Bronto End-of-Life: What about Your Pop-Ups and Preference Centers?

In an email to customers earlier this year, Oracle announced that the last day of service for their Bronto Marketing Platform will be May 31, 2022, sending customers on the hunt for their next email service provider.

The ESP selection process is no small task. Marketers must consider automation, segmentation, personalization, and an endless list of requirements for the new ESP to meet. With so many things to evaluate, it’s important that your search for Bronto alternatives considers two things that go beyond the inbox: your onsite forms and preference centers.

Whether you use Bronto’s built-in Pop-Up Manager for your onsite forms or a different solution, Bronto’s end-of-life means you must rebuild your current forms, ensure your current forms will integrate with your new ESP, or even think about whether your current form solution aligns with your long-term plans.

The same goes for your preference centers.

Here, we’ll spare you the obvious dinosaur jokes and help you decide what to do about your pop-ups and pages before Bronto goes extinct, er, away.

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Building Your Forms and Pop-Ups after Bronto

From inline forms that grow your newsletter list to exit-intent pop-ups that prevent cart abandonment, your onsite forms are a crucial part of your email program. When considering new email technology, you can’t afford to keep your pop-ups out of the conversation.

Finding Alternatives to Bronto’s Pop-Up Manager

If you use Bronto’s Pop-Up Manager, you need to find an ESP with comparable pop-ups, build your pop-ups in-house, or find a new pop-up solution that seamlessly integrates with your new marketing technology.

As you think about your next steps, keep these features in mind:

• Drag-and-Drop Editor. Drag-and-drop form builders make it easy to launch campaigns without significant development resources. If your marketing program moves fast, make sure your next solution has the drag-and-drop capabilities to keep up with you, as well as a selection of pre-built pop-up templates to help you get started quickly.
• Pop-Up Form Factors. From lightboxes to sliders and banners, there are several types of form factors that you can use to promote offers to your visitors. If you use Bronto’s Ribbons (banners) to place promotions at the top of your site, look for a pop-up solution that offers these form factors. 
• Design and Strategy Services. Moving forms to a new pop-up solution requires you to rebuild the forms using your new technology. Look for a provider that goes beyond technology to help you with design, strategy, and integrations.
• Exit-Intent and Other Trigger Conditions. Exit-intent pop-ups prevent site abandonment by showing an offer as visitors move their cursor to leave your site. Make sure your new solution provides exit-intent, timing, and other trigger conditions to show pop-ups at the moment when your visitor is most likely to convert.
• Behavioral Targeting. Triggering pop-ups by user behavior, such as URLs visited or number of articles read, is a powerful way to increase conversions. Look for a pop-up solution that allows you to replicate (or even improve) your current targeting conditions.
• Coupon Codes. Bronto’s pop-ups integrate with their Coupon Manager to display unique coupon codes. If you use these for your eCommerce site, make sure your new pop-up solution offers similar capabilities.
• A/B Testing. Testing your forms is important for ensuring your pop-ups drive conversions without impacting your onsite experience. Choose a pop-up solution with the A/B testing features you need.
• Integrations. If you use a separate pop-up solution, make sure your pop-ups integrate with your new ESP, as well as the other technology you use, such as shopping cart providers, analytics platforms, or your CDP.

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Upgrading Your Current Pop-Ups

If you don’t currently use Bronto pop-ups, switching ESPs gives you a chance to evaluate your existing pop-up solution.

Maybe you’ve outgrown those basic targeting and timing options. Perhaps you want to personalize your pop-ups. Or maybe you want to consolidate your tech with a solution that offers surveys, quizzes, and abandoned cart widgets too.

Advanced pop-up solutions provide you with a wealth of ways to better engage your website visitors. To improve your onsite conversions, consider looking for form builders with more powerful features, such as:

• Dynamic Content. With dynamic content, you can personalize pop-ups by dynamically changing text, images, and HTML to match user behavior or current page content.
• Multi-Page Forms. Progressively capture additional first-party data by building forms with multiple pages. That way, you can capture user data at each step of the form, even if users don’t complete the form sequence.
• Advanced Targeting. Show different pop-ups to users based on their referral source, purchase history, their cookie values, and more. For example, Digioh allows you to target users based on your Segment personas.
• Multivariate Testing. Want to test 3 pop-up variations at a time? More? With multivariate testing, you can experiment with copy, creative, and targeting/timing conditions on multiple pop-ups at once. If you choose a solution that provides traffic controls, you can even deploy your tests to a small percentage of your audience, rather than every visitor.
• One-Tap Mobile Opt-In. Improve mobile conversion rates by making it easier for mobile visitors to opt into your SMS list. One-tap forms allow you to populate a message in your visitor’s native text messaging app. All users have to do is hit send, and they’re set up to receive your text messages.
• Quizzes, Polls, and Surveys. Many pop-up providers go beyond basic email capture to provide additional ways to engage your visitors. If you use quizzes, polls, and surveys to interact with your visitors, consider turning to a solution like Digioh that allows you to create any type of form or pop-up from a single platform.
• Browse & Cart Abandonment Recovery. Exit-intent isn’t the only way to prevent site abandonment. Advanced pop-up builders allow you to recover revenue with countdown timers, idle timers on mobile, “save cart to email” pop-ups, dynamic free shipping threshold banners, and other tools for ecommerce conversion.

Of course, these aren't the only more advanced features out there. There are endless use cases for engaging your audience with inventive pop-ups. Maybe some of those use cases are floating around in your head right now. That's why it's important to make sure your next pop-up solution can match your potential. For instance, with Digioh's Custom JavaScript editor, you can build nearly any pop-up you can envision. Even better, we can write the JS for you.

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Building a Preference Center for Your Post-Bronto ESP

If you have an in-house preference center, your next step is to connect your preference center with your new ESP.

In-house preference centers are tough to build and maintain, so many marketers use their ESP’s built-in preference center solution instead. However, built-in preference center solutions often lack the flexibility needed to create an on-brand, fine-tuned preference page.

As you search for an ESP, make sure its preference center has the features you need, such as:

• Custom Branding. Does the ESP allow you to tailor your preference center with your brand’s colors, custom fonts, images, and HTML?
• Drag-and-Drop Builder. Can you create a preference center all your own, or are you locked into a set template?
• Custom Domains. Will your preference center live on your domain, or will you have to use a domain provided by your ESP?
• Frequency Options. Does the preference center solution allow subscribers to pause email communications for a while?
• Dynamic Content. Can you customize your preference page with pre-populated email addresses, newsletter recommendations, or other dynamic creative?
• Post-Unsubscribe Surveys. Will you be able to collect feedback from unsubscribers that you can use to improve your email program?
• Design Services. Can your new ESP work with you to design a preference center that matches your site?

If you find that preference center options are limited at your potential ESPs, you can also turn to a dedicated preference center solution. Digioh’s preference centers provide all of the above and can integrate with any ESP, leaving you with one less thing to worry about in your RFPs.

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Forms and Preference Centers That Integrate with Any Bronto Alternatives

Choosing and migrating your ESP is hard enough without having to worry about your forms and preference centers too.

That’s why Digioh provides hands-on service to help you build and launch pop-ups, preference centers, surveys, quizzes, and more. With advanced targeting, powerful personalization, and hundreds of integrations, Digioh’s drag-and-drop forms and preference centers fit seamlessly into any marketing stack.

To learn how you can build better pop-ups and preference centers, talk to us! We’re happy to help, no matter which ESP you choose.