The Joeism Blog

The Fall 2008 Release is only two days away. In the spirit of the countdown, I decided to put together a list of three of my favorite things about this release. Here we go:

1. Reporting and Charts. We added a new tab that allows marketers to add an assortment of interesting and compelling charts to their reporting dashboard. For those of you who have used SalesForce’s dashboard feature, you know how powerful this is. Email marketing provides lots of data but the trick is turning that data into information. This tab does that.

2. Omniture Integration. Omniture is the leading web analytics provider out there. Bronto is now integrating with their Genesis platform to create powerful connection between the analytics on one’s website with one’s email campaigns. Not ready for Omniture? We also integrate Google Analytics and developed a general purpose tool to integrate with other web analytics solutions that rely on passing variables back and forth through urls.

3. Inbox Rendering. Designing emails that render well across many email clients is very hard. There are lots of email programs out there — Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook, Eudora, Mac Mail, … The list goes on and on. Fortunately, you can now use this feature to preview of your message in up to 25 different email clients before you send your message to your actual list. There is a per-rendering charge but it is very reasonable in light of the cost of designer doing the testing for you.

Not enough? Here’s some more improvements:

• Easy yet powerful A|B Splits. Most marketers don’t test. Why? It is too hard and too time consuming. No longer. We completely rethought A|B Splits to make it more usable and approachable.
• Help, Help, Help. Let’s face it. Online Help is often neglected on the web and rarely done well. We would like to reverse that trend. We have all new flash tutorials and page-by-page help to explain features not just in terms of click-here-then-here but rather in terms of email marketing best practices and concepts so that we are leaving up to our mantra of helping make our clients better marketers.
• And lots more.

Read more about the Fall 2008 Release on Bronto’s blog and get a peek for yourself by watching this 4-minute video: