Bronto Blog

Imagine the following (very real) scenario:

Your boss sends you a file that includes 50,000 email addresses. You import the list into your account (merging it with the rest of your house file) and “blast away.” Within minutes your IP address is blocked at several major ISPs.

What went wrong? All 50,000 email addresses are customers who’ve purchased in the past and opted-in. Upon sign up, you included a link to your privacy policy. You even have another file that lists the date and IP address associated with each opt-in. So, what happened?

On the surface, it appears that you’ve done it all by the book. You’ve satisfied the law (read: CAN-SPAM). You’re not a spammer. Why did this happen, if these are your customers?

Upon analyzing these subscribers, you uncover the following information about the 50,000 emails in the file:

• 50% purchased over a year ago, but haven’t received an email since that first purchase.
• 25% purchased in the past 6 months, but haven’t received an email since that first purchase.
• 25% are repeat buyers (their last purchase < 1 month ago), but haven’t received an email in 6 months Read the rest of this entry »

As a support associate here at Bronto, I not only help to support our clients, but I do my part to support my fellow Brontos as well. One of the things that I am responsible for is testing all of Bronto’s marketing emails in the major email clients, just to be absolutely certain that our messages are being seen as they are meant to be.

All in all, this is a fairly simple task – send a test message to a number of people in our office who use the different email clients, and make sure it looks like it is intended to look. However, a couple of computers always gave me problems, both of them used Outlook 2007, and both of them mangled our normally nice looking emails. To add to the mystery, the two bad seeds would break the messages in totally different ways.

All of the other instances of Outlook 2007 in our office rendered the message just fine, so we would normally chalk it up to a setting on the computer that was making the messages render incorrectly. Some people may be able to walk away from a situation like this; I am not one of those people. This would not stand… not on my watch.

I decided to do some research and testing to see what exactly was causing this error. I settled down with the two machines to see what I could find. I looked through all of the settings that I thought could be causing the issue in Outlook 2007, but even with all of the settings the same, the messages still did not render correctly. This is when I noticed the two computers side by side just didn’t look the same, everything was much bigger on one and much smaller on the other, and this led me to check the graphics settings, which in turn led me straight to the culprit… the DPI setting.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve crafted a dynamic, relevant landing experience for your prospects based on their search criteria, now what? As you drive them to convert, regardless of acquisition model, the question remains…”How do you keep them engaged post-click?” Email marketing is an excellent way to communicate to your search engine marketing prospects with a highly relevant, engaging campaign. Consider the following:

• Including an email opt-in throughout the conversion cycle. Adding this small piece to a form, or through banner presence, will allow you multiple opportunities in the future to connect. Allowing preference management will also ensure that you deliver the most relevant email campaigns.

• Adding a transactional message post acquisition that includes cross-sell and up-sell opportunities as well as introduces new content or product, while reinforcing your brand. Read the rest of this entry »

In a few weeks we will be coming out with our Spring 2008 Release. We’re quite excited to be providing some new features that will help to provide a higher degree of relevancy in your messages and a higher ROI in general - which we all like.

Look forward to: Automated Messages, improved message scheduling workflow, a new calendar to help you better visualize how your email marketing calendar is shaping up, and more.

To be honest, I’m most excited about our new email automation features, so I thought I could take advantage of this blog post to expound on that a bit more…

Automation - it’s the panacea of the 21st century. The idea of robots doing our laundry, meals preparing themselves, and other Jetsonian wonders seem to be attainable goals. But as we approach the seemingly futuristic date of 2010 we haven’t achieved those wonders yet. However, there’s no need to fret as we have seen some advances in the world of automation. In this blog post I’ll focus on one of these advances: marketing automation.

For many of us there isn’t enough time in the day to get our marketing out the door, never mind fine tuning and growing out our marketing calendar. So, please welcome with open arms email automation, your time saver and new best friend.

Email automation allows you to execute on a campaign once and reap the benefits for weeks, months, or even years. By creating an automated message that keys off of recipient information you can easily send messages to people at the most relevant and impactful time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bronto is very focused on developing our email marketing product for online retailers. Why? We strongly believe that email marketing segmentation, analytics and reporting are significant drivers of online revenue.

The latest research from Shop.org, the online retail arm of the National Retail Foundation, and Forrester seems to agree with us. Recently, they published the “The State of Online Retailing 2008″and according to the report, email marketing continues to be one of the most successful marketing program for retailers. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

• Email marketing remains a top marketing priority for retailers in 2008.
• Email marketing is widely used among online retailers (92%) to market to their own customers. Over 93% of these retailers plan on making it a higher priority in the upcoming year
• The typical retailer in the survey expects to spend $311,634 this year sending emails to its own list of customers. Read the rest of this entry »