Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. Litmus from Validity

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

I’ve been really impressed with Litmus, especially the personalization features. Being able to easily plug in tools like sentiment trackers right into our emails has helped us gather valuable third-party data without a lot of extra work. I also really appreciate the ongoing learning resources—they offer tons of free webinars and articles that are actually useful. I recently read one on email deliverability that broke down specific data and gave me clear, actionable steps to improve how our emails are hitting inboxes. It’s more than just a testing tool—it’s become a go-to resource in our email marketing toolkit.

Incentivized

• 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

• The AQ and Approval Process is very seamless. We have a brand team of 20 people, and there are mostly five emails being deployed every day across 3 Hotels and 30 restaurants.
• The Preview of the email template on all devices, ranging from mobile phones to laptops and iPads, which we can also check based on ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, and AOL, is a very good feature that we use for each email.
• The Analytics tools we use for each email to create a tracking link to insert into our email for a send is a great feature. It helps us to see the email performance based on ISP clients.
• For every edits, we receive an email on our inbox, which is very helpful.

Incentivized

• 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

• When creating a tracking code, I would like to see a button that says "Create New" without having to return to the main page.
• When creating a tracking code, I would like to have no expiration option.
• There is a little bit more personalization for the personalization content (being able to access the code HTML and not only the snippet).

Incentivized

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

I love using Litmus and find that it has been a huge component of the success of our email campaigns. I can't say enough great things about the platform, and I have seen firsthand how it has saved me time building and sending fully optimized email campaigns. I would absolutely renew again.

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.

Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.

Incentivized

I never experienced any downtime.

We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time

Incentivized

No issues.

As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost

Incentivized

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

I am always so so impressed with the litmus support team. They are not only prompt but attentive and offer very personalised responses and support

Incentivized

I had internal training for how to use, not lead by litmus. Unsure if there was any external training which took place before my time

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

It has all the required information.

Incentivized

Easy to set up.

I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Litmus, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.

Incentivized

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

I selected Litmus because it provides an all-in-one powerful tool to update content, collaborate with teams, and analyse data seamlessly. This saves a big amount of time for the whole team. The insights are more granular allowing us to focus deeper into improvements. The preview tools is one of the most important features we heavily rely on, as we can see how emails are previewed across multiple devices. Speed is also a major factor. Being an organisation sending out many emails, we are happy with the speed and efficiency of accessing and organising emails.

Incentivized

With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions

Incentivized

• 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

• Litmus saves our team so much time by making the QA and email review process so much easier, streamlined, and efficient.
• We often send out campaigns out to thousands of members, and Litmus gives us the assurance and peace of mind that everything is working as it should before it gets sent out.
• Decreases the number of email review cycles we go through.

Incentivized