Bronto Blog

We recommend that you consider personalizing your messages to create a one-to-one marketing dialog with your contacts. 

Bronto makes it easy - you can personalize any of your field names within the message body or the subject line with: %%fieldname%%.  For example, if you created a field name called “firstname,” then your personalization would be %%firstname%%.  But if you called it “fname,” it would be %%fname%%.

If some of your contacts do not have data for that first name field, you can use the If-Empty feature to account for any known or suspected empty fields.   

Avoid these situations by using this exact construct:

Dear %%if(%%firstname%% is empty,"Customer",%%firstname%%)%%,

This function would display "Dear Customer," when the field is blank
and “Dear %%firstname%%," when not.  Without this feature, you message would show "Dear ," for contacts without data in the firstname field.

You can also combine fields, provided you have the field data.  For example, Dear %%salutation%%. %%lastname%%: would display “Dear Mr. Smith.”

Instead of sending a generic message to all of your contacts (i.e. Dear Client or Dear Supporter), use Bronto’s personalization feature to let them know that they are important enough for an individual conversation.

Megan

We get a lot of questions about deleting lists vs. deleting contacts vs. deleting contacts on a list. Read on for some clarification…

Deleting Lists:
First, it is important to understand how Bronto manages lists. Lists are associations (groups) of contacts; they do not “contain” contacts. Therefore, a contact can be in the account and:

• Not associated with any lists OR
• Associated with only one, two, seventeen etc. lists OR
• Associated with all of your lists

Because Bronto stores contacts as unique entities, contacts only count once towards your subscription level, no matter how many lists they are on.

To actually delete a list, click the delete icon on the Lists and Segments page. Note that when you delete a list, you are not deleting the contacts on the list - only the “association” that groups the contacts.

Deleting Contacts
If you want to delete a contact from the account (and completely remove all traces of them from Bronto) you have two options:

• Check the box next to a contact’s email and then click the red delete button
• Use the “import contacts” feature and select the “remove” option to bulk delete all contacts in a file

Deleting Contacts From A List
Also, you might need to delete certain contacts from a list, but not from your account. You have two options to make this happen:

• Click a contact’s email address and then “edit” the associated lists
• Use the “import contacts” feature and select the “update” option to bulk remove all contacts in a file from a particular list.

In times of business need, we often turn to the one piece of business productivity software that many of us can’t live without — Microsoft Word.

However, if you use Word to compose your email marketing communications, it is important to understand what goes on behind the scenes as you type.

Though you can’t see it happening, Word keeps track of an incredible number of internal styles, code snippets, comments, and other items. These bits of information are critical to Word, but when you copy that text and try to paste it somewhere else (like Bronto or an HTML editor), all of the invisible stuff comes with it.

In fact, the last thing you ever want to do is copy from Word and paste the content — and all of the hidden codes — directly into the Bronto rich text editor. As you might expect, these invisible codes”can rear their ugly head at the most inopportune moment — after you’ve sent your message and it arrives in someone’s inbox.

Luckily, Bronto provides you with easy ways to clean things up and get rid of all of the undesirable invisible bits. First off, if you’ve got a nicely formatted Word document and you want to carry your font sizes and colors over to your email message, choose “Paste from Word”, the clipboard icon with the Word “W” logo.

Paste your text into the box that pops up, click the options to ignore font face or remove styles if you want, and click OK. This will remove the majority of the extraneous code and leave you with something that looks very close to the way it did in Word.

The other option — and my personal preference — is to choose the “Paste as Plain Text” option, the clipboard icon with a “T” in a yellow box. This will strip out ALL formatting and leave you with the cleanest possible code. Yes, you will need to spend a few more minutes setting your fonts, text sizes, and colors again, but I think the resulting pristine code is worth the time.

As always, we recommend that you fully test your message before sending it out to your contacts. Different mail clients display things in different ways, so just because a message looks one way in the preview in Bronto does not mean it will look that way when it shows up in someone’s inbox.

The product updates keep coming! We moved over the following changes this morning:

Survey-Based Segments
Build segments based on whether or not contacts responded to a survey or based on their reponses to a specific question in a survey.

Help Tab Search Engine
Per your request in our recent customer satisfaction survey, we’ve beefed up the search engine on the Help tab to help you find the FAQ entries that you need.

Default Alternative Text
Alternative text messages will now come pre-packaged with default text. Use the text as-is or customize it to suit your needs.

Monthly Message Allocation
Click the Account Info link at the top-right corner of your account to view an overview of your account usage for the month. This report now includes details about your monthly message allocation.

In addition to these changes, we also made 2 particularly helpful tweaks:

• We added functionality that will remove any spaces before or after email addresses and field values in your bulk import files. This change will make importing contacts much easier for some of you.
• We’ve tightened the Spam Test rules so that Bronto will catch more “spammy” content in your message before your deliver it to your contacts.

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

As someone who spends a large majority of my waking hours staring at a computer screen, I see my fair share of email marketing campaigns from a wide variety of sources Some are pretty good, some are mediocre, and some are just downright bad. But occasionally, I see one so well executed that it puts others to shame. This is the story of one such campaign.

About a month ago, I received an email newsletter from one of my favorite recording artists outlining the details of their upcoming CD. As you might expect, there was a link to pre-order the new CD.

However, in addition to the CD, you would also receive a super-exclusive limited edition live CD, all for the low low price of $12. That’s a great price any day, and I’m always a sucker for so-called free exclusive CDs. To sweeten the deal, shipping was free. Needless to say, I fell victim to their marketing ploy and immediately placed my order.

Fast forward a month. The CD was due to be released this Tuesday. Given the fact that this particular recording artist isn’t terribly well-known and isn’t on a major label, I fully expected to receive my package of sweet musical goodness weeks after its release to the general public.

After making my way home from Bronto HQ this Monday, I opened my mailbox to find the aforementioned bundle of goodies — the day before it was released in stores. In addition to the new CD and the super-exclusive limited edition live CD, they also included an extra copy of the CD liner notes personally autographed by the band. (Nice touch!)

If this is the way they treat their fans (and customers), I’ll definitely be ordering from them again.

Here’s the takeaway: It’s great that you can put together a good email marketing campaign with a compelling offer. However, don’t stop there. Follow through with fulfilling the order. Add a special personal touch. Don’t do the bare minimum to meet the expectations of your customer. Take things to the next level and really blow them away. If you do that, you’ve just won a customer for life.