Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. Echobox Email

Bronto is a very professional application in the email marketing use space. It has a straightforward and simple interface but it is still a powerful and customizable experience. Most tasks are easy, and you can usually find a way to do things outside the norm with ease. It is a good platform for users new to the email marketing world but grows with their needs and abilities.

Incentivized

Echobox Email is great for news or article-based sites. It's the only platform we've used that allows editors to simply paste one link to include or override a story. The ability to automate fully or enable periodically is a time and money saver for us during holidays or employee vacations. The platform has been easy to learn and a great improvement over our workaround solutions in Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. Besides the platform UI and optimizations for articles (which is worth switching for alone), the AI/ML built in to the platform has already started showing improvements to our open and click rates. The personalized send time is a game-changer and the personalized story selection is a promising feature– we look forward to seeing how it plays out over time.

• Chat support. They are the professionals behind those keyboards. Not asking someone else. Them. Right there. Get your answers fast and accurate.
• Detailed tracking information. Sends, delivered, clicks, conversions. Anything and everything you want to know about how your emails are doing is tracked. I keep my own reporting separate in an excel sheet, but they have great reporting.
• Automated messaging rules. Set and forget emails that hit the customer with the right information exactly when needed. The workflows allow for some REALLY cool & complex set ups too.

Incentivized

• Easy interface for everyone to learn
• Personalized send times have led to increased open rates
• Ability to automate whole campaigns by theme or category
• Responsive support team that has already incorporated feedback

• Reporting has been much improved in the last 12 months but still has room to improve. Often the view and format of reports varies depending on where you are looking at the data.
• Although the feature IS coming, we have been looking for transactional messaging for our CRM since we signed with Bronto. Given we use Netsuite, who owns Bronto, we expected this feature much sooner.
• More real-time and personalized content within Bronto would be welcomed.

Incentivized

• Stories on Facebook
• More editing options for photos (e.x. layering, pixelating)
• Define also seconds when scheduling

As with anything, it's not perfect but it's more than suitable for our needs. I'd like to see continued growth and updates from Bronto and I'm excited to see what they have planned for their users down the road. Our clients (and my superiors) have been very happy with the performance of the software so far. It's going to be a great year for us

Incentivized

It has helped increase traffic via social media, which was something crucial for us. This came without extra working time. On contrary, it saved us time.

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.

It has all the features we need and is performing better than what we used previously. The support/development team has been very open to feedback and is actively working on new features and improvements. Any shortcomings (which may not exist for long) are very minor compared to the benefits and features specifically built for news/articles.

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.

Bronto Marketing Platform is much more of an enterprise solution than I believe many of these other options are within the email marketing campaign world. Their amount of features, data collection, and management and even help support was impressive. This was especially true during our launch efforts with the initial release of using their tool. If budget costs could be a concern, then you can be successful with some of the smaller options available. Still, the Bronto Marketing Platform makes it pretty easy to define some exact costs and actual ROI for improving your email campaign efforts that can help justify the expense of the tool above others.

Incentivized

Echobox Email is specifically built for article-based newsletters and pre-selects content based on your criteria so the editorial team is not starting from scratch. Article-based emails can also be fully automated which was not possible in Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor before. Our web development team no longer needs to build custom solutions to integrate with the ESP and instead can focus on other projects.

• Our email list was aging, and based on Bronto recommendations to clean out our list, we were able to increase our average open rate from 21% to 28% over the course of 12 months.
• We were able to increase our list size by about 25% over the course of 24 months by cleaning our lists and subsequently starting the pop-up manager on our site.
• We're able to maintain a healthy click rate- about 30%, with the straightforward template options in the WYSYWIG editor.

Incentivized

• Increased open rates 17%
• Higher click totals overall