Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. GetResponse

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

GetResponse is perfect for small to medium businesses. For a large business, it certainly could be used in some areas. One example would be for clients that are looking to get started with email marketing. I would not expect it to run a business as Salesforce or Keep. However, GetResponse is robust enough and has a solid suite of tools that would serve a medium or small business quite well. And of course, if a company is just looking for an email marketing solution GetResponse would be ideal. And to go even further, depending on the level of service you use, GetResponse has the potential to do things you might have been using separate tools for. Building funnels, the ability to host webinars, building landing pages. It's all there and it is priced very well.

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

• Email creation—A simple interface and a variety of tools make it easy to create very attractive emails quickly.
• List building—GetResponse is ideal for setting-up and using any number of segmented lists/
• Forms and landing pages—These tools are also fairly strong, however, GetResponse (ironically) does not provide responsive forms for mobile, which I would think would be an urgent problem. They have so far not addressed it.
• Customer support—Customer support via chat and email is strong. It's disappointing the company has pulled the plug on live phone-in support.

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

• The email editor is kind of a nightmare. Elements don't move or behave how you'd expect, the font choices are limited and pretty lame, adding new elements is difficult or often impossible... the whole thing feels 5+ years outdated. Buggy, slow, and extremely limited in functionality.
• The entire UI feels similarly outdated and slow--just seems like GetResponse hasn't kept up with the curve of the market in terms of performance or aesthetics.

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

As I mentioned before. I believe that the platform is easy to use. Simple and easy process from start to finish. Email efficient and get to the client quickly. Catch errors that would prevent getting to where i need it to go. Overall great experience and would renew without question

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

Excellent general support. However, in case of an escalation, their turnaround time over email (follow through) can go higher

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 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

Not the top of the heap and certainly far from the bottom. GR is arguably one of the best solutions for Home based or small shops. It is out of the box whereas some of the others are not as complete or more difficult to unpack. It lacks some features but over-delivers on others.

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

• Only negative. They cleaned our entire contact list.
• We had to start over with Get Response. Now that they have forcefully freed us, we'll be redownloading our actual customer and prospect list from our CRM.
• They will not refund us. We paid for a year and they gave us 5 months. So we are also out $5,000.