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Company spotlight: Bronto

What does Bronto do and what is its USP?

Bronto is a commerce marketing provider. Its advanced marketing automation platform helps retailers to drive revenue and engagement via email, social media and mobile. Focusing exclusively on the ecommerce market, the company’s roadmap is dictated by the needs of retailers. This has resulted in the company being awarded the number one email marketing provider to the Top 1000 retailers in the US InternetRetailer ranking for the past three years.

We help retailers drive revenue through email, mobil and social media by leveraging fantastic services and support combined with easy to use and powerful technology

Brandon Wilkins, General Manager Europe

Brandon Wilkins, general manager Europe, Bronto, says that along with the retail-only focus, Bronto’s technology and services components also differentiate it in the market. The ease of use of the platform mean that marketers can accomplish the marketing campaigns they need without running into time constraints and complexities. “By using Bronto, retailers can achieve more, in less time, which means more revenue,” he says.

Wrapped around this is the services component that enables retailers to make the most of the Bronto technology. This comes in the form of implementation, execution, strategy and reporting help to fully leverage the platform and industry best practice.

“A lot of retailers have marketing teams, but not necessarily dedicated email or mobile experts, so we can give them guidance,” says Wilkins.

What new functionality does the latest version of Bronto’s system give to retailers?

Bronto is continually evolving the platform. The most recent upgrade includes significant enhancements in the Bronto app centre, which gives retailers access to the latest commerce marketing techniques as well as technology from leading ecommerce, personalisation and analytics providers. One new app is Browse Recovery, which captures shoppers’ behaviour and automatically sends them rules-based messages around recently or frequently viewed items. The Predictor app creates targeted product recommendations based on shopper segments, while Socialite helps retailers leverage insights from their email marketing to drive more engagement and revenue in their social media activities.

What does Bronto think are the main challenges for the retail industry over the coming year?

Retailers are looking to seamlessly nurture consumers from browsing to purchasing. One of the key areas for doing this is browse abandonment, where a shopper who left the website without buying is sent a personalised email with content based on the products or categories they had last been looking at. This email could highlight the viewed product or contain an incentive should the shopper add the item to their basket and make the purchase. This gives retailers the opportunity to generate sales even if the shopper didn’t place an item into the basket on their last visit.

As many as 93% of retailers in the UK don’t have such a browse recovery strategy in place but it’s easier that ever to implement. Shoppers are increasingly willing to engage with highly relevant content just so long as the context is right. Marketers finally have the tools to access and make sense of collected data to turn it into actionable insights.

Retail is moving increasingly towards personalisation and ensuring that email communications are both timely and relevant. Product recommendations, based on explicit and implicit data, make consumers feel that the brand understands their interests and that the message is tailored to them. Many of the latest techniques are easy and cost effective for brands of all sizes. Oak Furniture Land, for example, uses geolocation to target emails about shop events and deals based on the location of the recipient’s nearest bricks and mortar store. This campaign, linking online and offline data to create an omnichannel experience, led to a 30% revenue bump.

While email still delivers the highest ROI and retention rates, many commerce marketers are struggling to combine it with their social media activities. Email provides a large pool of data around customer demographics and propensity to purchase so marketers can use information on gender, age or location as a base to target the same, high-converting segments on social media such as Facebook. The more cohesive the message, the more quantifiable the results.

What are the challenges for suppliers and technology providers and how is Bronto meeting those challenges?

Technology has to continually evolve to keep up with shopper behaviour and retailers’ need for results. Suppliers have to constantly adapt both the technology and the services and support they provide to brands. Bronto offers award-winning client services so that its specialists can be on hand whenever retailers need assistance. With offices on the east and west coasts of the US, in the UK and Australia, its staff are available 24/7. As Wilkins puts it, “Commerce happens all around us and we want Bronto experts to be constantly available to meet the needs of our clients”.

Who are Bronto’s customers?

Some 1,500 brands worldwide rely on Bronto to help them drive revenue through targeted and data-driven email, mobile and social marketing. Customers in the EU include notonthehighstreet.com, Vivienne Westwood, Euro Car Parts, Oak Furniture Land and Björn Borg.

What does the future hold?

Bronto aims to continue to provide a great service and equally good technology while constantly evolving both the platform and the company. “We’ll continue to make the platform bigger and better and introduce more new apps,” says Wilkins. “Our goal is to ensure that we keep providing the toolbox that commerce marketers need in order for them to effectively generate more sales.”


Customer case study – Björn Borg

“We only get a person’s attention for a very short time so we need to deliver a message they feel is directed at them personally,” says Noelia Guinón, ecommerce manager at Swedish fashion underwear and sports apparel brand Björn Borg.

The company sends nearly 20 million marketing messages a year to its 200,000 subscribers across 12 markets, so it needs a powerful tool to understand customer data and fulfil its focus on engagement, interaction and personalisation. The solution also needs easy-to-use workflows. By integrating Bronto’s email marketing platform with its Magento Enterprise ecommerce platform, Björn Borg is able to import three types of data into its email marketing platform to enhance emails – basic address and customer information, product data and images, and order history details.

“The primary objective was to invest in a platform with rock-solid deliverability,” says Guinón. “Previously, we encountered a variety of issues, including a high bounce rate that hurt our delivery rate. As a result, the channel had been rapidly declining – both in terms of growth and revenue.”

In 2015, in the first six months after implementation of the Bronto platform, newsletter deliverability rate increased by 75%, click rates were up 83%, and it saw a 66% increase in email-generated revenue, all thanks to a newly personalised approach.

In addition to revamping its marketing emails, Björn Borg reinvented its transactional emails, improving brand recognition and affinity in the process. It also introduced an email welcome series for new customers. This far exceeded its standard marketing emails with a click rate 232% higher, conversion up by 21% and an increase in revenue of 217%.


Bronto IN BRIEF

Company founded: 2002

Global reach: Durham (NC), London, New York, LA and Sydney

UK launch: 2013

Listing: Wholly-owned subsidiary of NetSuite (NYSE: N)

Customers: 1,500+ brands including notonthehighstreet.com, Vivienne Westwood, Björn Borg, Joseph Joseph, Vince Camuto, Theory, Euro Car Parts and Oak Furniture Land

Number of employees: 300

For more information about Bronto please visit www.bronto.co.uk, email europe@bronto.com or telephone +44 (0) 203 640 2040

@BrontoEurope

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