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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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

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Width

The first thing I want to go over is setting the overall width of your template design. Many people want to create an email template in the same way they would build a web page and set the width to be fairly wide. Unfortunately, many contacts are limited by the width of the display window of their email client, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. These display windows are usually fairly small and a wide email design forces the contact to have to scroll left and right to read the content of your message. We typically recommend building an email template design with a width of around 600 pixels or so. You can sometimes get away with a slightly larger width, but again, your contacts may have to scroll right to see the entire content.

Non-Supported HTML Elements

Building an HTML template for email is much different than building an HTML website. Many of the shortcuts we can use in web page design to cut down on coding are not supported by email clients that display the emails. A great resource for seeing which elements may not be supported by the various email clients is http://www.email-standards.org. Lucas Weber also did a great blog post explaining this site and how to use it, which you can find by clicking here.

So, for example, let’s say you want to create a simple table cell with some text and have 10 pixels of padding separating the text from the edge of the cell. In website design, the HTML might look similar to this:

Resulting in:

Unfortunately, the very popular Outlook 2007 email client does not support the padding style attribute and will ignore it, resulting in your text showing up incorrectly up against the edge of the cell. To write this code so that it correctly shows up in an email client that doesn’t support the padding attribute, we must use table rows and columns to set the spacing we wish to use. Our corrected code will look something similar to this:

Resulting in this:

As you can see, we achieved the same result as above, but we used rows with their height set to 10 pixels and additional columns with widths set to 10 pixels to create the “padding” we need in this table cell. This code will render exactly the same, regardless of which email client you view the message in.

Inline Styles vs. CSS Style Sheets

Another helpful tool web designers use in websites is CSS style sheets. These are usually added into the header region of the page and define styles throughout the web page. When you try to use these in email, however, some email clients will strip any information contained in the header section, including style sheets. This will force the content of the email message to default to whatever fonts and font sizes are set by default by either the email client or web browser you are using. To make sure this doesn’t happen in your emails, we recommend using inline styles throughout your HTML template.

Let’s say you wanted to set the font of one section of the template to 10 point Arial. Setting this as an inline style would look something like this:

Resulting in:

As you can see, the style attribute was added to the td tag to style the elements contained within it. You can add these styles throughout your template HTML code and the styles will hold in all email clients.

Required Bronto Tags

The last thing I want to talk about is adding the required Bronto tags for the unsubscribe link and physical address into your template design. The unsubscribe link and a physical address are required by CAN-SPAM in each of your email sends. If Bronto doesn’t see the correct tags to generate this information, it will automatically add it into the message for you. Typically the version Bronto adds will not look consistent with the rest of your template design. In order to incorporate the unsubscribe tag into your message, you will need to use the tag %%!unsubscribe_url%% as the URL in your hyperlink. The tag will be replaced automatically with the correct URL when you send out your message from Bronto. In the HTML code, your unsubscribe URL might look similar to this:

Click here to <a href="%%!unsubscribe_url%%">Unsubscribe</a>

Resulting in:

Click here to Unsubscribe

Adding the company address is very easy as Bronto has a tag that will add all of the required address information and format it in a popular style. The tag is %%!account_address%%. This does not need to be inserted into a hyperlink like the unsubscribe link, as the tag will be replaced at time of send with the account address. The formatting will look like this:

Bronto | 324 Blackwell Street | Suite 410 | Durham, NC 27701 | US

Conclusions

Wrapping things up, these are just a few tips you can use in your custom HTML template designs. For example code and more tutorials on building custom Bronto templates, reference the help section in your Bronto account and search for “Example Code For A Custom Template”. Good luck with creating your custom templates!

Rob Slade
Client Support Specialist

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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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If you used the previous version of the API you may have used the filtering that was available. You had the option to check equality(=) for all data types as well as inequalities(>, <, >=, <=) with numeric and date types. In version 4 of the API we have added some very useful filter operators.  Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the new operators.

To The Operators Jeeves

StartsWith / EndsWith can be used as a string comparison and are especially useful when trying to filter down your contacts by matching a portion of their email address. For instance, let’s say you wanted to see how engaged contacts with only yahoo.com have been.  You could use the EndsWith operator and “yahoo.com” as the value to request just these contacts.  Once you have these contacts you can use the aggregated statistics that are returned to create a customized report with just the information that you need.

But Wait, There’s More…

So you actually want all of the contacts except those yahoo.com addresses?  You’re in luck, you can change that EndsWith operator to DoesNotEndWith.    Why stop there?  You can add additional filters to crop that list down even more.  You only want contacts that signed up this year?  Add a filter using the new SameYearAs operator?  Want to get contacts that signed up specifically between two dates?  Check out the Before / After and BeforeOrSameDay / AfterOrSameDay.

With this version of the API we have made an effort to open up the filtering to give you more options. As your contact database grows this will be increasingly important to you. Hopefully you will find these additional possibilities helpful. Let us know what you think!

Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto

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What’s New In Version 4?

Gone is the universal readFilter with its readCriteria attributes. In version 4, each read function has its own filter object with associated named criteria parameters. As with V3, you can still opt to perform the read with an empty filter in order to retrieve all of the available records for that request. In some cases, this may be the desired effect. However, in other cases, filtering the returned results is essential. The objects that you will probably want to filter most are contacts, since this is likely your largest set of objects.

Filtering Contacts

Let’s take a look at the options available in the filter for the readContacts function. On api.bronto.com, you will find the contactFilter object that is one of the parameters of the readContacts (Click here for example code) function. The parameters of the various filter objects correlate to their associated object. All of the parameters you see in the contactFilter object are all in the contact object itself, except for one. That is the type parameter. This parameter takes on the same role as the operator parameter in V3. That is, it allows you to set multiple criteria and join them with an AND or OR operator. We have also added some new operators that allow for more advanced filtering. Take a look at the comparisons that are now available in the filterOperator.

If you want to give it a try without writing any code and don’t yet have a handy SOAP testing tool, see Washing With SOAP. You’ll also want to review Logging into the API v4.0. Once you have done that, you can go ahead and pick out your favorite read function and start trying out some of the different filtering parameters.

Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto

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Would you tow a trailer with a sports car? Would you tighten a bolt with a hammer? Would you eat soup with a knife?

Many of our clients, either by design or due to allocation of resources, have a separation of responsibilities in regards to their email marketing activities. This is especially true when an API integration is involved and the developers handling the integration may or may not also be involved on the marketing side.

The Bronto API is a powerful tool that allows you to control your entire work-flow, from contact management, to message creation, to message sending.  From a development standpoint, this is great in that you have all the power in your own hands. While this may suit your needs perfectly, you may also want to ask yourself what parts of your work-flow are best served by your custom integration, and what would make more sense to save for human intervention in the Bronto application.  Developers and marketers sometimes view things very differently, so let’s look into a couple of places where you can make some choices to affect how you ultimately end up sending messages.

No Code Changes Required

So your developers have integrated your contact database with Bronto. Messages are being triggered off of various activities on your website. Marketing messages are being sent regularly to the various lists managed by your integration. Transactional messages are being sent with a fury from all the purchasing that is occurring on your site. Unfortunately, the messages look like an old paper plate that someone wrote on. If your developers don’t also double as email marketers and graphic designers, then perhaps you want to pass control of that portion of the process. We talked about how message creation, data population, and sending can be separate activities in Give Them What They Want. Your designers can create a visually appealing emails and your developer’s custom integration can continue to trigger the sending of messages and managing contacts.  You shouldn’t have to make any code changes because you want to update the look of a message.

Sending through an API Triggered Automated Message Rule, as we talked about in Owning Automated Messages is another way to not only get great reporting for your triggered deliveries, but to allow more choice for your marketing team. You can turn an AMR on and off, schedule it to expire, control lists of ineligible and eligible contacts, override frequency caps, and control throttling, all without having to make a single code change. Often this type of control is tied into the code that was written by your developers, but Bronto also allows you to make these changes directly from our web application.

Allowing your developers and marketers to do what they do best is one way to get maximum performance from everyone and hopefully yield a successful marketing campaign. Don’t eat soup with a knife.  It burns and you’ll probably end up buying a new shirt.

Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto

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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

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Knowing the impact your email marketing has on the bottom line is huge. It can help you to justify more money, more time, or more thought on what is most likely a crucial part of your marketing mix. So how can you do that? One word gets you there – Conversions.

Within Bronto you can quickly and easily track conversions, and today I’d like to talk about strategies for getting the most out of tracking multiple purchases on your site. Keep in mind that conversion tracking within email marketing can be powerful, but it is usually there for segmentation purposes. Conversion tracking allows for a great way to track email’s value add or engage in remarketing, but it’s not going to replace the reporting you get from your ecommerce system.

With that being said, when you are implementing conversion tracking, you should consider your needs first. For the details on how to implement the actual tracking code, see our recent blog post on Setting Up Conversion Tracking Within Bronto.

Show me the money

If you are looking primarily to understand the total amount of money that is driven in, then I’d suggest you go with ‘Purchase Total’ tracking. In this method you will be tracking just one thing, purchase total. In fact, I would recommend just using “purchase total” as the actual description.

This will allow you to have a simple report that quickly and easily displays the value you are realizing from your email marketing. You will be able to segment your contacts on purchase amounts as well. Are you excited about the prospects of a High Value Customers yet?

A Segmenter’s Dream

If you have loftier goals of segmenting and targeting buyers based on their behavior, I would suggest going with a more granular approach. You can actually track multiple conversions on one page, and I would suggest doing one for each department they purchase within. You could track at the product level, but that can quickly become unwieldy, and frankly, almost impossible to segment on.

The departmental method will require that your ecommerce system (or an add-on created by your team) be able to break purchases down by department. However, once you have conversions tracked by department (with their corresponding spend by department), you will be able to segment you contacts by department they have purchased from. Now you’ve just opened a door to more relevant emails!

As you can see, there is no single set way to track conversions. You will need to put some thought into what you want to do with the resulting data. But don’t be too concerned, if you find that you aren’t getting the data you need, you can always change your conversion tracking.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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As everyone sends holiday email campaigns, the ISPs receiving them start to get swamped with people sending their messages out.  At Bronto, we recommend that you take it easy on the ISPs.  As a best practice, you should throttle your message for as long as you can when sending.  Your deliverability should improve and your campaign should move more smoothly if you choose to send your message over a longer period of time, rather than letting them all hit their destinations at the same time.

All Bronto messages are set by default to send over a period of 4 hours.  If you can afford to spread your message out over 8 to 10 hours, your chances of reaching your audience successfully will greatly increase.  The throttling option is located at the bottom of the “Send Message” page under the heading Delivery Scheduling.

So, do yourself a favor during the rush of the holiday season and slow down. It may help you get your message out a little more effectively. If you have any questions or comments on the throttling feature, please add them to the comments section below.

Frank Chapman
Bronto Client Services

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