Audience Republic vs. Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued)

Audience Republic is good for data acquisition using their gamified competitions, but I think that's about the only point of difference it has from Braze, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. While they promise to allow you to easily segment data from ticketing outlets, in my opinion, this is a blatant falsehood. In my experience, excuses come through thick and fast from the customer service team, but nothing has been resolved in the 2.5 years of using them.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Segmentation
• EDM template refinements
• Data acquisition

Incentivized

• It's easy to work with – it has seamless integration across all platforms, which helps when you're working with big clientele.
• It's logically organized, which can't be said of all ESP's.
• It has the LIVE CHAT support. A lot of email marketing clients simply don't have that. It's the little things!

Incentivized

• Integration of ticketing agencies
• More flexible templates
• Better customer service
• Not lying about the fees charged to other clients

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's easy enough to use, even for a beginner, but I think the usability is dampened by the terrible dynamics of the platform and, in my experience, how they create more manual labour and legwork instead of the optimisation they promise.

Incentivized

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.

I never experienced any downtime.

No issues.

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.

Incentivized

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

Easy to set up.

All of these platforms offer the same level of performance to Audience Republic, but are a lot cheaper. I didn't choose Audience Republic, it was passed down to me from a former employee. I am in the process of moving to Braze as for the exact same service they will save our company $100k a year.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Besides from the gamified competitions to attain data to then market to, literally nothing that I couldn't get from a competitor.
• Audience Republic lie to us about how much their services cost. They were charging us 0.0053c per email send (and they upped this price without telling us one month), and a peer told me they were paying 0.0015c per send. In my opinion, they are not trustworthy.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized