In this post, we’re going to look at how to accomplish this in Bronto using our Direct Add feature in conjunction with a simple welcome message that leads the contact to the Manage Preferences page, which will act as step two of the process.

Step 1: Setting up your Manage Preferences page

The first step in the process is to make sure that your Manage Preferences page is set to collect the information that you would like to get after your contact signs up. This is as simple as adding the fields that you would like to collect to your standard manage preferences page. We’ve covered this in previous posts on Brontoversity, so I won’t go into much detail. If you need a refresher on editing webforms, please check out the following post:  Getting Comfortable with New Webforms.

Step 2: Setting up your welcome message

The second step in making this work is to create the welcome message you would like to use to point your new contact to the Manage Preferences page. You will create this message just like any other message in the account, by going to the Messages->Create New Message. The message can be any type, although plain text is not recommended because links do not work in plain text messages. We’ll be using the WYSIWYG editor for our example. As with any welcome message, you should be sure to thank the contact for signing up, and provide them with an example or description of they type of communication they will receive from you and when.

When using the welcome message as the gateway to the second step of the signup process though, you’ll want to ensure that you feature a prominent link to the Manage Preferences page. To link to the manage preferences page, just type the text that you would like to be your link, highlight it, and click the Insert / Edit Link button in the WYSIWYG editor. In the pop-up, select Manage Preferences URL from the Link List drop-down, and then click Update. This will create a link to the Manage Preferences page that is customized to whatever contact this message is sent to.

Once this link is in place, and you are happy with the look and feel, content, and subject of the message, go ahead and Save and Close the message.

Step 3: Setting up your Direct Add URL

The next step in the process to to set up your Direct Add URL to send out the welcome message automatically, as soon as the Direct Add code is triggered from your site. Setting this up in Bronto is pretty simple, all you need to do is go to the Home>Settings and then click Data Exchange on the left sidebar. Once on the Data Exchange page, just check the checkbox next to Enable Direct Add for adding new contacts to enable Direct Add.

Once the setting is enabled, it is time to choose our settings for the current Direct Add URL. The URL that appears in the box below the settings is dynamic and will change as you modify the parameters using the checkboxes above. For our two step process, you’ll want to leave the Add contacts with “unconfirmed” status (By default all contacts are added with “active” status) box unchecked, and check the Send a welcome message box. You can leave the drop-down set to only when contact is new.

Checking the option to send a welcome message will expand the settings options. Here you can define the from name, from address and choose the welcome message you would like to send when a new contact fills out the form. You’ll want to choose the welcome message you set up in step 1.

We’re going to skip over the basics of implementing Direct Add on your site, as that has been covered in depth in a couple of previous posts, linked here for your convenience:

DIY Integrations: Direct Add
Adding Contacts to a Specific List with Direct Add

So once you’ve got your welcome message set up, and your Direct Add code embedded on your site, you should be all set. Now, when a new contact fills out your form and is added to your Bronto account, they will be automatically sent an email containing a prominent link to the Manage Preferences page where they can give you whatever additional information they would like.

Let us know if you have questions or comments on this post. If you are already implementing this method, let us know how it’s going in the comments below.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

Related posts:

1. Are You Aware of Direct Unsubscribe? Typically contacts in Bronto can unsubscribe by either clicking the...
2. Adding Contacts To A Specific List With Direct Add A few months ago, Lucas Weber wrote a post called...
3. How To Send A Subscription Confirmation Message At Bronto, we’re very serious about permission based marketing. We...

So, what is a Bulletproof button anyway?

A Bulletproof button is a button or navigation bar in your HTML email that looks the same regardless of whether the contact has enabled images or not. They are great for calls to action that can be seen even if the contact doesn’t enable images in their inbox. Instead of being made up of one or more images like a traditional graphical button, bulletproof buttons are built from pure HTML. You may not have the same graphic flair available to you, but that is a small tradeoff for the greatly enhanced readability.

Below is an example of each kind of button. The button on the left is actually a bullet proof button. If you highlight it, you’ll notice that you can actually select the text on it. The button on the right is a regular old graphic button, which, if images were not available, would be totally invisible! Not much use, huh?

Bulletproof!

So how can I make a bulletproof button?

Making these buttons used to be a bit of a chore. You would have to manually write the HTML code involved. The code for the button above looks like this:

 Bulletproof!

Luckily, the folks over at Email Transit have whipped up a Bulletproof Button Generator that they have been kind enough to share with the internet. You can find the generator at http://emailtransmit.com/bulletproof

That’s all there is to it. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section below.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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2. See What They See: Inbox Previews At Bronto, we work hard to implement features that not...
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What’s New?

First of all, those of you who are currently using the Direct Unsubscribe snippet as it is now will be able to continue to do so without any changes being made. Your contacts will still be able to use your form, enter their email address, click submit, and (once their email address is appended to the Direct Unsubscribe snippet) unsubscribe.

The big change that has been made to Direct Unsubscribe is that it can now use a Bronto tracking cookie to automatically pull in the email address of the contact who clicked on a link in a message you sent from Bronto and unsubscribe that individual. This is great for people who would like to implement a truly one-click unsubscribe process that uses a custom unsubscribe landing page. The other change is that we’ve moved the feature from the unsubscribe page out to the Data Exchange area (Home tab > Settings > Data Exchange).

How To Use It

Using Direct Unsubscribe is actually pretty simple, but like any of our snippet based integrations, it can require some web programming knowledge. To get the snippet just go to the Home tab > Settings > Data Exchange and check the Direct Unsubscribe checkbox.  This will expand the box and reveal the code.  You’ll notice that the code does not include any area for email address. This is because it can now be used without using the Bronto tracking cookie. In other words, you can unsubscribe contacts even if they arrive at your unsubscribe page from a source other than a message you send via Bronto. If you would like to append the email address manually, just add the following to the very end of the snippet:

&email=email@example.com

Of course you will need to replace email@example.com with the email address of the person who wants to unsubscribe. This can be done by pulling the email address that the recipient enters into the form on your end. If you append an email address yourself, it will always take precedence over the the cookie used to identify the email address.

So that is an overview of the new and improved  Direct Unsubscribe feature, if you are currently using this feature or if you have any questions, please let us know!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

Related posts:

1. Are You Aware of Direct Unsubscribe? Typically contacts in Bronto can unsubscribe by either clicking the...
2. Abandonment Issues? Use Direct Update to Get Over Them! In my last post, DIY Integrations II: Direct Update, I...
3. Adding Contacts To A Specific List With Direct Add A few months ago, Lucas Weber wrote a post called...

The Email Standards Project is a group of designers and developers who are working to send a message to email client developers.  The message is that designing for email  should be standardized and simplified. Right now, email clients are able to support or not support whatever HTML or CSS they would like. This makes designing emails that look good across all of the most common email clients very difficult.

When coding templates for clients, our team ensures cross-client compatibility by using the Email Standards Project’s comprehensive website http://www.email-standards.org to make sure that we only use code that is universally supported. This is a free service that they offer. They send an ‘acid test’ email with an array of specific tags to various email clients, and then report back on which tags do or do not render properly.

This is an invaluable tool for email developers, and one that we use often to diagnose rendering issues for clients. I highly recommend checking it out if you are an email coder, or would just like to know more about the current state of email client rendering.

Got any other sites that you use to enhance your email designs?  Share them in the comments.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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Before we begin, please note that this guide will not tell you what changes to make to the CSS, simply where to find it in the new webforms builder.

Step 1: Choose your Webform

The new webform builder allows you to edit the CSS for any of the webforms available to you, from an Add contact form to a Manage Preferences page. The first step is just deciding which form you would like to edit. When you’ve decided, you can click either the name of the form, or the pencil icon off to the right.


Step 2: Click the ‘Styles’ link

The next step is to simply click on the Styles button on the upper right of the form editor screen. This will bring up a lightbox that contains all of the CSS code for the current webform. You can see that the CSS is well commented, which means you should be able to tell which selector controls which portion of your form content.

Step 3: Check the checkbox

In order to make sure that you are able to edit the CSS, you’ll just need to make sure that the Use the custom stylesheet below checkbox is checked. This will enable the text field with the CSS in it, and you will be able to make any edits that you would like.

Resetting the form

If you make a few too many edits and accidentally hide your email address field or something, we also offer a quick way to revert back to the default CSS stylesheet. If you need to do this, just click the Styles link one more time and then click the link at the very bottom of the lightbox, the link is pictured below.

Hopefully this post illustrates the ease with which you can now find and edit specific styles on your webforms. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

Lucas Weber,
Bronto Client Services

Related posts:

1. Getting Comfortable With New Webforms Bronto’s Spring 2010 Release is finally here, and with it,...
2. Creating New Webforms Coming soon to a Bronto near you, our new webforms...
3. Webforms and Subscriber Confirmation Back in February, Lucas Weber gave us a great post...

Setting Frequency Caps

Before we look at how to override Frequency Caps, we’ll take a very quick look at where to go to set them up in the first place. By default, Bronto does not enable any Frequency Caps in your account, so they will need to be set up manually. To set up or check Frequency Caps that are currently in place, just go to Home->Settings and then choose General settings from the left sidebar. Your current Frequency Caps settings can be found on this page.

Overriding Frequency Caps

Overriding Frequency Caps is actually very simple, and can be done on regular or automated messages in your account. For regular messages, during the first step of the send process and after you’ve set up your From information and scheduled your message, there will be a link at the bottom of the screen that says Show Advanced Options. Just click the link and the Advanced Options menu will appear. From there, all you have to do is click the checkbox labeled Contact Frequency Caps Override. You can then scroll to the bottom and click Next to move on with the sending process.

For Automated Message Rules, overriding Frequency Caps is even easier. On the second step of creating an Automated Message Rule, there is the Override Frequency Caps checkbox in the Sender Options section right at the top of the page.  Just make sure that checkbox is checked and this Automated Message Rule will override any Frequency Caps you have in place.

That is all there is to it. Simply checking the override Frequency Caps checkbox in either of these locations will allow this particular message to bypass any Frequency Caps that may be set on your account.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

Related posts:

1. Separate Your Way To Success This post only applies to Legacy Version 3 of the...
2. Automatically Sending Welcome Messages When a contact sign’s up to receive messages from you,...
3. Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3: Sending Test Messages As a Bronto user, you have probably been sending test...

Step 1:  Prepare Your Message

The first step in sending your contacts a subscription confirmation message is to have your message set up, tested, and ready to go. Creating messages is covered extensively in the online help, and will not be covered in this blog post. Instead, we’ll be focusing on making sure that the message we want to send has a Confirmation URL in it so that our contacts have some way to confirm their subscription.

We actually have a Special tag that can be placed on any element in your message, whether it is an image or a simple text link. The Special tag you’ll need to use to create a click-able confirmation URL is %%!confirm_url%%. Here is how it would look as part of a text link:

<a href="%%!confirm_url%%"> Click here to confirm your subscription </a>


Step 2: Import Your Contacts

The second and final step is to import your contacts. This can be done just as normal, the only exception is that on the fourth step of the import process, you’ll choose to send the contacts a subscription confirmation message, as seen below:

Be sure to select the message you have prepared with the confirmation url link in it. The system will not allow you to select a message that does not have this Special tag in place. Once you’ve specified which confirmation message to send, fill in the From Name and From Address fields, and then follow the rest of the normal import steps. As the system processes the new contacts into the account, it will automatically send them the confirmation message you specified. The contacts will be imported with a status of ‘unconfirmed’ and will not be able to receive any further email from your account until they have clicked on the confirmation link in the message they were sent.

That’s it! Now all you have to do is enjoy the benefits of a truly opted in list.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

Related posts:

1. Webforms and Subscriber Confirmation Back in February, Lucas Weber gave us a great post...
2. Make Mine A Double: Double Opt-in With The API For those of you that want to use the API...
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Do your images have style?  If not, why?  It’s simple in Bronto’s WYSIWYG editor to add styling to your images to give your message that professional feel.  In today’s post, we’ll look at the styling tools we offer and see how to use them to fix a couple of common problems.

A Look at the Image Appearance tab

In order to see what styles you can apply to your images, you’ll need to go to the normal Insert/Edit Image button () in the Bronto WYSIWYG editor. Clicking this button will bring up the standard image inserting dialogue box. If you take a look at this, you’ll notice two tabs at the top, one of which is labeled Appearance.

After clicking on the Appearance tab, you’ll see the editor window below:

Now that we have the Appearance tab pulled up, we’ll walk through what each of the settings does…

The Alignment Setting

The Alignment setting allows you to align your image. You can choose from a number of different alignment options, including the two most commonly used, left and right.  Aligning an image left will cause text to wrap around the image on the right side, and aligning an image right will cause the text to wrap around on the left.  Like the graphic below.

Dimensions

The Dimensions setting allows you to set the size of your image. It will let you define a width and a height for the image you are styling. It also includes a checkbox that will, if checked, keep the image proportions intact so that your image does not distort when it re-sizes.

Vertical and Horizontal space

The Vertical and Horizontal space boxes are great for allowing your images a little breathing room.  If you look back at the alignment example above, you’ll notice that the images and the text are really close together.  If we take the same left aligned image and put a value of 10 in both the vertical and horizontal space boxes, an invisible buffer of 10 pixels in either direction will surround the image. The result will be much nicer, like so:

Border

The Border property allows you to set a border around your image. The border will be solid with a thickness set to whatever number you type into the box. This is not the most useful aspect of the Border property though. Oddly enough, the vast majority of users will set the Border attribute to 0.  Setting it to 0 will eliminate the ugly blue border that appears around images when you place a link on them. This blue border can be quite the eyesore in an otherwise beautiful email marketing message, so it really pays to get rid of it with this simple setting.

Style

The Style box is kind of a catch all that allows you to apply custom styling to your images using CSS. Using this box will require knowledge of CSS syntax and attributes.

So that is our quick and easy look at the image styling options available in the Bronto WYSIWYG editor. The different styles offered here can really help to lend a professional look and feel to your WYSIWYG generated messages, and can hopefully increase your ROI in the process.

Lucas Weber,
Bronto Client Services

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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 Update 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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Integrating your website or database with a third party application (like Bronto) can be a pain. It can take hours of expensive development work, and requires in-depth planning and forethought.  Luckily, if you have web programming experience, you can get some basic integrations up and running in a relatively short amount of time.

Our DIY Integrations series will explore how to set up these mini-integrations. In this episode, we’ll be talking about a feature called Direct Update. We won’t be doing a step-by-step walk through here, as every implementation will be a bit different. Rather, this post is more of an overview describing what the feature is and general information on how to implement it.

Direct Update

The Direct Update feature enables you to update information in a contact’s fields whenever they visit a page on your website.  You can add or subtract from numerical values, as well as set any field to a specific value.  This allows you to easily keep contact information up to date without manually importing or updating data.  This feature adds data to your account by calling a specially formatted image tag that contains account-specific parameters.

To get started using Direct Update, you’ll need to enable it in your account. To do this, just go to the Home tab -> Settings -> Analytics.   Once you are on the Analytics Settings page, just click the checkbox next to Direct Update, and then click Save at the bottom of the page.

Fields

In order to specify a field to update, you will need to use the exact spelling of that field as you specified it within the application. You can see a listing of all your contact fields by going to Contacts->Fields. Any field can be updated with Direct Update, but some fields only support certain operations.

Operations And Values

There are 4 different operations: set, add, append, and sub ( which is short for subtract). add and sub are only supported by the numerical field types. append allows you to track multiple values without having to create a large number of individual fields. The listing below gives more information about working with the different types of fields. Be sure to use only lower case letters for the operators.

• Number, decimal, and currency fields support the operations of set, add, and sub. The value provided may be a positive or negative number. Decimal values provided operations on a Number field will be rounded accordingly.
• Date fields support the set operator. The value must be a date specified in the format you have designated for date fields on the Formatting page located at Home->Settings->Formatting.
• Text and Text Area fields only support the set and append operator. The text value that is passed in will need to be url escaped if it contains any special characters such as ?, &, =, or %.
• Checkbox fields only support set with a value of 0 for unchecked and 1 for checked.
• Radio button and pull down fields only support set. The value provided must exactly match one of the existing options for a given field – this means they must have the same spelling, case, and any included spaces.

Possible Uses

Product Interest

This example updates a field whenever a contact visits the product page for a specific high value product. This allows us to send an email to people who have checked out a product within the last month:

field1=productxvisit,set,05/12/2008

Purchase Details

Below you can see an example that is used on a purchase confirmation page. Here the contact has made a purchase totaling 129.23, so we add that to the field lifetimevalue. We also update the field lastpurchaseddate to the date of purchase. This one update will give us the ability to segment our contacts based on dollar amount purchased, as well as recency of purchase – fantastic segments for very targeted mailings!

field1=lifetimevalue,add,129.23&field2=lastpurchaseddate,set,12/15/2007

Deconstructing the Direct Update snippet

Below is an example of a possible Direct Update code snippet:

<img height="0" width="0" border="0" src="http://example.com/ public/?q=direct_update amp;fn=Public_DirectUpdateForm&id=IDSTRING&field1=lifetimevalue,add,129.23 amp;field2=lastpurchasedate,set,09/15/2009">

The first part of the URL is given to you as part of the code snippet you got from the Direct Update section on the Analytics page. This is unique to each account and allows the application to identify your account. The next few parameters, q, fn, and id allow us to know how to process the data that is to follow, as well as identify your account. The last bit, field1=lifetimevalue,add,129.23&field2=lastpurchasedate,set,12/15/2007 is the actual string that updates the fields. As you can see, all you need to do is define your update pieces and tack them onto the URL provided on the Analytics page.

So that is a simple breakdown on how to maintain up to date contact field information without a lengthy integration process. This method is definitely not for everyone, and does require some experience with web programming. However, with the right know how, Direct Update is a great way to get integrated without fussing with an API. Are you successfully using the Direct Update feature? Let us know in the comments!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

Related posts:

1. Abandonment Issues? Use Direct Update to Get Over Them! In my last post, DIY Integrations II: Direct Update, I...
2. DIY Integrations: Getting Contacts Into Your Account With Direct Add Integrating your website or database with a third party application...
3. Adding Contacts To A Specific List With Direct Add A few months ago, Lucas Weber wrote a post called...