Bronto Blog

BrontoFire is live once again, focusing on the important role subscription landing pages play in forging an immediate relationship with subscribers.

DJ and I discuss the importance of utilizing this very effective email marketing tool to “sell” and ultimately “seal” the subscription.

Together we dive into how major brands are incorporating subscription landing pages and how some are missing a great opportunity to build a strong relationship right from the beginning. So, check out this new episode of BrontoFire and look forward to next month, when we analyze Welcome Messages with another live version of BrontoFire.

Kimberly Snyder and DJ Waldow
Account Managers at Bronto

What valuable insight can 3 young adults who were not even born when Ghost Busters or E.T. were originally released provide to email marketers?

Last week, MediaPost hosted the Email Insider Summit on Captiva Island, FL. Close your eyes and imagine 150 email experts - people who spend a significant portion of their day thinking about email - sequestered on a remote Florida island for 72-hours. (Ok. Open your eyes now. Back to the real world.) Over 3 days, we dissected the email ecosystem, discussed industry insights, swapped best practices, deliberated over the new FTC CAN-SPAM regulations, debated co-registration and list rental, recapped the current state of the industry and speculated about the role email will have in the future.

One of the most intriguing panels at the Summit - Next Generation: Does Email Have a Future? - involved these 3 extremely well-spoken, intelligent students from Ball State University (BSU). For over an hour, the entire room was captivated by three people with a combined age of less than 60.

Is Facebook For Real?
The panelists began by talking about IM and texting; however, the discussion quickly turned to Facebook. August Miller, a Junior at BSU, said that he has a Facebook tab open at all times. His day starts and ends with Facebook. Amanda Pollard, a graduating BSU Senior, believes that “social networking is less professional.” She said that there is something fundamentally different about email; “it’s more professional.” Brandon Prebynski, a 2nd year graduate student at BSU, said he is more hesitant to open email than check a social networking site. According to Brandon, social networking is more fun; email is secondary. He thinks of email as “usually advertising, but not just to say hi; that is reserved for Facebook.” Brandon admits he uses Facebook whenever there is a free moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Grow Organically It Is So Worth The Wait: Part 3 in a Series

Marketing your subscription buttons on every page of your site is the first step in capturing a new subscriber’s email address. The second step is creating a compelling subscription landing page. The subscription landing page gives every email marketer the opportunity to sell subscribers on signing up and more importantly staying subscribed. Too often email marketers overlook this critical tool, essential to creating a strong foundation, by not implementing all the enclosed components or not utilizing a subscription landing page at all (many don’t currently offer this feature).

Consumers want, like and simply deserve to be provided exactly what they can expect and how often from a specific company’s email marketing program.

Providing the following expectations upfront will enable consumers to anticipate and accept your messages by knowing what they will be sent and when – keeping your subscribers informed rather than uniformed is to your benefit. The enclosed subscription landing page from RalphLauren.com incorporates the following elements seamlessly:

• Thanks the subscriber for showing interest and joining their email marketing efforts – the subscriber is welcomed immediately by the brand:

Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I detailed the testing I did to find out why some of our messages were consistently breaking on Outlook 2007 machines and discovered an issue with DPI settings. If the display settings were set to use a DPI other than the default of 96, the message would render improperly. At the end of that post, I said that I would continue my research….

I tested two methods to fix the rendering issues - I have not found a conclusion yet. Hopefully detailing these tests will save you some time and frustration.

Percentage based widths

I attempted to convert the Bronto News to use percentages instead of pixels to define the widths of the sections in the hope that this would provide a fluid layout rather than fixed. The layout looked just fine in Thunderbird, but Outlook 2007 failed to render it properly and showed the same results as last time.

Images using width/height CSS attributes

A comment left by Alex Foley on the previous post mentioned that it might be the images that are throwing off the layout because Outlook 2007 may be rendering pixels differently for image files than for the rest of the HTML. I thought that I would give this a try until I discovered that Outlook 2007 does not support width and height CSS attributes. Scratch that one off for now as well. This could be a working solution, but we won’t know until Outlook 2007 supports these attributes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the FTC approved several new rule provisions under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Read the press release or download the full article (PDF). If you don’t have time to sort through the comments and legalese, below is a brief overview.

These new provisions were included largely to clarify the meanings of and intents of existing rules, so not too much has changed. There were a few clarifications that dealt more with the technicalities of the Act; however, there are two main changes to concentrate on. One of the biggest additions was an augmentation to ensure that subscribers could easily remove themselves from your list, which we’ve paraphrased here:

“…an e-mail recipient cannot be required to…take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message..

This means even more diligence is required when managing replies. You, as the sender, must include a valid reply-to address and read/respond to replies often. Also, avoid reply-to’s such as “donotreply@” or “noreply@”. It is essential to honor unsubscribe requests when subscribers ask to be removed via replying to your email. Additionally, avoid the dreaded “DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.” For more details, read the BrontoFire episode, “Don’t Hide That Unsubscribe” (look under the TurboTax section).

Read the rest of this entry »