Bronto Blog

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.

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Big changes are happening at Bronto. We are changing our pricing model to the more standard CPM pricing and tiering our product into multiple editions.

We’ve been looking at this change for over a year and have been very focused on it for the last three months. Of course, transitioning over 750 customers from one pricing scheme to another is no easy task so we’ll be working to migrate them slowly over the rest of 2008.

So, here is what’s happening:

CPM Pricing

For the last five years, we have priced our clients’ subscriptions by the number of the contacts stored in the application (i.e., list size.) This worked great in the early days because we primarily had small business-to-business customers. As we grew and our business and product became more sophisticated, we attracted more sophisticated clients that sent at higher volumes. Since list size mattered less and sending capacity mattered more to them, the model became tougher to match with our clients’ needs and trickier to manage operationally.

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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

The Engineering and Product teams have been hard at work and are ready to unveil the Bronto Summer Release. The new release will be going live Sunday, August 26, 2007.

This release is relatively minor and focuses on message reporting and tracking. Here are some of the highlights:

• New look for the message reporting page.
• Improved formulas (or is it formulae!) for open and click-through rates.
• More detailed bounce reporting. Read more…
• New message performance metrics - clicked/opened and converted/clicked. Read more…

More details await! We will be sending out a complete release description this Friday. Also, plan on attending the official Summer Release webcast Wednesday, August 22nd at 1:00 PM EST. To attend, go to http://webdialogs.com/join and enter the Conference ID 71280; Audio available at 888-676-3315 , Conference ID 71280.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

Bronto is including a few new metrics on the Message Tracking Reports page. Let’s take a few minutes to go over what they mean and how they can help improve your marketing.

Clicks/Opens helps marketers more easily and accurately understand the performance of the email body. This specific statistic tells you the percentage of those who opened your message to also click a link. It’s important to look at click stats in this way, because if you compare click rates between two messages having different open rates, you are comparing apples to oranges.

Let’s look at an example: two messages, A and B, both sent to 1,000 customers. Message A has an open rate of 55% and a click rate of 30%; message B has a 40% open rate and a 25% click rate. At first glance it’s clear message A had a better click through rate, and, in fact, more people did click through. Viewed in its entirety, message A was more effective at driving people to your site.

However, if you want to analyze the effectiveness of your copy and creative (the body of your message), we have to look a little deeper. We want to know what percentage of people who actually saw the message body also clicked. This is what clicks/opens shows us. In this example the clicks/opens rate for A is 55% and for B it’s actually 63%. Comparing the two messages, we can see that Message B actually had a more compelling body. It may have been a better call to action or a better offer, but we know the message body performed better.

Looking at the Converted / Clicks metric, you’ll find a similar story. Again we are trying to get a better
understanding of how one individual aspect of this process has performed. The Converted/Clicks metric tells us how good our flow is from the landing page to the point of conversion - comparing multiple emails will help weed out bad landing pages. Looking at your Converted/Clicks metric across emails, in conjunction with web analytics data, can help you to improve the process you have in place for converting contacts.

With this information in hand you are now equipped to better analyze and improve your email marketing efforts. Enjoy!

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto