Automated Onboarding

Automated onboarding is a simple process that allows you to quickly add contacts to your account, while mitigating the risk of these contacts negatively affecting sending in your account.

Importing/adding new contacts is often a risky proposition and could have a negative impact on your email deliverability, email delivery ratings, and your sender rating. Because of this risk, Bronto developed the automated onboarding process to assess the legitimacy of new contacts as you send to them for the first time. This is a seamless process that should not disrupt your day-to-day email marketing efforts, as long as the contacts that you onboard have no negative impact on your account.

Automated onboarding is an email-centric process and is only used to assess contacts for whom you have an email address. If you have the potential to send emails to a contact and they have not double opted-in to receiving email messages from you, or they have a status of Transactional, the contact is run through the automated onboarding process the first time you send an email to them. Contacts for whom you have only Facebook, Twitter, or SMS information are not run through the automated onboarding process.

When contacts are imported into Bronto, they are automatically given the status of Onboarding, unless an imported contact already has an Inactive status that is imported with them. Contacts continue to have the Onboarding status until you send them their first marketing email. When contacts are sent a marketing message for the first time, they enter a 48 hour assessment period that Bronto uses to monitor each contact in order to determine if they will have a negative impact on your account.

All contacts who are being assessed are moved from Onboarding to Awaiting Assessment for a 48 hour period. During the assessment period, Bronto monitors the send for contact loss activity including complaints, unsubscribes, and bounces. At the end of the 48 hour period, any contact who triggered a complaint, unsubscribe, or bounce is given an Inactive status. All other contacts become Active contacts. For more information about statuses, see Contact Status. Engagement metrics, such as opens or clicks, are collected and reported for the contacts while they're being assessed but they are not used in the assessment. If Active contacts are included in the delivery, they are not affected by onboarding.
Note: You can still send other emails to contacts while they are Awaiting Assessment and engagement metrics will be collected for these sends.

The number of contacts you can include in an assessment is determined by your Sending Max. The Sending Max represents the maximum number of contacts with a status of Onboarding to whom you can currently send. Initially, you can send to a maximum of 100,000 contacts who have an Onboarding status.

Note: Customers who joined Bronto before November 2015 have an initial Sending Max of 55,000.
Your Sending Max is increased or decreased based on a combination of the success of the previous assessment and on your Sender Rating. If the assessment did not have a negative impact on your account, Bronto increases the number of Onboarding contacts you can send the next email delivery to. If the assessment indicates that sending to these contacts will have a negative impact on your account, Bronto decreases the number of Onboarding contacts you can send email to on the next delivery. For example:
  • Your Sender Rating was 10. You send to your full Sending Max and your Sender Rating remains 10 after the contacts have completed assessment. In this instance, your Sending Max will be increased to 5 times your previous Sending Max.
  • Your Sender Rating was 6. You send to your full Sending Max and your Sender Rating remains 6 after the contacts have completed assessment. In this instance, your Sending Max will remain the same.
  • Your Sender Rating was 1. You send to your full Sending Max and your Sender Rating remains 1 after the contacts have completed assessment. In this instance, your Sending Max will be half of previous Sending Max.

Bronto continues to increase or decrease your Sending Max after each assessment until all contacts are assessed. The lowest possible Sending Max is 50,000.

Over time, as your assessment activity dies down, the Sending Max will return to its default number. Bronto does this to reset the automated onboarding system and prepare your account for the next import you perform. You can view your current Sending Max on the Contact Snapshot widget.

If you attempt to send to more Onboarding contacts than the Sending Max allows, Bronto randomly selects the maximum number of Onboarding contacts from the group and puts those contacts through the 48 hour assessment process. Any Onboarding contacts to whom you attempted to send that are in excess of your limit are skipped for this send. You can view the number of skipped contacts for an email delivery by going to a delivery report and viewing the onboarding (skipped) metric. For more information on the onboarding (skipped) metric, see Onboarding (Skipped) Metric. For more information on delivery reports, see Delivery Reports (Legacy).

Note: The Sending Max does not apply to contacts with an Active status. If you send to a mix of Onboarding and Active contacts, all Active contacts will be sent to.
If you need to onboard more contacts than your Sending Max allows, you can run another group of Onboarding contacts through the assessment process by sending a marketing message to them after the previous group of contacts have moved out of Awaiting Assessment. You can easily manage onboarding by: