Bronto Marketing Platform

"Endless customization + excellent support"

Pros: Bronto offers a sophisticated email marketing platform that allows very complex segmentation, A/B testing capabilities and workflow triggers to automate campaigns. Templates provide quick-start opportunities, while there is also the option to get fancy with dynamic content. The live chat support team and account managers are very knowledgable, highly available and provide excellent guidance.

Cons: The message design interface can be a little restrictive for message styling, unless you are working in CSS.
Opening a more intensive support case can take a week or longer to resolve.
The pop-up manager is a bare bones app.

"Evolving platform with strong customer support and accessible features"

Comments: My experience with Bronto was always positive. 6 years ago, when I began using it at a company acquired by Fandango, it was the best platform at creating sophisticated customer segments and personalized automated campaigns. Fast forward 5 years when I came back to it at a new role at DIFF Eyewear, I saw how it evolved and improved. Revenue tracking, site integration, deployment speed and the ui all improved significantly within the platform.

Pros: - Customer care team is top notch
- Segmentation is fast and easy even with databases containing over 2mm subs
- Deployment time improved greatly over the last 5 years
- Easy-to-use journey builder with drag and drop tools
- Exporting stats and reports is also fast and easy compared to many other ESPs
- Owned by Oracle and strongly supported by mother organization
- Competitively prices
- Integrates natively with many other 3rd party platforms, e-commerce shops and content management systems

Cons: - Like most platforms, there is a learning curve to understand all if its features, but they offer online learning, documentation and hand-held tutorials.

"Very expensive platform with poor support and missing features"

Comments: Poor. Bronto is very expensive with very poor support and service. Their business model appears to revolve around how they can get the most amount of money possible out of the customer with add ons, missing features, support, integration etc. We were forced to do a finance agreement, instead of monthly payments for the year. I understand now, why they did this, as I would have disputed and stopped paying when their service stopped working. However, now we have no choice.

Pros: Not much. The email design interface is basic at best. The user interface is clunky. Most of the advanced features never worked for us or worked for a very brief period of time, like until we upgraded our shopping cart, then they wanted more money for implementation and support again.

Cons: Expensive with lots of nickel and diming. The sales rep promised the world, however when it came time to implement these, it never happened. We ended up using Bronto as a really (REALLY) expensive version of Mailchimp. We make very clear exactly what we needed and were given a crash course in the software and implementation with an Indian support team. We made a change to our shopping cart and lost the connection and were charged for the entire implementation again. Features like cart recovery worked for a very brief period, then stopped and we were not able to get the support to get it to work again. Other advanced features like B2B marketing and trickle campaigns just never happened. Things like coupon codes, were part of our discussions all along but somehow left out fo the contract and we were hit with more fees and were never able to get it set up. They also don't tell you that you need an extra license (at your cost) in NetSuite to use Bronto. Initially they only included 1m emails, even though we never discussed a limit. They changed this to 4m, which was used up in 6 months. Now they want more money to continue to use it.

"Miss working with Bronto"

Comments: Overall, Bronto was the best ESP I have used for small-medium sized B2C businesses (~400 employees worldwide). If you are tiny, it's probably overkill. If you're larger, it won't have flexibility of some of the enterprise-level ESPs. Their employees are all about practical, quick solutions to real problems faced by email marketers.

Pros: Bronto is logically organized, something which unfortunately can't be said of all ESPs. It offers programs like abandoned cart, email signup modals (layers) with fairly easy implementation. Easy to add variables to subscriber profiles. But the BEST element is the live chat support. These folks truly unlock the potential of the platform.

Cons: It could hold sales data, but doesn't allow you any easy way to see that data in tables. And you can't add tables for ancillary data like "store locations" that would make dynamic content easier. As with any software, sometimes you run into road blocks: they have a site where you can post ideas for the platform and other users can vote on them, but even then these take time.

"Bronto has helped in growing our email results across our 2 unique storefronts."

Comments: Bronto was instrumental at the start in helping us manage our lists better, and through A/B testing refined what our customers enjoy seeing from our email marketing.
Cost - for our usage there are others who are now providing the capabilities for our needs as Bronto at cost savings. Bronto still continues to offer innovations to help in customer engagement, but these are all offered as an additional monthly charge and not part of their standard package.

Pros: Bronto's WYSIWYG user interface to design emails is extremely user-friendly and a knowledge of HTML is not required to design fantastic emails. A code view is available if preferred, and is sometimes needed to add in elements like animated gifs. A/B Testing, delayed sends, and Netsuite integration for more personalized send have all contributed as our email revenue has grown in our time with Bronto.