Here is a demonstration on how you would export all of your inactive contacts in a Bronto account.

First, you will nead to click on the Contacts tab to get to the Contacts Dashboard.

Near the top right of the Contacts dashboard there is an Export link.  Click on this link and you will go to the Export page. Here is what the Export page looks like in Bronto.

There are three sections on this page that you need to be aware of.  The first is the status of the contacts that you are creating the report for. The three choices that you have are Active, Inactive and All.  In this demo we are choosing Inactive.  If you have a question concerning this terminology, please refer to our Brontoversity post – “What’s Your Contact’s Status?” for a complete description.

Below this you will find the “Choose Fields” section. In this section you can decide what field information you would like to export for each of the contacts in the report. Notice that there are links that will allow you to choose “Select All” or “Select None”  easily with one click.  In this demonstration we are choosing to include the information stored in Bronto for the first and last names of each contact.  It is important to remember that you should only export the field information that you need.  Excess information will only increase file size and may extend the time that you will have to wait for the report to generate.

Your last option on this page is to request email notification that your report has been generated.  If you are exporting a large number of contacts, or fields, it may take the application a few minutes to generate your report.  If this is the case, enter your email address in the box provided and Bronto will send you a message to alert you that the report is ready upon completion.

Once you have completed adding the criteria for your export, click the Generate link. Bronto will start the background process of creating your report. You will then receive a banner that informs you that the export process has started.  Once you receive this, banner you are free to work in other areas of Bronto as the report is compiled.

Once you receive notification from Bronto that the report has been generated, you will be able to find it in the “Recent Reports” section in the lower right corner of the Home Dashboard.  The report will be in the form of a .CSV file that can be easily opened and edited in most spreadsheet applications.

So the next time your boss needs you to provide a list of all of your contacts with their data, you should be able to pull it out of Bronto with ease.  If you have any questions on the Export feature, please leave a comment below or contact Bronto Client Services.

Frank Chapman
Bronto Client Services

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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 Add. 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 Add

The Direct Add feature enables you to feed information from forms on your site directly into your Bronto mailing lists. This feature adds data to your account by calling a specially formatted image tag that contains account-specific parameters.  To get started using Direct Add, you’ll need to create a Web Form in your Bronto account that includes all of the fields that you would like to pass from a form on your website.   Once the Bronto Web Form is created, you can access the code to implement this feature by clicking the Advanced Form Usage tab, and then scrolling down to the Direct Add section.

Below is an example of a possible Direct Add URL:

The first part of the path (http:// through the ID string) notifies the application of the account, list, and form with which the path is associated. “&a=DirectAdd” is calling the actual function to process the data that is to follow. The last bit is the actual string that was created earlier in your script. To make sure that field values are correctly mapped from your account to the Direct Add form, we provide a list of available field values (click screenshot below).

The name of the field will come first, followed by an equal sign, and then the actual value. To add additional fields and values, you will tack on an ampersand and then repeat the format for the first field.

Once your URL is set up, you can place it within the body tag of the confirmation or thank you page of your website form.  It is very important that the URL is placed on the page following the actual form so that data that is inserted into the form can be passed to the URL string.

So that is a simple breakdown on how to push information from your form to Bronto using Direct Add. This method is definitely not for everyone, and does require some experience with web programming. However, with the right know how, Direct Add is a great way to get integrated without fussing with an API. Join us next time on DIY Integrations when we’ll be talking about the Direct Update feature.

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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In this example, we are going to assume that your targeted list has a large amount of Gmail addresses that you would like to send to.  You can easily find this out by looking at the pie chart on your list’s overview page.  What you want to do now is create a segment from this list that includes only these Gmail addresses.

The Segment

On the Contacts tab, choose the Segments option.  This will take you to the “All Segments” page. Here you are able to see all of the segments in your account.  Click the “Create Segment” link in the top right of this page. Give your segment a name and make sure to mark the radio button next to “Select contacts who match all rules described below.”  Proceed to Rule one and establish the list that you are working with.  In this case we are using the Blog Post List. Choose “On List” from the first drop down and then choose your list in the second drop down. You should now be able to click on the “Calculate Criteria” link to see how many contacts are included in this list. In this case we are working with a list of 1,788 contacts.

Now, click the link to create a new rule.

You will need to establish your accounts Gmail.com contacts. In the first drop down, choose “Email address.”  In the second drop down list, choose “contains.”  The last field for this rule is a text field.  In this field you would add gmail.com. You can now click on the “Calculate Criteria” link now to see how many gmail.com addresses you have in your account.  It’s important to remember that this rule is showing you how many of these addresses you have across your whole account and not just on the list.

Click the link to “Calculate Full Segment” and you will now find the intersection between the contacts on your stated list and contacts with gmail.com in their address. In this example we have 135 contacts that now belong to this segment.  Save this segment and you are ready to send to your Gmail contacts.

Sending To This Segment

When you send your message in Bronto, just choose this segment from the “Select Recipients” area as you would any list you are sending to.It is important to remember that if you are sending another version of this same message to the rest of your list, you should select your original list for that delivery. Also for that delivery, you should choose the segment created above from the “Ineligible Recipients” area in the advanced sending options to ensure that the contacts on the segment created above don’t also receive the version of the message sent to the entire list.

The Power of Segmentation

This is only a small part of what makes segmentation in the Bronto application such a powerful marketing tool.  There are hundreds of ways to use segmentation to send targeted messages to select groups of contacts.  If you have any questions on creating a segment, please make sure to contact anyone in Client Services here at Bronto.

Frank Chapman
Bronto Client Service

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When you first import a list, we will add the contacts to your account with a status of Active. You now have an active marketing relationship with these contacts. From there, a number of things can happen. Take a look below for a quick overview.

When you import contacts, you also have the option to have them double opt-in. Choosing this option will cause them to be created as Unconfirmed contacts. When unconfirmed, contacts can only be sent messages that contain a confirmation link. Once they click that confirmation link, they will become an active contact.

Active contacts occasionally bounce, it’s just part of what happens out on the internet. That’s ok, we expect it will happen from time to time. However, if a contact starts to bounce too much, or if we get an Invalid Email Address bounce, then we will mark that contact as Bounced. Once a contact is bounced, you cannot email them. We do this to protect your deliverability and list performance.

Contacts not only bounce, but they also unsubscribe from lists. When a contact does this, we will mark them as Unsubscribed. This ensures that they will not receive any marketing messages from you. The unsubscribe relationship is very important, so even if you delete a contact, we will remember that they have been unsubscribed. This helps to ensure that any accidental re-additions of this contact to your account will not violate compliance.

Speaking of deleted contacts, we do maintain a contact’s information when they are deleted as stated above. If a contact is deleted, then the contact has a state of Deleted. These contacts cannot be sent marketing messages, and they do not count towards your contact count.

There is one last state which is quite special, Transactional. Contacts are added to your account as transactional if you have a business relationship, as opposed to a marketing relationship with them. These contacts can be emailed transactional messages such as receipts, confirmations, or other messages that relate to a business transaction.

Bronto will not allow you to send marketing messages to transactional contacts. An important thing to note is that you can send transactional messages to active contacts. They don’t need to be modified to receive transactional messages.

If you want to see what status your contacts have, you can look at the All Contacts page by going to Contacts->All Contacts. Here you will see exactly where each contact stands.

We try to make the contact lifecycle simple and unobtrusive so that you can always know where you stand with your contacts. Have any questions about the contact lifecycle? Feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

Update: There was a question about which contacts count towards your Contact Count, it’s easy, only active contacts are counted up when we tell you how many contacts you have.

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Our Clean Contacts feature, accessible by going to Contacts –> Manage –> Clean Contacts, can be used in a couple of different ways.  For example, you can use it to remove contacts that are likely to soft bounce into inactivity with your next send, or add those that have not opened or clicked-through on the last 10 messages they have been sent to a new list.

The cleaning process is broken into 4 easy steps.  We’ll look at each step in detail below.

Step 1:  Where

Step one will allow you to choose which list you would like to clean.  You can choose any individual list in your account, or you can choose to clean contacts from all of your lists.  This allows for very targeted cleaning.

Step 2:  Who

In step two, we just have to let the system know which contacts we want to clean. There are a number of options here, so lets take a quick look at each one. First, we can choose to clean Bounced Contacts. These are contacts that have soft bounced between 1 and 4 times (on the 5th soft bounce, they are automatically cleaned).  This can be useful if you are nearing your contact limit and need to make room for a new import.

Next, we have non-engaged contacts. Non-engaged contacts are contacts that have not opened or clicked on a certain number of your past messages.   This is very useful for separating out contacts that have not opened your messages, but that you may want to try and re-engage.   Many of our clients have gotten great results with re-engagement campaigns.  For some excellent tips on how to create an effective re-engagement campaign, check out Kristen Gregory’s Bronto Blog Post ‘Drop Your Email Lists Dead Weight Without Sacrificing ROI‘.

Finally, we have Orphaned contacts. Orphaned contacts are contacts that are just sitting in your account, not associated with any lists.  Unless you send exclusively to segments, these contacts are most likely not being sent to.

Step 3: What

Step three is where we tell the system what we’d like to do with the contacts we’ve just selected.  There are three options here. First we can Clean the contacts. This simply means that they are removed from the account.  We can also add the selected contacts to a newly created list, or to an existing list.

Step 4:  Confirm

When you click Next at the bottom of the page, you’ll be brought to either a confirmation screen, or a screen that will allow you to enter the internal and external names of your new list.  When you are ready, just click Save and the cleaning process will begin.

That’s all there is to it! Our Clean Contacts feature is a quick and easy way to purge your contact list of dead weight and wasted emails, or to set up a list to kick off your next great re-engagement campaign.  Enjoy!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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