It’s great how Bronto will automatically compare A/B splits and pick the winner for you, but sometimes you just want to try something out. You may have a hunch you want to try out - Would people react better to the color blue? You may feel the need to continually check certain variables - What’s a good length for the subject line? Or maybe you’ve hit a wall with the status quo - Ah ha, this is the perfect case for champion-challenger.

A fight against the status quo, especially when it’s not something everyone is on-board with, is definitely champion-challenger territory. Let me explain why. A champion-challenger tests involves running a new challenger group against the established champion and nothing more. That means that we are only going to try a change on a small percentage of your list. Hence, there is no risk of a large number of people getting this new variant.

If the test goes well for the challenger, you can try another test with a larger audience or move on to an a/b winner split. In the mean time however, we are limiting exposure and just getting a rough idea of how your audience will react with a champion-challenger split test.

Let’s look at another example. What if you have to change your email format to include more ads. Rather than roll out what just seems like it might be the best version of the new format, you can run tests for a few weeks with a challenger using the new ad-heavy format. This will help you to refine your strategy in order to provide an optimal recipient experience when you roll out the change to a larger audience.

So try out champion-challenger split tests. You may find that a quick test on a small number of contacts is the best way to ease into something new.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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Sending Text and HTML Test Messages

Bronto has an option that allows you to send both the text and HTML versions of an email message separately. If you enable sending separate text and HTML versions of a message on the General Settings page, when a test delivery is made, two different deliveries will actually get created. One delivery will have the regular (HTML) version of the message. The other delivery will be the plain text version. Each delivery will be treated separately for accounting/tracking purposes. To turn this option on, click the Home tab and choose Settings.  Click General and check the box beside the option, “Send text and HTML versions of message separately.”

Differentiating Test Sends From Regular Sends

Test messages are displayed slightly differently in your account when looking at your sent list.  For instance, when you are reviewing a message and look at the recent deliveries for that message, the test sends will be indicated by a small icon with the word TEST on it.

Additionally, when reviewing the tracking reports for a sent message, you can select either the test sends or the regular sends in the drop down menu at the top of the message report.

Finally, one of the main benefits to sending test messages (aside from the obvious) is that they do not factor into your overall sender rating.  This means if you send a test message to two email addresses and one of your contacts doesn’t open the message, you aren’t stuck with a message with a 50% open rate.  Or, if you happen to misspell one of your email addresses and you get a bounce, the bounce rate of 50% will not cause havoc on your overall sender rating.

Leave us some comments and let us know what your test send strategies are in Bronto and how you utilize this feature in your own account.

Rob Slade
Client Services Specialist
Bronto Software

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Let’s Get Started

First, make sure you have an agency user with agency API access turned on.

Note that this user does not need to have administrator privileges. This allows you to restrict the amount of access this user has in the Bronto web application, while still allowing access to the API.

Now you can login to the API using this username, password, and the sitename from from the Sign In tab of your agency preferences. As with logging into the agency portion of the Bronto web application, you can’t perform subaccount activities just yet (i.e. updating contacts, sending messages, etc).  You’ll first need to login to a specific subaccount by using the optional siteId parameter in the login function. This siteId can be retrieved by using the readAccounts function. In fact, this is the only function you’ll have access to as an agency API user.  Once you have these siteIds, you may choose to store them locally. This way you won’t have to go through the first step of logging in as the agency user and reading them.

Keep This In Mind…

If your subaccounts change somewhat frequently and you are creating an interface to allow someone in your organization to perform various subaccount activities, you may want to continue to perform the initial agency login and retrieval of siteIds step. Doing this allows you to present an up to date list of all your subaccounts.

Included is a PHP example that shows how you can use a single login function for both agency and subaccount logins. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto

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It is certainly no secret to marketers that email clients will not show images by default. You must know how your message looks without your images. Once you have an understanding of how your message looks with images off, you can start to add alternate text behind these images that may engage a reader and cause them to either load images, or click on a link and move into your site.

To see how your email looks without images enabled, just navigate to the Messages Overview page. The Enable/Disable links are at the top of the message preview. The images should be on by default. Your message preview should look like this:

Now click the Disable Images link to see how your message looks with images off.

There are a few items of note concerning the Disable Images feature in Bronto.

1. If you do not indicate image dimensions in your html, the size will not be held once the image has been disabled. This is similar to how most email clients handle images.

2. This is a good reference for email designs that have already been tested using the inbox preview feature that John Gunther described in in his post “See What They See - Using Inbox Previews”. The inbox preview is a very powerful tool that will demonstrate how your email will render in specific email clients.

3. The Disable/Enable link is also available to you when you click the Show Preview button on the Edit Message page.

It is always important to remember that email opens are tracked based on images loading or a link being clicked on. Previewing your message with images off is just one more way Bronto helps put you in the recipient’s seat. Do you have a suggestion that could make this feature more powerful? Please let us know in the comment section below.

Frank Chapman
Bronto Client Services

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A Big NO NO

If you are thinking of attaching a PDF to an email in your email marketing campaign, DON’T. Here’s why:

• Attachments increase the size of your message. The larger the file size, the more susceptible your message becomes to a filter or an outright block. Also, ISPs (especially free ones like Hotmail, Yahoo etc) limit the size of emails it will accept and deliver to an inbox. A message with an attachment might not be delivered because it puts the recipient over their mailbox quota.
• Attachments can’t be opened by all users. Not all people run the same operating system and/or use the same applications. Although they have the file, they might not be able to actually open it.
• Attachments sometimes can raise red flags. Smart email users will sometimes question attachments because of a potential virus and damage to their computer.
• Viruses spread through attachments. If we allowed this functionality in the application, we would make our customers unnecessarily susceptible to a virus attack. By choosing to not support attachments at all, we’re able to completely remove the virus risk for our customers.

Not Only A Solution, A Better Solution

Instead of an attachment in the typical sense, I recommend that you host your PDF and link to it in the body of your message. Here’s why:

• Linking to the document mitigates all of the potential delivery problems you might encounter with attachments.
• Linking to the document enables you to view the contacts that “open” the “attachment” via the application’s click-through tracking. Links to a PDF or .doc work just like a link to a URL, and thus will appear in your link tracking and click-through reports.

To host your PDF and link to it in the body of your message:

1. Go to Site->Hosting.
2. Click the Upload button.
3. Click the Choose File button.
4. Once the file is listed in the text box, click the Upload button.
5. Once the upload is complete, you will see the file name in the list on the Hosting page.
6. Now that your file is hosted, you can direct your contacts to view it through a hyperlink in a message (Please note this is only possible through HTML and not plain text).
7. Highlight the text in your message you want to use as the link (i.e. Please click HERE to view…).
8. On the WYSIWYG editor toolbar, click the Insert/Edit link button.
9. Click the browse button.
10. Find the correct file and click on it.
11. Click Insert
12. Click Insert.
13. The hosted file is now linked to in the body of your message content. Be sure to test that the link is working properly before you actually send out the message.

So now you have a solution that not only avoids all of the pitfalls of sending a PDF as an email attachment, but also allows you to track how many people read the PDF! If you have any questions or comments, please leave in them in the comments section below.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
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Earlier this year, Frank Chapman gave us a great post on how to use personalization in your messages, Getting Personal With Your Contacts. If you’re wondering how to get started using personalization, check out his article for a quick how-to guide.

If you’re already personalizing your emails, though, you may be missing out on a key feature: personalization testing. You probably already know that Bronto’s Send Test feature provides a quick view of message formatting and layout in your inbox. But with one simple step, you can also test your message personalization fields to ensure they’re working properly.

Once you’ve composed your message and are ready to test it out, click the Send Test button.

On the next page, set your sending options and recipients. Then, check the box marked “Use a random contact for personalization” shown below. Choosing this will pull the field value from a random contact and use it within your test message.

Only the field value from the random contact will be pulled - they will not be sent the message. Only the person(s) you specify in the sending options will receive the message.

Once you’ve checked this box, proceed with verifying and sending your test message. When you receive the message, you’ll see your personalization tag replaced with a value pulled from a random contact!

As always, if you have any questions about personalizing messages, feel free to post in the comments or to open a case from the Support link within your account.

Brad Gurley
Support Associate at Bronto

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Whenever you create Dynamic Content within Bronto, we actually insert Dynamic Code into your message. If you feel comfortable around basic coding, such as javascript, then you now have a new tool at your disposal.

As you can see above, there are several different elements at play here. We start things out with a dynamic_code block. Everything inside of here will be considered part of this Dynamic Code. This is an area where you have to be careful. Any changes to the basic structure of the code will affect what output people receive. As with any type of code, it’s also possible to break Dynamic Code. So please be careful when editing it.

Inside a Dynamic Code block you will find some form of conditional, that’s the if and later on the else. Bronto also has an elseif available to users. This structure is completed with a closing /if. These are comparable to conditionals available in most other programming languages. In Bronto’s Dynamic Code, all of these special terms are enclosed in curly braces - that just makes sure we don’t accidentally confuse some of your text for a conditional.

Within Dynamic Code, you will enclose any actual content within literal tags. This tells Bronto to view this literally as content, not as Dynamic Code. Inside of those tags, you can have any html you wish. If you are using the WYSIWYG editor you can also click within this area and drop in images, special text, tables, or anything else you need.

So Now what?

Alright, so you understand the basics of how Dynamic Code works. If you play around with the Dynamic Code Wizard, you can check out all the available functions that can be used within an if or elseif.

You can then take that code and put it into a template or drop it into a message that you are creating via the API. You may also find that writing the code yourself will provide a bit more flexibility than using the wizard. At the very least, you now have the ability to tweak your Dynamic Content as you go, speeding up any edits you need to make. So try it out.

Don’t Forget To Test!

As with any Dynamic Code you create, it’s important to check how it looks. Once you have made changes to your Dynamic Code, you should look at the preview. We have added an option in the Fall 2009 Release that allows you to personalize previews to a specific contact.

You can select which contacts are available for preview on the individual contact pages. I suggest you select yourself and some other colleagues, then alter your data and list membership in order to see how your content looks with different data. This is also useful for testing out personalization.

So check out the new Dynamic Code feature and start delivering a better, more dynamic experience for your contacts.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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This post will assume that you have an understanding of how Direct Update works and how to implement it on your site. If you have questions on the basics or usage of Direct Update, please check out the help topic called Enabling Direct Update in the Bronto application.

Getting this set up is as simple as setting up a couple of fields, creating two separate Direct Update strings, and placing them in the right location on your site. Let’s get started…

The Fields

First, the easy part, creating two fields. We’ll use these fields to monitor when a contact has placed something in their cart, and when they complete a purchase.  We’ll call our first field ItemInCart. This can be pretty much any type of field you’d like. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll leave it as a text field.  The next field we’ll call CompletedPurchase. Again, this can be any type of field. I would recommend a date type field so that you can use this field data in multiple ways to target contacts.

The First Direct Update Statement

Next, we’ll need to set up the first of our two Direct Update code snippets.  The base code can be found by going to Home->Settings->Analytics, and then scrolling down to the Direct Update section.  In addition to grabbing the code, make sure that the check box under Direct Update is checked. Doing so will activate the feature.

Let’s take a look at a sample of the base code first.

<img src="http://app.bronto.com/public/?q=direct_update&fn=Public_DirectUpdateForm&id=cdagfvzjskjuipnbbdjdvbiwgfkdbbb" border="0" alt="" width="0" height="0" />

The goal of the first snippet is to let us know that someone has placed an item in their shopping cart. We’ll need to add an operator to the end of the snippet that sets the ItemInCart field to a positive value. To do this, we’ll use the following code:

field1=ItemInCart,set,Yes

The completed Direct Update code snippet would look like this:

<img src="http://app.bronto.com/public/?q=direct_update&fn=Public_DirectUpdateForm&id=cdagfvzjskjuipnbbdjdvbiwgfkdbbb&field1=ItemInCart,set,Yes" border="0" alt="" width="0" height="0" />

Once you’ve got this first snippet, it will need to be placed on your website. Preferably, you should place it on a confirmation page that comes up after a contact adds an item or items to their shopping cart. That way, when they reach this page, the Direct Update code snippet will activate and update their ItemInCart field to ‘Yes’.

The Second Direct Update Statement

Now we’re ready to set up the second and final piece of Direct Update code. We’ll start with the base code again and build from there. This time around, we need to add an operator that sets a contact’s CompletedPurchase field to a certain value. I recommend using the current date. This will allow you to use this data for other segmenting purposes.

field1=CompletedPurchase,set,10/27/2009

In order to set to the current date, you will need to use some simple javascript that will be run from your own server. Click here and check out Example 1 for a simple script to call the current date. It is important to note that the date must be specified in the format you have designated for date fields on the Formatting page located at Home->Settings->Formatting. In addition, we need to remove the positive value from the ItemInCart field so that we don’t accidentally pull in people that have completed a purchase.  We’ll use the following to do so:

field2=ItemInCart,set,No

The completed Direct Update code snippet would look like this:

<img src="http://app.bronto.com/public/?q=direct_update&fn=Public_DirectUpdateForm&id=cdagfvzjskjuipnbbdjdvbiwgfkdbbb&field1=CompletedPurchase,set,10/27/2009&field2=ItemInCart,set,No" border="0" alt="" width="0" height="0" />

This second code snippet will also need to be placed on your website. This one should be placed on the order confirmation screen, after the purchase has been completed. It will set the contact’s CompletedPurchase field to the date defined, and will set their ItemInCart field to No.

Segmenting with Reckless Abandon

All that remains is to find the people in your contact list that have abandoned their shopping cart and give them a little incentive to complete the purchase! This can be very easily done by creating a simple segment that searches for contacts in your account that have a value of Yes in the ItemInCart field. Once that segment is created, all you have to do is send your message to it.

Careful Considerations

One small caveat to this post is that the whole thing will only work if a couple of conditions are met. First, the contact must have clicked on a link in an email sent via Bronto, which will open a tracking cookie on their computer. The cookie will allow the Direct Add code to work. Second, they must have cookies enabled in their web browser.

There you have it, a relatively simple way to set up an abandoned shopping cart tracking mechanism for your Bronto contacts. Keeping track of when your contacts do not complete a purchase can be just as important as keeping track of when they do. Are you currently using this method to increase conversions? Are you using a different method? Let us know in the comments.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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Dynamic Content…Huh?

In programmer speak, Dynamic Content allows you to add content to your message based on whether or not certain conditions are met (i.e. conditional logic). In plain English, Dynamic Content allows you to display different content to your contacts based on who is receiving it. For example, if you are sending out a message to parents with a newborn baby, you can use Dynamic Content to display one block of content if they had a boy, and another block of content if they had a girl.

Getting Started With Dynamic Content

The easiest way to get started using Dynamic Content is to use the WYSIWYG editor.

To insert dynamic content using the wizard:

1. Click on the Inset Dynamic Content button in the WYSIWYG editor, or the Dynamic Content button if you are viewing the text version of a message.
2. Choose the conditional. For the first block, by default, you can only choose if.
3. Choose the operator. The available operators are:
   • In List
   • In Segment
   • Field Is Blank
   • Field Is Equal To
   • Field Is Not Equal To
   • Field Is Greater Than
   • Field Is Less Than
4. Choose a value. The values that you can choose from depend on the operator you choose in the previous step. Click OR to add an additional value.
5. Add the content that will be displayed if the Dynamic Content conditions are met.
6. (Optional) If you wish to add nested conditionals to a Dynamic Content block, click Logic. You can add 2 nested conditionals per Dynamic Content block. To add additional Dynamic Content blocks, click Add Block.
7. Click Insert Dynamic Content.

What’s All That Strange Text In My Message?

After you click Insert Dynamic Content, you will notice that some strange looking text has been added to your message. This text, known as Dynamic Code (more on this in a later post), represents the Dynamic Content you just built using the wizard. In the example below, the text in blue gets displayed if the value in the “child” field is equal to “boy”, and the text in pink get’s displayed if the value for the “child” field is equal to “girl”.

In upcoming posts, we’ll look at ways to make your Dynamic Content even more powerful by adding in additional content blocks and nested conditionals. In the mean time, you can use the information in this post to get started testing and using Dynamic Content. If you have already started using Dynamic Content, we’d love to hear about it! Let us know in the comments section below.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto

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As mentioned, with our Fall 2009 release, we now support relative dates in segments. This means you can now specify a number and a time frame (hours, days, weeks, months, years,etc) in a segment. The dates being used are relative to the time the segment is processed. For example, lets say you wanted to find any contact in your Bronto account that was created in the last 3 days. The segment may look like this: (Click the image to enlarge)

Another example might be to pull a list of contacts that have purchased in the last 30 days. If you are storing a last purchase date as a field in Bronto, you can use the segment builder to build a segment comprised of these contacts. An example could look like this: (Click to the image to enlarge)

Obviously, there will be many more uses for this new feature. For more information about segmenting on relative dates, click on the Creating Segments: Detailed Explanation help guide available on the Help For This Page on any of the segment pages in the Bronto application.

We would love to hear how you are implementing this feature in Bronto and what success you are having with it. Leave us a comment and share your thoughts!

Rob Slade
Client Support Specialist at Bronto

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