Bronto Blog

I’ve always said that relevancy is key - it’s a major factor in recipient satisfaction. You need to know who your recipients are and what they want - no small task. Understanding this on a macro scale is a necessity for your business, but understanding each individual is where you need to be for email marketing.

In order to do this you will need to have data for your customers - accurate data. Once you have data for your customers you can start to segment them into meaningful groups. With your customers broken down into groups, you can begin to market to them on their own terms, which makes perfect sense, right?

Although getting that data can be tough, it’s maintaining it that’s the trick. The data that is creating relevant emails today will be creating stale, out of touch messages in a few weeks. You don’t want to send a renewal notice to some one who renewed their contract last week. So you not only need to identify and import useful data, you need to keep updating it - but how? Read the rest of this entry »

Bronto recently gave the old blog a facelift. One of the new features we added was a left navigation bar that included an “Ask the Expert” section (look to your left). Over the past two months, we’ve received many inquiries. Occasionally, we’ll pick one of the questions and dedicate a short blog post to answer it. Today is one such occasion.

An excerpt from a recent “Ask the Expert” question:

“How does this rate compare with that of my peers?”

The short answer is, “It depends.” When I provide clients with this answer, I pause, count to 3 in my head, and wait for their reply. It usually goes something like this: “Yeah, but…I mean…what are the averages?”

So, why does it depend?
Let’s say that your organization sends out 3 distinct campaigns per month (promotional, informational, educational). Would you expect the metrics to be the same for the 3 communications? What if they were targeted to 3 diverse demographic groups? Each message has a different goal, with different expectations; therefore, it’s unreasonable to assume that the metrics will be the same.

Read the rest of this entry »