Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. Maropost Marketing Cloud

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

It's a perfect fit for medium to high volume email senders who want an easy-to-use email builder and marketing campaign planner.

• 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

• Support: we were given a go to support person who is basically an account executive who oversaw our progress and was there to assist us with whatever we may need.
• Email open rates and testing abilities: Maropost supplies an array of different ways you can test to make sure you are getting the best opens and CTR's you can.

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

• The Sales Department shouldn't promise the customer what support can't deliver on.
• They should also brush up on some ethics courses. It's appalling to me how they conduct business. Buyer beware.

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

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

Though relatively responsive, the responses were always utterly unhelpful and sometime not even relevant to the questions we asked. It quickly became apparent that it was outsourced copy/paste support.

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

Maropost is most closely related to iContact in that it's main purpose is to send e-mail. iContact is less expensive, but it inbox deliverability and open rate are less than half that of Maropost's. Also, Maropost has more automated list management features, which makes it more efficient. Maropost is a far better e-mail service provider than Infusionsoft, but it can't replace Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft's marketing automation capabilities are leaps and bounds ahead of Maropost. In our organization, we use both of these software side by side. Infusionsoft manages all of our marketing automation and Maropost is used for any e-mail blasts to our list.

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

• It took a while for sales to reach what it is, but the move to Maropost Sales Cloud definitely spiked our return.