The Bronto Marketing Platform was an email marketing solution from Oracle which was acquired from NetSuite in 2016. It was optimized for creating automated, yet personalized emails, and subscriber profile segments, analyzing click and visit behavior, and tracking geolocation. It has since been discontinued.
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Campaigner
Score 2.1 out of 10
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Campaigner is an email marketing solution built by marketers that is designed to help small, medium and large businesses strengthen customer relationships and drive sales.
The vendor's value proposition is that Campaigner provides advanced features such as industry-leading A/B split testing, workflows, API integration, segmentation, detailed reporting, and responsive design, to provide corporate-level senders with the functionality that they need to effectively track and monitor email marketing…
If you're a mid-size to larger business and rely on regular email engagement from customers, then Bronto Marketing Platform could be a potentially great partner if not game-changer for how you've been doing email campaign management previously. Their automation tools and development interface is amicable. The amount of data that's collected and available from engagement with subscribers through their tools can be overwhelming. Still, if you enjoy digging into every kernel of possible user activity information, you'll love it.
Workflow feature makes this best suited for those who want to send a series of emails over time based on contact attributes and behavior. Ability to add custom fields and define segments makes this tool valuable for very targeted email campaigns. Lack of communication about releases and poor technical support means your users will need to be fairly skilled in critical thinking and more technical than average. Our knowledge of system came from lots of trial and error.
Number 1, is it's ease of use. We have not run into any problems where someone finds Campaigner difficult to use and this comes in handy every day. The more people that know how to use it the better because it reduces stress/buildup on others.
We love the reporting system here. We use the clicks and opens to follow up with people all the time so to have all that detailed information is very beneficial.
Customization is great. You can really make all your emails look exactly like they're pictured in your head.
Segmenting- although there's a lot that can be done with segmenting audiences, there's a bit of a learning curve when it comes to setting up segments. Wish it was more intuitive.
Workflows- setting up automation workflows requires some practice and I've needed to consult a Bronto support person each time I set up a new workflow.
Bronto Pop-up manager- we use this feature, not sure how common it is among Bronto clients, but there is overall some improvement needed with this tool. There is limited capability to update the look and feel of the pop-up manager, and we've run into some conflicts with other pop-ups on our website interfering with the Bronto pop-up.
Campaigner is just too bare-bones. When we first started using Campaigner close to a decade ago it was perfect for what it was. But nowadays Campaigner is missing several features that their competitors offer like exit intent and cart abandonment emails.
Campaigner has an astonishingly bad unsubscribe option. We have had many customers complain to us over the years that when they try to unsubscribe through the emails Campaigner sends, their unsubscribe does not go through.
Hard to change account settings such as changing our subscription plan. We had to call and were told to wait 24 hours just to make a small change to our account.
Never really had any issues that caused out-of-the-ordinary frustration levels. Of course, you'll have days where the learning curve of using a tool gets challenging. Still, I don't remember ever really coming across an obstacle or roadblock while using the tool because of a feature or function it just couldn't do successfully or at all. Customer support was always available as needed, and it was generally easy to find answers to questions when they arose.
I can't see us not renewing unless we find something better. This is highly unlikely because there was a thorough research done for use to chose the best marketing client and it always came back to campaigner.
Usability is great. Very intuitive drag-and-drip metaphor for building automations. And the UI is very user-centric. It constantly prompts you with suggestions and next steps such that you hardly have to refer to the (excellent) documentation.
Great features but awful tech support experiences over five years of use. Some releases broke our workflows and Campaigner could never explain why. Our initial plan provided a designed client support contact. This individual changed frequently without notice and at one point they decided our plan no longer included a designated contact. Of course this was never communicated to us until we tried to reach out to the person. If you are tech savy this system might be for you but you'll be on your own.
They used to be good, but they've evolved into a monolithic bureaucratic nightmare after the Netsuite / Oracle acquisition. Can't talk to anyone that actually knows the system and support tickets seem to go days or weeks without responses and resolution.
Everything takes a minimum of 24 hours to solve and after being with campaigner for several years we were just told for the first time we have an account rep which we never even spoke to.
They have lots of videos on list importing / segmentation / report customization etc. when you sign on they give a link to online tutorials and documentation which is very helpful. They have very helpful PDFs on how to import / set up platform
Bronto hits the sweet spot for us. It is most similar to the Salesforce family of products. Salesforce however can feel cluttered and configuration and setup can be time consuming and confusing. Bronto is much more streamlined and also has features built in that may require additional purchases in the Salesforce world. Adobe Campaign is a very powerful solution and can do many things hard to achieve in Bronto. However, Campaign is much more of a developer tool where Bronto is easy to learn and use right out of the box.
MailChimp is far more customizable and User-Friendly, although Campaigner gets the job done. Campaigner could benefit from a design upgrade to bring their look into the modern realm. The drag and drop features and email customization of MailChimp, Campaigner is lacking. However, MailChimp is pricier. So you are definitely getting what you pay for.
Offering great reporting for tracking everything. I can see what emails are working (I track on a monthly basis) and what people are clicking.
A/B split testing lets us try different things. Try this and that.
Creating lists and segments of subscribers lets us look at who is the best performing contacts. Really get 'into the data' and understand what is working and what is not.