Bronto Blog

At Bronto, we are always working to bring you the best tools for email marketing. We know that it’s easier to get your job done if you have all the right tools and information at hand. That’s why many Brontos are members of different email and tech organizations, such as the EEC, Marketing Profs, Email Marketing Club, DMA, TIMA, and Refresh.

In support of the last group mentioned, Bronto will be hosting a meeting of our local Refresh group on Thursday January 24th.

Refresh is a community of designers/developers working to refresh the
creative, technical, & professional culture of new media endeavors
in their areas through design, technology, usability, and standards.

This is a great chance for Brontos (and anyone else in the area) to meet up with some people who make up the local tech/designer culture here in the Triangle - for those of you not familiar to our area, ‘The Triangle‘ is how we refer to the Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, NC area. If you aren’t local to the Triangle and this sounds interesting, then please check out refreshingcities.org to see if there is one near you.
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Two days before Halloween 2007, BrontoFire was Born. In the middle of November, we took it live. Last month, we debated the merits of a good “From Name.” Earlier today, Kimberly and I hunkered down in the green room and went back and forth on how 4 well-known online retailers promote (or hide) email sign-ups on their website. The results…
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Lessons Learned from Bronto’s Marketing Team:
Multi-Channel, Part 2 in a Series

2007 was a year of testing for Bronto’s marketing team. Our goal was to create successful campaigns across multiple channels. Multi-channel marketing is becoming more and more significant to customer life cycle management. Reaching customers or prospects can no longer be accomplished using one tactic. Your respondents may react to a campaign online but may not respond to a direct marketing piece. It’s important to create a plan that has fluidity and test to see what performs in each market.
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It’s been a while since I posted, and with good reason, I’ve been hard at work on the Bronto Winter 2008 Release. Well I’m happy to announce that our Winter 2008 Release went live over the weekend!

This release brought in some great improvements to contact fields, not only did we introduce several new field types, including various numbers and dates, on top of that we also made Direct Update available.

Direct Update is an powerful new feature that allows you to easily update any contact’s fields directly from a web page. Don’t have time or resources for a full-on integration? No problem, you can still capture running totals of purchases, record webinar sign-up dates, update preferences, anything really - with just a little snippet of HTML.

We also streamlined the sending of test messages, it’s even easier and more flexible. You can easily select a list to send to, pop a few addresses in by hand, or do both. These messages are also more clearly marked in your sent messages listing, allowing for better insight into your testing practices.

There’s more coming as well, we have a ’sister’ release coming in early February. I can’t reveal too much right now. However, I will say that we are introducing some exciting new pricing options, which include Google Analytics integration and a newly designed Agency Application with robust client reporting.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

Every email marketing manager is always searching for ways to grow their subscription file - this is a given. Many options and opportunities exist to grow your subscription file organically. Unfortunately some email marketers still struggle with purchasing permission based lists as a means to increase their mail file. By doing so they settle for a quick fix that really does not build a stable, viable and cost effective acquisition.

I think of the saying “good things come to those who wait” applies to smart email marketing managers who appreciate the logic and process of growing their subscription file organically over time and with well developed marketing efforts.

The opportunities to grow a healthy subscription file comprised of subscribers with true interests in your products, company, messaging… are only limited by the time you spend creating and implementing an effective Email Marketing Acquisition Plan.

Over the next few weeks I will create a series of blogs focusing on each of the following elements. Each element is critical to creating a thorough Email Marketing Acquisition Plan.
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