Bronto Blog

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

Bounce messages really aren’t much fun, but they are an important aspect of email marketing. It’s important you review your bounce counts to ensure you‘re not having issues with your list or messages. So in my review today I figured I’d try to make it a little more interesting - let’s look at bounces in light of a summer favorite, ice cream.

We’ll start with some common ground. There are two types of bounces, and, similar to ice cream, they are hard or soft; also like ice cream, soft is usually better for you. Of course it’s not as simple as that - there are many different flavors of bounce. You can get an Invalid User, Mailbox Full, Server Busy, Mailbox Currently Suspended, and many more.

Are you getting hungry yet? Well, making your flavor choice just got harder. Each Internet Service Provider, or ISP, has their own way of returning a bounce message, like variations in ice cream flavors. So just as Moose Tracks may vary slightly from one shop to the next, AOL and Yahoo! don’t return identical Invalid Account messages.

So where does this leave you? You just wanted a sweet treat on a hot August afternoon. There’s no need to worry; we’ve gone through and classified the variations for you. In Bronto’s upcoming update to the Message Tracking Report, we break down both hard and soft bounces into three types: Account, Connection, and Spam issues. This will show you if the bounce message is due to your contacts, a connection issue, or your message.

If you find that you are receiving a large number of contact issues then you have a lot of invalid contact e-mail messages and need to assess your registration gathering methods. For those of you with lofty Spam Identification numbers, you should take a long, hard look at your messages, because they are looking spam-like to a lot of ISPs. You shouldn’t see too much in terms of connection issues; those are due to target mail servers being busy or not accessible, and there isn’t much you can do about it. But, if you were to see connection issues, you’d at least know it wasn’t your messages or your subscribers at fault.

You can see how breaking bounce messages into something more granular than Hard and Soft can really help to demystify them. I hope you now understand bounce messages a bit better and that you appreciated the sprinkles I added as well.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

We’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on an upcoming release; this time we’re updating the Message Tracking reports. What does this mean? Well, for starters, we’ve added a summary at the top of the report giving you an at-a-glance review of the KPIs for your email. Not only does it have your tried and true Delivered, Opens, Clicks, and Conversions, it also has some new stats such as ‘Clicked / Opens’ and ‘Converted / Clicks’. These stats really help you get a bead on how well your contacts are converting between each step in the process. To echo that, and perhaps make it even clearer, we’ve updated the graph to better represent the funneling effect, it’s now a, wait for it… Funnel! Check back for more information about other improvements and screenshots in the coming weeks.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto