Bronto Blog

The third installment of our Customer Success Webcast Series goes live on Thursday, December 7th at 2PM EST.

The December edition will spotlight Bronto customer Transamerican Auto Parts, the oldest and largest online auto parts provider. Transamerican sells various auto parts and accessories through various online properties, including 4wheelparts.com, 4wheeldrive.com and Performanceproducts.com, and a large network of retail locations.

The webcast will outline Transamerican’s strategies for managing large email lists, building complex segments, and driving online and offline sales through targeted email marketing communications.

Adam and I just wrapped up a practice call with Chris and Sanjee at Transamerican. These guys run a great email marketing program - you don’t want to miss what they have to say!

Eric

Bronto held our inaugural Bronto Customer Advisory Board (B-CAB) meeting yesterday afternoon.

We created the B-CAB in order to facilitate ongoing communication between
Bronto leadership and our customers. Quite simply, the board is a
manifestation of one of our guiding principles - “We don’t drive our business, our customers do.”

To that end, we spent nearly 90 minutes yesterday digging into board member feedback from topics ranging from feature suggestions, product communications, support and education programs, and upcoming projects to the music/talk/screaming kids they listen to during their morning commute.

All in all, the call was a great success - we had lively participation, insightful feedback, and interesting ideas from all of our board members. I’ll spend the next few weeks lining up follow-up calls with our board members and assessing ways to blend their insights into our future product development plans.

Last week was a pretty typical week at Bronto:

• Directors meeting first thing Monday morning.
• Countless sales deals closed, customer problems solved, lines coded, etc.
• Team lunch and learn on Thursday.
• Impromptu karaoke blow-out on Thursday afternoon.
• Friday evening beers downstairs at Tyler’s.

Oh yeah - the impromptu karaoke blow-out? Perhaps we should qualify that…

OK - so we really can’t qualify it. We just had karaoke on a Thursday. It happens sometimes.

Words can’t convey the Mick Jagger strutting, David Lee Roth preening, Axl Rose shrieking, Don McClean droning, Lynyrd Skynyrd twangin’ and overall rock star ‘tude displayed by the Bronto team, so the pictures will have to suffice:

DJ and Eric kicked off the jams with a train wreck duet of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. DJ crooned the whimsical “Turnarounds…” while Eric managed to supply the punchy “Every now and then I get a little bit…”

Joe sang the chorus for “American Pie” - all 100 times - and muddled through the rest of the verses admirably. (Does anyone really know all of the lyrics and phrasing for “American Pie”?)

Haley and Liz did Skynyrd quite well. Though everyone sparked lighters and pleaded, they would not encore with “Freebird”.

Matt stole the show with his over-the-top performance of Van Halen’s “Jump”. He ripped a whole in his pants sliding across the floor on his knees. No joke. He seriously rocked it.

Chaz closed the night by leading a sing-along of “We Are Family”.

We wrapped up the documentation for the new template features set to go live tomorrow morning. Take a look to learn the details necessary to design your own custom templates.

We pulled some of the more relevant FAQs for the new template features from the product documentation and included them in a single blog post for your convenience.

Thanks.

The Bronto Team

Does the new template framework impact my existing custom templates?

No – your existing custom templates will continue to work, no problem.

However, note that the previous mechanism of using <ins> tags to define template blocks is deprecated with this update. Going forward, you will need to code your custom template(s) according
to the new framework.

Also, if you wish to extend a template to include the new repeatable
sections feature, you will need to re-code the template according to
the new framework and upload the new template to your account.

Download our Template Documentation for a complete overview of the new framework.

What is the new repeatable section feature?

Sections are areas in the template that the user can clone in order to extend the template to accommodate additional content.

For example, a newsletter template may be coded to have a repeatable section containing a section header and a section body, with each header/body section designed to represent a “story” for the newsletter. This type of design would allow the end-user can clone the section as many times as necessary to accommodate the story sections for the newsletter.

How do I manipulate repeatable sections?

Repeatable sections are denoted in the template UI with a dotted red outline and a green “add” icon in the upper-right corner that allows the user to clone the section.

After clicking the green “add” icon to clone a section, you will be able to add new content to the new section that appears beneath the section you chose to clone. You can reorder or delete sections by using the “up”, “down”, and “delete” icons as shown below.

What does the Outline tab provide?

The Outline tab lists all template blocks, provides a link to edit each block, and provides a preview of the content in each block. In some cases, you may prefer to add/edit content via this mechanism as opposed to the inline mechanism on the Edit tab.

To do so, click the Edit icon to the right of each block. This will launch a new window that will allow you add/edit content for the block.

The Outline tab lists all template blocks in the order that they appear in the template, as shown below:

What does the Preview tab provide?

The Preview tab displays a preview of your template that reflects the current content of each block.

You can toggle between Edit, Outline, and Preview without losing your work. Bronto saves your work automatically.

How does the new functionality impact Bronto’s default templates?

We’re glad that you asked! We - or more accurately, Todd - re-coded the majority of our default templates to include the new repeatable sections feature. Plus, we’ve added more color selections for many of the default templates.

Going forward, you will be able to add, remove, and re-order sections when you create or edit messages that use Bronto’s default templates. Any existing messages that refer to default templates will not be affected by the change.

Also, note that not all of the default templates will have repeatable sections. For example, we designed some of the templates in the “Creatives” to only have one section.

What are the primary differences between the new framework and the previous framework?

The update includes the following changes:

• We’ve deprecated the the previous mechanism of using <ins> tags to define template blocks. Note that templates built in this framework will still work, but that, going forward, you will need to build any new templates according to the new framework.
• We’ve deprecated the order tag. Going forward, blocks are automatically ordered according to the order they are included in the template HTML code.
• We’ve added linked as an optional attribute that you can use to create linked template blocks. This attribute is useful for repeated content within the template, such as a date or section headings included in both the message table of contents and the message body.
• We’ve added link as a type for the display attribute. The link type allows you to specify the text and URL for an <a href> tag.
• Lastly, we’ve changed the way you name templates. Instead of naming the template with a <meta> tag, you can name it when you upload it.