Bronto Blog

A recent article on MarketingSherpa.com caught our attention: BellSouth customers can no longer receive HTML emails. Sometime in January, BellSouth altered its filtering system, only allowing text-only messages to reach inboxes.

While BellSouth customers may not comprise a large percentage of your contacts, it might be worth a few extra steps to stay in touch with them. To do so, start by segmenting anyone with a BellSouth email address onto a separate list. Compose a text-only version of your message and send it to the new BellSouth-only list. It’s that easy.

As MarketingSherpa points out, changes like these should motivate you to perform regular audits of your undeliverable list; finding an abnormal amount of hard bounces from a particular ISP could indicate an underlying problem.

If you have questions about segmenting or auditing your undeliverable report, submit a ticket from within your account to contact the Bronto Support team. We are always here to help.

In our ongoing effort to make Bronto clients better marketers, we have introduced new concepts, new policies, and mucho Best Practices. As you can see, all of these things are geared towards increasing deliverability and reducing the number of complaints - both good for you as email marketers.

Today’s Tip: Make sure that you are checking your “reply-to” inbox often and manually unsubscribing contacts per their comments. Failing to effectively honor these requests can lead to complaints, which can impact your deliverability. (Remember: complaints are bad!)

Bronto helps you reduce complaints by automatically unsubscribing contacts that click “Report Spam” via a feedback loop as well if a contact clicks on the unsubscribe link in the footer. However, sometimes a contact replies directly to a Bronto message and writes, “Please Remove Me,” “TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST!!!!”, or some less-than-friendly comment indicating they no longer wish to be on your list. Bronto does not unsubscribe these contacts automatically.

As always, do not hesitate to contact a member of the Client Services Team if you would like to discuss further.

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto

Here are a few screenshots and details for the features in our forthcoming update. Look for these to go live Tuesday morning, March 6.

Also - don’t forget that our new complaint policy will launch a week after the update on March 13.

Let us a know if you have any questions or comments.

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New Home Tab

We’ve added a number of helpful features and stats on the Home tab, including quick links to common features and additional message reporting:

Support Ticket History

In addition to submitting new cases, you will be able to view a history of all of your open and closed cases and have the ability to add new comments to any open, ongoing cases. (Note that this feature will only display cases that have been submitted through the support form in Bronto.)

All of your previous and existing cases will automatically appear in your account. Click the “Support” link the top-right header to access your cases.

Background Activities

Bronto does a lot of work behind the scenes. For example, when you import a list or build a segment, Bronto does all of the processing work in the background while you keep working. Once we’re done, we notify you of the completed activity. (Think of the yellow “your import is complete!” notifications…)

With the forthcoming update, you will receive notification of any processing activities on the Home tab:

…and you will have visibility to the queue of processing background activities. Note that we’ll provide a estimated time remaining - this should be a helpful feature for those of you that import huge data files with hundreds of thousands of contacts.

Reports

Beginning with this update, all downloadable reports will first “generate” through a background activity before they are made available for download. This change allows Bronto to scale our overall speed and performance and also enables us to provide quick, reliable downloads regardless of file size.

After you click to download a report to a .csv file - a detailed tracking reports or a contact list, for example - you will be prompted to generate the report as shown below:

Click “generate” to begin processing the report. Once the report is ready, we’ll notify via the friendly yellow alerts you’re already familiar with, plus via email if you completed the optional email field. The notification (and the email) will contain a link to access the downloadable report.

We’ll also provide a list of all of the reports that you’ve requested in the past 10 days so that you can come back to download report files as often as necessary.

Delivery Throttling

Set the delivery rate for your message to ensure optimal deliverability. Learn more about this feature in our previous post about throttling…and ketchup.