Bronto Blog

New to the Bronto Blog? New to RSS? Check out this video for a great primer on RSS and why you should use it to read our blog.

A quick note - the video fails to highlight that you actually don’t have to use a separate RSS reader. The latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox have RSS readers built right in to the browser. If you’re using one of these browsers - which you probably are - you can simply click the orange RSS icon or RSS feed link and your browser will prompt you with the steps to subscribe to the feed.

(Having said that, I MUCH prefer using a feed reader. I use NetNewsWire.)

Enjoy!

Eric

Bronto Product Manager Eric Boggs authored an article on E-Commerce Times that outlines the email marketing impact of Outlook 2007:

“Unfortunately for e-mail designers and marketers, Outlook 2007 is going to cause a few unavoidable headaches. Luckily, they’re of the low-grade, “I-ate-my-ice-cream-too-fast” variety and easy to address with a little awareness and a few design adjustments.”

Read the full article.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple weeks chatting with customers - including our Customer Advisory Board - about the metrics they they use to measure their performance. Specifically, we’ve sought examples in which our customers look beyond Bronto’s standard metrics (delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, etc.) to create their own tracking benchmarks.

Here are a few of the ideas that we’ve found most interesting:

• Revenue/Recipient - Online retailers and other conversion-driven customers may benefit from this type of measurement. Take the total revenue from a message or campaign and then divide it by the number of contacts that receive the message. This method is helpful because it smooths out any outliers - such as a large conversion - and yields a number that you can follow over time. Plus - there is no better way to demonstrate the value of email marketing to your boss or client than to tie an actual (and accurate!) dollar value to the contacts that you manage.
• Clicks/Opens - We actually incorporate this measurement in our Reporting Groups feature. We divide the total clicks by the total opens to find the percentage of contacts that clicked on a link after opening the message. This number is helpful for assessing the “stickiness” of your message. In other words, does the content of the messaging effectively entice “the click” on a consistent basis?
• Page Views/Recipient - If your bottom line is tied to the number of ads you serve, then it makes sense to track the impact that email marketing can have on your aggregate page views. You can get to this number either by using Bronto’s Clickstream Tracking feature or by blending metrics from Bronto and your site analytics platform. Again, this is a number than you can track over time and that should yield some insight into the quality of your content, specifically with any targeted landing pages.

These are just a few of the ideas that have come out of our conversations. Let us know if you have a similar “homemade” metric or if you have any thoughts on reporting in general. We’re always looking for ways that we can make it easier for you to measure your performance!

More new features are coming your way on April 11, including an oft-requested addition to Reporting Groups and a new Unsubscribe message page. Read on for the scoop.

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

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Reporting Groups

We’ve added a feature that will make it easier to add multiple deliveries to a Reporting Group.

To access the feature, click the “Recently Sent” view on the Messages tab and select the deliveries that you wish to add to a group. Click the “Add to Reporting Group” button and Bronto will prompt you to choose a group as illustrated below.

Note that this feature is only available on the Recently Sent view on the Messages tab and will only appear if you have already created a Reporting Group in your account.

Unsubscribe Message Page

The new Unsubscribe message page enables you to provide your contacts a simple, direct mechanism to unsubscribe from your account.

Unlike the Manage Preferences page, the Unsubscribe page does not include profile information and does not allow contacts to modify their list preferences. Instead, they may only use this page to completely unsubscribe from your account. Many Bronto users may find this method preferable to the more complex Manage Preferences page.

In fact, we suggest that you consider providing both the Unsubscribe and Manage Preference pages in your messages. By offering both options - “Manage your profile” or “Unsubscribe” - you clarify the purpose of each link and provide a simpler experience for the recipient.

To use the feature, you should first customize the page on the Site tab - click on the Landing Pages sub-tab and then note the new option in the Messages Pages block. Like other messages pages and web forms, you have the ability to embed your logo, customize the CSS on the page, add additional text to the page, and more.

Once you’ve customized the page, you can make it available to your contacts. To add a link to the unsubscribe page in your message, link to the merge tag %%!unsubscribe_url%% in a message or, preferably, in your message footer(s). Here is an example construct:

<a href=”%%!unsubscribe_url%%”>Click here to unsubscribe.</a>

This will provide a link to the unsubscribe page. After clicking the link to unsubscribe, the message recipient must confirm their desire to unsubscribe as follows:

After the user clicks to unsubscribe, they will land on a page that confirms their action and provides a mechanism to submit an unsolicited email complaint - just like the existing process with the Manage Preferences page.

A few key points regarding the new Unsubscribe page feature:

• Your recipients can still unsubscribe through the Manage Preferences page. The Unsubscribe page simply provides you another unsubscribe option that you can choose to include in your messages.
• If you send a message that does not contain a Manage Preferences or Unsubscribe link, Bronto will automatically append an Unsubscribe link in your message. (Previously, the application appended a Manage Preferences link.)
• Lastly - a tip. We strongly recommend that you use Footers to take advantage of this functionality. Much like a signature in your personal email, you can customize your footer(s) with an Unsubscribe link and any other relevant information, such as your postal address. Once you’ve set up a footer, you can re-use it with numerous messages.

Landing Page Design Tab Consolidation

We consolidated some of the landing page design options on the Design tab. Most notably, we created separate blocks for CSS code and confirmation page settings. The functionality here is the same - we just re-grouped a few features to simplify the process.

User Information

Lastly, the forthcoming release will require additional contact information for all users - both new and existing - in your account. We will require first name, last name, email address, and phone number.

As illustrated below, this information will automatically associate “you” with any cases that you create through our support form and will help us communicate back to you with greater speed and accuracy.

Because this is a new requirement, all users will be prompted and required to provide this information upon their next login. You will only need to go through this additional step once.

Today marks the launch of Bronto’s technology blog, bronto.tech().

In addition to securing Bronto’s status as a “2 blog company”, bronto.tech() provides a behind the scenes look at the people, technologies and engineering wizardry that drive our product growth and performance. This blog will be a great resource for developers that:

• build applications using the Bronto API.
• build email marketing applications.
• are interested in working at Bronto.

A word of warning - some the content of this blog is not for the faint of heart. For example:

NuSOAP deserializes WSDL complexType as an associative array while PHP-SOAP deserializes complexType to an object of stdClass. In PHP-SOAP, you can also specify a ‘classmap’ instantiation option that will allow you to have complexTypes deserialized to custom classes though you have to manually generate the custom classes (other non-PHP SOAP implementations automatically create the classes).

I openly admit that I have no earthly idea what this means. However, I’m proud to say that I work with (and sit beside!) very smart people that do.

Read bronto.tech().