Bronto

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.

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.

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.

Pros

We started using the Bronto Marketing Platform about a year ago for all of our in-house email marketing efforts. Compared to our previous platform, it was easy to tell that Bronto was a more robust platform from the get-go. It's easy to work with, extremely smart and offers powerful strategies to get the most out of email marketing. This includes automated responders which are helpful for our e-Newsletter welcome email, campaign signups and more. Bronto also allows us to target subscribers based on what content they have clicked on in previous emails. We love the ability to optimize sends by time of day or day of the week and how easily we can segment our lists. Even the reporting within the Bronto platform itself is top notch and provides the detail we need. We've had it for a year, but there is still much more capabilities that we have yet to explore.

Cons

It would be nice if Bronto had an easier way to identify hard vs. soft bounces each email send. You either have to run a segmented report or pull from all contacts in Bronto and sort based on list. It would be great if this was a Legacy Report option. We also track list growth each month in the Legacy Reports, but it would also be great to track segment growth. Right now I jump in at the beginning of each month to compare growth from the previous month for all segments.

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.