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Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued)

Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued)

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Bronto Marketing Platform has proven to be a valuable tool for various use cases based on user experiences. Users rely on Bronto to send …
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Bronto Review

7 out of 10
February 12, 2020
We use Bronto as an ESP and CRM system across our organization. It helps us manage email channels automatically and some workflows, and …
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All-in-one platform

10 out of 10
October 18, 2019
Incentivized
Bronto is the end to end marketing automation platform. We love how it incorporates social posting with email marketing and SMS. Such a …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 12 features
  • Email deliverability reporting (58)
    9.4
    94%
  • Dashboards (57)
    7.8
    78%
  • Standard reports (56)
    7.8
    78%
  • List management (56)
    7.4
    74%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://go.bronto.com/LP=4076?elqCampaig…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Klaviyo?

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses to centralize and use every piece of their customer data. With Klaviyo, businesses can combine customer data with more than 300 native integrations to automate personalized email and SMS communications that make customers feel seen.…

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.

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Features

Email & Online Marketing

Using software to manage lists, send emails, automate email campaigns, and track results.

7.4
Avg 8.1

Reporting & Analytics

Users can report on and analyze usage, performance, ROI, and/or other metrics of success.

7.6
Avg 7.7
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Product Details

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

Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesEnglish-speaking countries
Supported LanguagesEnglish

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.

Klaviyo, Listrak, and Mailchimp are common alternatives for Bronto Marketing Platform (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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(126)

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!

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

(1-8 of 8)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have a couple of big clients that we use Bronto for. It's ideal for retailers working in e-commerce that send 250,000+ emails per year, or those that generate online revenues in the six-figures. Bronto seamlessly integrates with any e-commerce engine so its adaptability and versatility go hand-in-hand. We use it for all of our clients' in-house marketing. It's easy to work with and offers a lot of strategies to get the most out of our email marketing campaigns.
  • 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!
  • It would be nice if Bronto held sales data, you can't see it easily in tables.
  • It would be nice if Bronto tracked legacy growth – we could track growth each month digitally rather than just writing stuff down.
  • Their mobile version still is a bit lacking on different devices, mobile/desktop is generally grouped "okay" and same for the rendering engine of the mail client.
We've used Bronto for the past year or so with a couple of our larger clients. It's super easy to work with and offers good strategies to get the most out of our email marketing campaigns. It has automated responders that help with e-newsletters and campaign sign-ups, which streamlines our workload and saves us the headache of tracking all this stuff ourselves. This software is ideal for large companies with huge returns.
July 31, 2018

A happy customer

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Bronto is great for our use - B2C communication that gives us flexibility to use templates consistently, or build something new for a specific delivery. Unfortunately with our company's web hosting, we don't have the capability for Cart Recovery or other apps that Bronto has at its disposal.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Bronto is very useful for basic marketing email scheduling as well as some basic segmentation features. Managing all of our email templates, marketing and transactional, through Bronto has been a big step up from our previous email service provider. We had some pain during implementation as well as getting some tech support.
Tim Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Bronto is a fantastic step-up for smaller businesses which may be using something like MailChimp or Constant Contact. There is significant room for growth after moving to the Bronto platform. A key feature/ability of Bronto is that the entire program can be managed by as little as 1 person, which is hugely important for a small business.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I would recommend Bronto if you need segmentation and automation in your emailing platform, such as someone has already clicked on a link in your email but they didn't become a lead you can send a follow-up email later on. If you wanted to create emails fast and to send them out to everyone I believe there are better solutions out there because of the UI.
March 08, 2018

Good for retailers

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I would only recommend Bronto to an organization with retail customers. Otherwise, you are paying a lot of money for features you do not use.
March 08, 2018

Bronto Fan

Jean Enzbrenner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Bronto to for all marketing and transactional messages for our e-commerce website. It allows us to connect with customers and subscribers who are not yet customers. We also connect Bronto with our platform so purchase history and brand interest is also available through Bronto for use in messages.
  • Ability to target customers based on behavior (past purchases, click data, etc).
  • Ever evolving platform - new and useful features added every year.
  • Great support - problems are addressed quickly even if that involves escalating to software engineers.
  • I'd like to see more webinars or how-tos on using features within the platform - not just purchase this new expensive module.
  • I would like to be able to edit a scheduled email rather than having to cancel and reschedule if a mistake was made.
  • What happened to the Bronto Summit? Those were great!
Bronto seems best suited to someone who will use the data available to market to customer interest such as using triggered emails or dynamic content. If you plan to send the same email to everyone regardless of interest, you will not get as much value.
McKane Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Bronto in our marketing and technology departments regularly. We use it to send email marketing campaigns and transactional emails to our customers. Bronto allows us to send beautiful, highly targeted emails to our users and to create workflows for drip and abandonment campaigns. We use the API and have it tied tightly into our site as well as some third party applications.
  • Easy-to use, intuitive workflows for automated drip/abandonment campaigns. It is the best workflow interface I've seen anywhere and it's the best part of the Bronto software in my opinion.
  • It is flexible and they have a robust API, so if the software doesn't do something you want/need it to do, you can usually find a way.
  • Their new message editor (introduced in late 2015) is fantastic and allows for quick creation of beautiful emails. When they brought it out of beta, though it was terribly buggy and frustrating to use, but it's now stable and great. This was much needed in Bronto and they delivered.
  • The custom segment tool is fantastic. Best-in-class in my opinion. You can create pools of subscribers on any criteria you can dream up. It's really key to sending targeted, relevant email messages.
  • Their "Socialite" app (social media connector) is really great if you use it to it's fullest.
  • The way they approach pricing is very, very problematic. They charge fees for features that either should be baked into the software or once were baked into the software. Their pricing is always changing and they are not transparent with pricing. One customer may pay $1,000 for a feature, while another might pay $2,000 - with no rhyme or reason. On more than one occasion we've got wildly different pricing quotes from reps a few months apart. We can't help but feel like they are deceptive on pricing.
  • And their pricing and billing practices are downright dishonest at times. The word "bait and switch" has been used at our company to describe Bronto several times as well. Also, every year, they try and raise rates and make you fight with them over the contract. It's so bad that we will likely end up leaving the platform over this. They could fix this by offering transparent, published prices on their site and not being deceptive about it. We've offered these suggestions several times to upper management but they've fallen on deaf ears.
  • They call themselves a "marketing platform for commerce", but they have been very slow to introduce features geared toward commerce. They've improved this over the last year, but want to charge extra for all of the "commerce marketing" features they are adding. It's an issue. Simple tools like Cart Recovery aren't baked into the platform and are treated as "apps" that you have to pay extra to use. The concept of "add-ons" in software can be helpful sometimes, but Bronto has missed the mark here and taken it to the extreme. They've taken core commerce functionality out of the core "commerce marketing" software to force you to pay more.
  • While Bronto has some of their own apps, they really lack useful third party Apps. It is a major problem when you compare them to MailChimp and others. I have had more than a few third party companies WANT to integrate with Bronto and tell me that the experience they had was terrible, that the biz dev team at bronto either wouldn't call them back, ignored them for several weeks or just wouldn't give them a test account. This is a major, major problem and needs to be remedied.
  • They were acquired by Netsuite last year (2015) and ever since that announcement, it takes longer to get answers and resolutions to issues or questions and support has been lacking. There is more red tape and bureaucracy than ever and the lack of internal communication and external updates post-acquisition has gotten really bad. As time passes, this continues to be a major problem. Bronto was once a nimble business with integrity. Now, they've introduced so much bureaucracy and red-tape that it's almost impossible to get anything done - never is this more evident than in the (lack of) timely customer service.
  • They have overcharged us on more than one occasion and getting credits back takes hours of work. Their billing department is terrible.
This is not a tool for a small business or startups in my opinion. It's too expensive and likely overkill. It's good for mid-sized ecommerce companies because it facilitates workflow-centric email marketing campaigns. On the downside, this once nimble and honest company has turned into a bureaucratic web with dishonest billing practices.
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