 3 months is extremely limiting and makes it hard for us to create a sophisticated email program in Bronto.
- Overall Bronto is very clunky to use and not very user-friendly. I've used a lot of ESPs in my career, and Bronto is one of the more outdated in terms of functionality and features.
- The tech team takes a very long time to resolve issues and doesn't do a great job of communicating when issues will be resolved.