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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Iterable
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Iterable is an AI-powered customer communication platform that activates customers across channels in real-time. With intelligent personalization, dynamic content, and a cross-channel suite, Iterable helps brands create seamless, data-driven experiences across email, SMS, push, and in-app notifications.
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.
Iterable is great for any marketing team looking to ramp up the capabilities on lifecycle marketing specifically if you're a company with a lot of data and/or SKU's the product makes handling a lot of complexities much simpler and enables my team to move much faster even as a small team
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.
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.
Locale management: being able to copy and past a template section/row/content from a locale to another. Also, be able to duplicate any locale to any locale. So far we can just duplicate the default locale into the rest of the locales
Outages - I feel in the last 1 and half, more outages are happening, impacting their clients
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
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.
Iterable is super easy to use. I have experience with competing platforms, but Iterable is by far the most intuitive platform to use. I also really appreciate the way the product team is willing to accept product requests
Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.
The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.
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.
I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.
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 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.
As mentioned previously, I was hired to do a migration from ActiveCampaign, and I stayed for 2 years as a power user of Itearble. Since leaving OneVision Resources, I have continued to volunteer my time in a regional user group, which I would not do if the platform, product, and company were not so strong and so marketer-forward.
We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.
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.
I do not have hard numbers, as I am not in the department that deals with those kinds of quantifications of impact. However, I do believe the use of Iterable has been a positive thing for us in providing more comprehensive data that is useful when dealing with customer tickets.
