Bronto Blog

Today is Bronto’s 5th birthday and we couldn’t be happier. We have green balloons and birthday ribbon festooning our office, a full slate of birthday activities, and, most importantly, a bevy of beloved Bronto customers that have made it all possible.We’ll add photos as the celebration rolls on. Thanks for helping us make it happen.

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1PM Update

We gathered for an 11:30 photo shoot and cake celebration. Joe - Bronto CEO - brought homemade cake and cupcakes that he claims to have baked himself, without “any help whatsoever”. The cupcakes were delicious, so I’m not so sure that Joe was telling the truth…

3:30PM UpdateBronto has hired a masseuse - Naomi - for the day. She’s been giving chair massages to the team all afternoon.

Highlight of the day so far - seeing the red ring around DJ’s face (from the massage bench) after his massage session.

My appointment is coming up in a few minutes…

Can everyone on your email marketing list make this statement? If not, then you shouldn’t be emailing them. This is true for two big reasons, the first of which is CAN-SPAM, enough said. The second is that your emails should be a service for your customers, a service they want. If you are emailing customers who don’t want to be on your list then you may be actively driving them away.

So how do we solve this problem? One other thing you can do is to send a re-subscription email out to those who haven’t been responding. It’s basically sending them an email that explicitly presents them with a unsubscribe link.

You don’t need to unsubscribe them automatically, but you give them the chance to remove themselves. So let’s go ahead and build out this email.

1. First let’s identify our audience, we want to send this email out to people who haven’t opened an email or clicked a link in while. Bronto users can easily do this on the Clean tab (within the Contacts tab). There you can create a list of contacts who have made no opens or clicks for the last X emails. There are a number of options for how far back this should go (see right); the counts shown on this page are a good guide for making your decision.
2. Now we need to craft an email. This contact hasn’t opened the email in some time, so the subject line needs to be compelling, for example you can term this as an invitation, “We’d like to invite you back.”
3. In the body the email should be relatively simple, with the standard look and feel of your mailings. The key information to place here is a link to your website and a reminder of the purpose and value of your mailing. Remember to place a manage subscription link within the body or directly refer to the unsubscribe link in the footer.

All of this empowers your customer to unsubscribe if your email is no longer relevant to them. If it is still relevant, it can help to re-engage with the customer. For those customers who continue to not open or click, it is advisable to remove these users from your list.

At the end of the day, you are best served to keep a clean list. Customers who are no longer interested will eventually grow annoyed by continued attempts to contact them via email. It’s tempting to keep around as many contacts as you can, but it’s the active, interested customers that you want to be reaching out to.

Update: There was a question about how to place the manage url into your message, you can make use of the %%!manage_url%% or %%!unsubscribe_url%% tags. You can easily place them in the message via the rich text editor by typing in some text for the link, highlighting that text, then click on the link button. Once in the link pop-up, select <other> for the protocol and then enter the token in the URL field.

If you have any questions about re-subscription emails, feel free to post a comment.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

I know there’s been a brief hiatus from posting here at Bronto. It’s been mostly due to my consumption of Eric’s time over the past few weeks. So let me introduce myself; I’m Adam Covati, a new Product Manager here at Bronto. I’ll be working with the rest of the Bronto team to keep the Big Bronto moving along. I’ll also be working hard to help make Bronto clients even better email marketers, which I know can be a daunting task in today’s email environment.

If you have any questions or topics you’d like to see addressed on the blog, please let me know; just leave a comment here in the blog.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto