Feature Set:  

Bronto provides all the tools you need to build and create a successful email campaign. You can create an email campaign in a just a few steps. Start by clicking the "contacts" tab and enter or import your customers email addresses. Next, choose the "message" tab to build your email. To add your email contacts, simply select the contacts tab and then either import the contacts from your Excel spreadsheet or enter them manually. Once entered, you can create and customize the contacts' demographic fields.

You can also schedule an email blast, test your message for possible SPAM alarms, create alias accounts and email testing.

Ease of Use:  

We would have like to have seen Bronto incorporate a wizard into their service designed for novices. Unless you are already familiar with how email marketing services work, Bronto can be a little off-putting. There is no obvious path in which you should take.

The overall look and feel of Bronto is very simple with the different sections arranged as tabs at the top of the screen. Once you click on a tab, additional options appear. There isn't a reporting tab—you'll find the reporting section in the messages tab, under report groups.

We really liked the handy “Related Questions” section in the right navigation. The questions are FAQs that quickly address how to use particular sections.

However, we found editing Bronto’s templates to be more difficult than some of the higher ranked services.

Email Campaign Creation:  

You can choose from three different types of messages: a text email, rich text email (with images and hyperlinks included) or import an HTML email for your campaign. We were easily able to manipulate the template text; however, changing things like background color was more difficult. When we selected the color we wanted the template never reflected the change. We had to go directly into the HTML code and manually place the color code. We found this to be frustrating.

We suggest you have a professional designer create your emails and directly import the code into Bronto’s system.

Bronto will host 10MB of images. Although this isn’t much most services we reviewed offered far less storage. Bronto also provides you with the tools to create surveys.

Campaign Reporting:  

Though you are able to access several reports in Bronto, there is no reporting section or tab. In order to view the available reports, you have to select the messages tab and then go under the reporting groups section. In this option, you can monitor your Click-Through Tracking, ClickStream Tracking and you can track your conversions.

You can also get the number of emails that you sent the previous month and find out if you have any complaints from your customers. More information, like opened emails, emails sent, forwarded, replies and more, is available in the report that shows up after you send your email blasts.

The only type of report that this service doesn't have is bounce handling.

Help/Support:  

Bronto’s help section is comprehensive including a getting started guide, short FAQs, email and phone support. We found the tutorials to be helpful and their email responses to be prompt. However, we would like to see Bronto incorporate a live chat option and some additional resources discussing email marketing in general.  

Bronto has tons of useful features to help you create email campaigns and newsletters. Then only things keeping Bronto out of the top three is the difficulties we encountered while modifying the template, their ease of use and the unusual pricing plan.