Merit Network Fosters Education and Engagement with Email

Austin Caldwell, Product Marketing Director

July 29, 2020

Founded by the three largest universities in Michigan, Merit Network has pioneered networking and internet technologies for over 50 years. Today, the nonprofit provides networking, security and community services to member organizations across the state. It seeks to facilitate learning opportunities, economic development and accessible internet across its membership base, which consists of other nonprofits, higher education, K-12 schools, libraries, government and healthcare organizations.


“Bronto has been scalable with our needs, our understanding, and our sophistication. It’s something that we’ve been able to leverage throughout this entire journey of learning how to deliver messages to our audiences in the best way.”
Pierrette Widmeyer, Director of Marketing, Merit Network

Building Connections and Community

Serving an expansive network

Merit Network serves a large, yet close-knit base of approximately 400 member organizations and 750 affiliate organizations. With steady growth and low churn, the organization continually brings in new members who are typically familiar with Merit through the advisory boards, research and other community initiatives. Members span seven industries and 42 different products and services.

A shift to data-driven marketing

As Merit Network’s communications team grew and evolved into a full-fledged marketing organization, they realized they lacked visibility into their email marketing performance. To deliver the personalized educational content and resources their members value, they needed a better user experience and data analytics.

Highly targeted emails boost engagement

With the Bronto Marketing Platform, Merit Network can target and segment to even the most nuanced of audiences – for example, a healthcare member who purchased a particular product or service. Combined with NetSuite CRM, Merit can easily find the contacts associated with a particular organization and build segments based on custom fields, ensuring relevant and informative member communications.

Sophistication to scale

As Merit Network continues to hone its marketing strategy, confident that Bronto will grow and scale with the organization, it plans to experiment with more sophisticated techniques like advanced workflows, optimized delivery time, and multivariate testing to reach members in even more meaningful ways.

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