Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. Mapp Digital

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

With this program, we're able to keep track of our marketing campaigns, as well as use additional features to enhance the product. A lot of the software's success may be attributed to its statistical capabilities. A large part of our company's growth has come from improving the product, which our staff does on a daily basis.

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

• API functionality, alongside reporting, is unparalleled in an environment where you may not have IT support to build out tools.
• The user interface is easy to understand, allowing users to have control over the creative delivery for MIME, HTML, text and mobile ads.
• It allows deliverability experts to throttle deliveries by selecting mailing domain and IP pairs, granting access to stats on these individual paired delivery tools.

• 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

• I have used Blue Hornet over the last few years as it is the selected email platform used by my content provider. I have never used a more glitchy platform! Every time I use it I run into broken links, glitches and kinks. Their tech team is very quick to blame your machine - but I have access to several machines on all major OS platforms, and I run into the same issues every time.
• The Blue Hornet user interface is poor and clunky. They have a great looking homepage - but you can tell that there focus is on selling and not on current clients. This is plainly apparent by the fact that the login button is buried at the very bottom of the page and difficult to find the first time you look for it. Not to mention the fact that the user interface itself is nowhere near as smooth and polished as their branded website is. Additionally, their reports are often inaccurate.
• I would suggest any serious marketer looking to execute an email campaign with Blue Hornet to look elsewhere. I have reached out to my content provider to ask that they provide support on a different system - and was kindly informed that they are working around the clock to make this happen due to the overwhelmingly negative criticism of Blue Hornet from 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

Incentivized

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

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.

Once you start using the product a lot and are taught how it works, it's pretty simple. You just need that initial training and to use it a lot to get used to it.

I never experienced any downtime.

No issues.

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

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

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

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

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

Easy to set up.

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

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

Mapp Digital offers a unique breadth of services which other software failed to offer. The AI based insights Mapp provides are very accurate and useful in order to create hyper-personalized re-marketing campaigns for our customers. Also, the customer experience analytics that Mapp offers are informative and helps us to take decisions based on those.

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

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.