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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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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…
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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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February 04, 2020
Bronto Marketing Platform - Think Dinosaur for Power, Strength and Size - Not Extinction!
We were using the Bronto Marketing Platform as a new email marketing campaign management tool for all of our email marketing efforts across a few different business verticals. We migrated from an existing platform that we weren't necessarily unhappy with but we were looking for some potential new functionality and perhaps cleaner UI and UX features that what we'd currently had available with one of their competitors.
- Organization of Customer Information
- Ease of Developing Email Campaigns
- The amount of features can be overwhelming at first.
- Sometimes we experienced a laggy response to working within the tool.
78.88888888888889%
7.9
90%
9.0
N/A
N/A
- Enabled managing our subscriber lists more effectively.
- It allowed us to set up sub-lists and subscriber groups quickly and dynamically based on actions.
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.
3
Our use of the Bronto Marketing Platform at the time was mainly contained within our marketing, communications, and IT support team. We're a smaller business, so that team of individuals typically wore a few different hats of responsibility and covered a broad range of business responsibilities and needs for the organization.
2
I would encourage a support team that's very familiar with using online SaaS applications and systems. Understanding how to export/import and process data through text files, spreadsheets, database queries, and similar actions are also helpful. From a daily use standpoint, knowing some basics of HTML, CSS, and content marketing strategies will also go a long way in ensuring better success with the tool.
- Daily Promotional Emails
- New Subscriber Management
- Using data collected from email engagements to drive website content changes.
- Using data collected from email subscribers to confirm customer data in other systems.
- Integrating engagement with customers across social media platforms.
- Developing interest based subscriber lists.
January 18, 2019
Bronto: Great for Large Companies
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.
84.28571428571429%
8.4
76.66666666666667%
7.7
N/A
N/A
- Bigger response from our audience – Since we're dealing with massive email marketing campaigns, having our work streamlined with this software has generated a much larger response (which is great!).
- Its responsive technical support and training have helped a lot of our staff become familiar with the program so it's easier to figure problems out.
- Our engagement has gone up 35% in the last quarter with using Bronto.
There's a lot of email marketing software out there, and our company works with a lot of different programs. It's what we're known for, and it's how we've done business for a long time. My job is to figure out what software best suits what company we're working for. Bronto is simply the best solution for our 6-figure clients, that's really all there is to it. I don't bother with anything else.
This is our internal marketing team. There's 15-20 people whose job it is to review client data which includes (but isn't limited to) user experience, clicks/traffic and determining what campaigns drive the most interest. As part of our organization, we work hand-in-hand with our clients to make sure that their marketing campaigns are as effective as possible, and 90% of this relies heavily on email marketing and social media strategy.
We employ marketing and social media strategists to head up our team that goes proverbially "knee-deep" in working with Bronto Marketing Software. We have a couple of big clients (with a reach of 250,000+ contacts per list) so it's important that we have a team dedicated to JUST serving those accounts. Basically if you want to work with us, it's important that you have experience in online marketing strategy.
- Bronto makes creating e-newsletters (as part of a broader campaign) a breeze. It really streamlines our workflow
- Bronto helps us maintain our lists better – when you have a list of 250k+ contacts, you need software that keeps everything organized
- Knowledge of HTML is not required to put together emails, which saves us money as we don't need to hire an additional developer – whose job would be just to handle one account – it just makes sense business-wise.
- The WYSIWYG email template, by far. As I stated previously – we don't need to hire another developer to review HTML code before sending out campaigns. It's not as common as you would think for software like this, so it's nice to have it
- Since Bronto is built to be working with bigger companies, their e-marketing platform allows super complex segmentation. Big Plus.
- Bronto offers transactional emails, triggered email, full-send and whatever other types of emails we'd like to send. It's versatile and fluid, like us and our business. It's unexpected but it's exactly what we need.
- We're pushing some more interactive marketing campaigns for the future (not a lot of which I can talk about right here) but we're definitely going to be using Bronto's software to make that happen
- For broadening our campaigns, we're tapping into some foreign markets, and Bronto helps us determine what audiences will be the most lucrative
- We may be able to offer a separate consulting service based off of just Bronto's software – again, not a lot I can talk about here, but its looking very promising.
March 15, 2017
A powerful product but deceptive billing practices and too much bureaucracy are major concerns.
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.
- Very good ROI on email when we execute well on our side. But they keep trying to raise the price of everything in the software, so there is a concern there.
- Bronto isn't going to help you get more email leads or help you convert more, but it gives you a platform and the tools to be successful in marketing to customers and it gives good reporting so you can assess and adjust.
- Year to year it is hard to predict what they will do to pricing, so it's hard to commit to their platform fully. It does not feel good to spend lots of $ on custom integrations when that "partner" will undoubtedly try to raise your rates as soon as they see your switching costs are a deterrent to movement.
72.22222222222223%
7.2
50%
5.0
N/A
N/A
Bronto is not cheap, but it's valuable if you use it correctly. MailChimp has a better message editor and better third party apps, and is cheaper than Bronto and it more honest and transparent in pricing (very important for a partner!). Bronto has better segmentation tools and better workflow creation and management (for Drips) but it's hard to trust them. We are probably moving to Mail Chimp this year. Listrak is very similar to Bronto at a much lower price point. We have found the Bronto UI and Mail Chimp UI better, cleaner and more intuitive than Listrak - which cuts down on mistakes and headaches for our team - but Listrak has gotten better over the last 2 years and we have strongly considered them and are looking again at them this year.
10
3
- marketing automation
- email newsletters
- targeted email marketing
Yes
Nope. They are very slow to respond to and fix bugs.
Years ago, Bronto used to provide exceptional support. But they've gotten so bad over time. It's a bureaucratic nightmare now where they have middle-men handling support tickets instead of speaking with people who actually understand the software. We know so much more about the platform than the people trying to help us. So frustrating.
March 16, 2015
Fantastic product. Top-notch service.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Automation. It has a feature where you drag and drop elements of automation. This is really intuitive and does not require any programming. For example, building out a sequence where one segment of the list list gets this email, and then two days later days later, they get a different email. This was very easy to build.
- The product takes all the guess work out of building out these automations.
- Ability to send targeted re-mails based on initial send. Ability to define parameters without a data feed.
- List cleansing. Quarantine users that spam you, block you, etc. Helps boost overall inbox deliverability.
- Great, detailed reporting.
- They have lots of excellent documentation which is very easy to navigate to as it's context sensitive. The documentation is also written in a very intuitive way reflecting how you would actually use the product.
- Nothing.
- Higher open rates, and ultimately sales, based on automated re-mailing, list segmentation, list cleaning and much better insight via strong, accurate reporting tools.
Delivra.
Bronco had a very persistent sales person and friend uses them and is a huge fan. The rep had been trying to get time with me for a year. Even when I signed with ExactTarget he kept pushing. Persistence paid off. The combination of his persistence and the strong reference I got from my friend was enough to convince me. I didn't really take a very detailed look at Delivra in the end.
Bronco had a very persistent sales person and friend uses them and is a huge fan. The rep had been trying to get time with me for a year. Even when I signed with ExactTarget he kept pushing. Persistence paid off. The combination of his persistence and the strong reference I got from my friend was enough to convince me. I didn't really take a very detailed look at Delivra in the end.
1
1
- Automation. The ability to automate email sequencing and content based on consumer behavior
- Re-mailing campaigns. Ability to re-send emails with slight modifications without having to re-create the entire campaign.
- List segmentation. Different content sent to different segments of the customer list (people who opened / people who ignored, etc.).
- List cleaning.
Exact Target.
- Implemented in-house
- Online training
- Self-taught
Yes
- Internal E-commerce platform.
Integrating with our custom E-commerce platform was not too difficult. It was largely a matter of mapping automated data feeds to the right places.