Bronto Blog

DMNews, an online news leader in internet marketing, recently reported on the email marketing successes of Bronto customer, Blooms Today. The worldwide floral provider has realized exponential growth in online sales since implementing Bronto’s email solution.

We’re excited to introduce Bronto’s Best Practices Series, a unique email marketing best practices webinar and podcast series that will kick-off next week.

The monthly series will address timely email marketing issues faced by all types of Bronto customers. These presentations will provide insights and strategies from your peers that will enable you to maximize your use of Bronto.

The first installment of the series is slated for Tuesday, September 26th at 2 PM EST. Eric Boggs will lead the webcast, which will feature special guest Gabe Harris, eCommerce manager for worldwide floral service provider Blooms Today. Gabe will speak to his experience with Bronto and outline the strategies and Bronto functionality that helped him generate a 1200% ROI on his email marketing investment.

Follow the directions below to join:

1. Join the Internet Conference at http://webdialogs.com/join
Select to join as a Guest
Conference ID – 71280

2. Please dial the number below to join the conference audio.
Telephone – 513-562-2954 or 888-676-3315
Meeting Number – 71280

We hope to see you on Tuesday!

Bronto will move some exciting enhancements into production late Wednesday night that will be available when you log in Thursday morning, September 14.

New Messages Tab Interface

We’ve consolidated the Sent Messages and Message Folders sub-tabs into the View Messages sub-tab. The new tab features a folder tree structure that makes it easy to organize your account. Use the Move functionality to move your messages to folders and use the icons at the bottom left of the page to create new or manage existing folders.

Your existing folders will automatically convert to the new format.

In addition to the new look and feel, we’ve added functionality that allows you to copy and delete messages. To do so, check the box beside a message or messages and then select the Delete or Copy button. Bronto will the prompt you to confirm the action, as shown in the screenshots below.

The new interface also provides 3 quick folder views for managing your messages:

• The Outgoing folder (shown below) lists messages that you have queued to deliver. To cancel a queued message, select it by checking the box to the left and then click the Delete button.
• The Recently Sent folder provides a chronological list of sent messages.
• The Recently Edited folder orders messages by the last date edited, beginning with the most recently edited message.

New Site Name Feature

Use the Site Name feature to customize the “from” address - sitename@reply.bronto.com - for messages sent using the Reply Tracking/Domain Keys option and the login URL for Agency sub-accounts. For example, change the site name to reflect your company name - companyname@reply.bronto.com.

Given that the Site Name affects reply tracking and login URLs for Agency sub-accounts, you should use care when making any changes. We recommend that you decide on an appropriate Site Name and change only when necessary.

List Counts

Lastly, we’ve changed the contacts display on the Lists and Segments page to reflect only active contacts on the list or segment.

There will be moments of downtime between 10PM EST Wednesday night and 6AM EST Thursday morning while we move the new features into production. Tracking, web forms, and messages queued to send during this time will not be affected.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

Attachments are a frequent support inquiry and a worthy blog topic. While you can’t send attachments with Bronto messages as you would with Microsoft Outlook, you can create a virtual “attachment” by hyper-linking to a document in the body of your message.

First things first, here are a few reasons Bronto doesn’t allow attachments:

1. Attachments increase the size of your message. The larger the file size, the more susceptible your message becomes to a filter or an outright block. Also, ESPs (especially free ones like Hotmail, Yahoo etc) limit the size of emails it will accept and deliver to an inbox. A message with an attachment might not be delivered because it puts the recipient over their mailbox quota.
2. Attachments can’t be opened by all users. Not all people run the same operating system and/or use the same applications. Although they have the file, they might not be able to actually open it.
3. Attachments sometimes can raise red flags. Smart email users will sometimes choose not to open attachments from an unfamiliar source because of a potential virus and damage to their computer.
4. As we’ve already alluded, viruses spread through attachments. By choosing to not support attachments at all, we’re able to completely remove the virus risk for our customers.

Instead of an attachment in the typical sense, we recommend that you
“host” your “attachment” and link to it in the body of your message. Here’s why:

1. Linking to the document mitigates all of the potential delivery problems you might encounter with attachments.
2. Linking to the document enables you view the contacts that “open” the “attachment” via Bronto’s click-through tracking. Links to a .pdf or .doc work just like a link to a URL and thus will appear in your link tracking and click-through overlay reports.

Here’s how to do it. First, host image files, Word documents and PDFs on your SITE tab:

1. Go to the “hosting” sub tab under the “SITE” tab in your Bronto account.
2. Click the “browse” button to locate the file on your hard drive and then click OK.
3. Once the file is listed in the text box, click the “upload” button.
4. Once the upload is complete, you will see the file name in the list.

Now that your file is hosted, you can direct your contacts to view it through a hyperlink in a message (Please note this is only possible through rich text and not plain text):

1. Highlight the text you want to hyperlink (i.e. Please click HERE to view…).
2. On the rich text toolbar click the “Insert/Edit link” button (globe with chain link).
3. In the pop-up box, click the “browse server” button. A second new box will pop up that shows the contents of your “SITE” tab. Find the correct file and click on it.
4. That second pop up will close and you will see the URL text box populated with the link to your file. Click “OK”.

Now you have a link in your message that points users to the file that you’ve hosted online.

In conclusion, attachments can cause delivery problems and unnecessarily increase the size of your message. This is precisely why Bronto gives you 10MB of free hosting space with your account (additional space can be purchased). Remember, as with all messages, be sure to test and verify that all of your links work the way you want them to.

Bronto’s best practices webcasts will resume next Friday (9/8) at 2PM EST.

Designing For Email 101 will cover email marketing design best practices that will help you maximize message delivery and recipient impact.

Learn how message design can impact:

• Message Delivery: Clean code can mean good delivery. Poorly written code can mean spam filters.
• Message Consistency: Every ISP imposes different standards on the display of email messages. A poorly coded email might mean that some contacts will receive a distorted version of your message.
• Message Degradation: Proper design can ensure that your message will retain its format even if the recipient’s email client blocks images.

We’ll show examples of good and bad design and equip you with tangible takeaways that you can apply to your email marketing design.

Here are the details for the call:

• When: Friday September 8, 2PM EST
• Dial-in: 888-676-3315
• Conference ID: 23129
• Web Presentation: http://www.webdialogs.com/join/