Bronto Blog

Here’s Part III of IV of our series of posts regarding deliverability and open rates. With clean lists and solid subjects, it is now time to learn a bit more about the importance of a strong from name (alias) for your messages. (This one is short and sweet).

Like the subject line, the Alias is the other reason a subscriber opens your message. There are three main options for a strong Alias:

• Company Name: If a client recognizes your company name, they are more likely to open your message. Use it.
• Brand: If the message is specific to a recognizable brand, you may want to opt to use this instead.
• Individual Name: This can be effective if you have a company (celebrity) spokesperson or your CEO who is well known. Again, only use this option if your subscribers will recognize the name.

Clean lists, relevant subjects and the right “from names” (alias) leads us to the content of your message. Stay tuned for more…

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto

Our Client Services team has become so adept at helping our customers drive bottom line results through effective email marketing that they’ve all gotten a little big headed:

OK - not really. They’re actually a humble group of loyal servants devoted to our customers’ every need. We just made their faces big so that you could pick out the new ones, the chief of which is Carolyn Sparano. (Back row, 2nd from the left.)Carolyn, our new Director of Client Services, joined Bronto at the end of 2006 and comes to us with a plethora of experience in driving customer satisfaction. Prior to Bronto, she worked at Red Hat and, you guessed it, knew Joe and Chaz.

She has made a positive impact in a very short time. In an effort to provide faster response, Carolyn has re-organized and recruited new personnel to the team. (Welcome, Todd! Howdy, Nick! ‘Sup, Alison!). The re-energized Client Services team - affectionately known internally as “Sherpas” - have begun pro-actively calling our customers to provide actionable insights to help increase tracking numbers, improve deliverability and more effectively track email marketing ROI.

Keep your ears open and expect a call from us soon! If you’d rather not wait for us to call, fill out the Support form in your Bronto account and we’ll schedule a session.

We rolled out our new Complaint Policy this afternoon in a very well-attended webcast. A few points of note for those of you that were not able to attend:

• We’ve made the presentation slides available from the Home tab of your account. I encourage you to download the slides and take a quick walk through the main concepts when you have a few minutes.
• We’ve already updated the Complaint Policy in the FAQ to reflect the forthcoming changes. If you have questions about the policy, I suggest you start there first. (Just search the FAQ for “complaint policy” or click the “Email Complaint Policy” link under “Recommended Reading”.)
• We’ve already contacted the customers that will be affected immediately by the policy. If you haven’t heard from us, then your account is well within our acceptable threshold. (No news is good news!)
• Reminder - we’ll officially kick-off the new policy next Tuesday, March 13.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Our own Eric Boggs, Product Manager, chimes in on the HTML rendering issue in Outlook 2007:

Mr. Boggs said testing should be considered along with an execution plan that focuses on who the message is targeting.

“It really depends on the prevalence of the client,” Mr. Boggs said. “Business-to-business marketers in particular should pay special attention to Outlook 2007, but consumer marketers may not need to spend too much time focusing on it.”

Read the complete article.

Joe Colopy
Founder and CEO of Bronto

Our March Update will go live during the wee hours of tonight. You’ll log in tomorrow and automatically enjoy the benefits of the aforementioned new features.

Note that there will be a period of downtime overnight while we make the changes. During this time, mail will not send and we will not collect contacts via website forms. Mail queued to send during this time will send once the application is restored.

Also - don’t forget that we’re also launching our new complaint policy a week from tomorrow on March 13. If you haven’t already, make sure to read the policy documentation that we’ve made available in the Home tab in your account.

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