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Whether you’re running a blog or e-commerce business, email marketing might be one of the primary strategies you use to turn website visitors into paying customers. But you’ll need a reliable email marketing platform to collect subscribers and email your list. In this Sendinblue review, I’ll take a close look at Sendinblue’s email marketing software, including its features, plans, and pricing.
By understanding the pros and cons of this marketing software, you can make an informed decision about whether it’s the right tool for you and your business.
- Sendinblue review
- Features
- Free email marketing course
- Pros
- Cons
- Customer support
- Pricing
- How to sign up for Sendinblue
- Final thoughts
Sendinblue review: What exactly is Sendinblue?
Sendinblue is a sophisticated marketing platform that offers powerful features at a reasonable price.
It’s primarily an email marketing platform, helping you collect subscribers, design forms and landing pages, send broadcast emails, and set up email automations.
But it’s also a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that allows you to keep track of all your customers’ details in one place.
Plus, Sendinblue lets you send SMS messages, allowing you to build a closer relationship with your subscribers and text them about time-sensitive deals or special events.
All of these features make Sendinblue an excellent tool for businesses and experienced email marketers who want to launch comprehensive email marketing campaigns.
But even if you’re new to email marketing, Sendinblue could be a good fit, as it offers a free, simplified plan. Plus, its free, four-hour course is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn more about email marketing.
With the help of Sendinblue, you can create a bigger audience, build a strong relationship with your subscribers, and increase your business’s revenue.
Features
Sendinblue has a ton of rich features to meet all your digital marketing needs. Let’s take a closer look at how this platform can help you grow your audience, automate your emails, and manage customer relationships.
Email marketing
Sendinblue takes all of the headaches out of designing email newsletters with its email templates and easy drag-and-drop builder.
You can easily design and customize its email templates (or create a new design from scratch) to send newsletters to your audience.
Sendinblue offers over 60 beautifully-designed email templates you can use. They’re all responsive, so they’ll look great on any device. And you don’t need to know any coding to design professional emails.
According to various Sendinblue reviews and analyses, Sendinblue also has an excellent deliverability rate. This means your emails will reach your subscribers rather than end up in their spam folder.
Send time optimization
Have you thought about when to send your emails to optimize engagement? Sendinblue’s “Send At the Best Time” algorithm takes all the guesswork out of this process by figuring it out for you.
With its time optimization features, you can automatically send emails with individualized send times for each and every recipient.
Sendinblue determines when each individual is most likely to open an email and sends your emails accordingly.
The more emails you send, the better Sendinblue’s algorithm becomes at optimizing your email send times for maximum engagement.
And you don’t have to worry about differentiating send times for users in different time zones, since Sendinblue will do this for you, too.
Email automation
The best part of email marketing is that it can run on autopilot. Once you set it up once, your emails will keep sending to subscribers.
With Sendinblue, it’s simple to set up both basic and complex email automations based on triggers of your choosing.
For instance, you could automate a series of welcome emails to send when a new subscriber signs up, or send a happy birthday message or promo code to subscribers on your list.
If you want to go all out, you can set up individualized workflows for each and every subscriber on your list, creating seemingly customized marketing funnels that turn visitors into loyal fans and customers.
Sign up forms
One of the main ways you’ll collect email subscribers is via sign-up forms. On Sendinblue, you can design forms with any number of fields that you want, such as the subscriber’s name and email.
It’s easy to design these forms with Sendinblue’s drag-and-drop editor, but I found Sendinblue somewhat lacking in this area.
When comparing Sendinblue vs. ConvertKit, for example, I prefer ConvertKit’s stylish form templates, which can be in-line, pop-up, or slide-in.
Plus, ConvertKit has a WordPress app that makes it easy to put those forms on your website, whereas Sendinblue requires you to either use a third-party integration or copy and paste code onto your website.
This process could be confusing for beginners, though Sendinblue does have helpful resources to walk you through it.
Landing pages
Another major way you’ll collect subscribers is via landing pages. Landing pages tend to convert a lot better than forms, and they give you space to give more details about an offering.
With Sendinblue, you don’t need design skills to create a snazzy landing page. You can simply pick from one of its dozens of pre-designed templates.
Whether you’re trying to promote a product or grow your audience by offering something for free, you can easily amplify your message with Sendinblue’s pre-built landing pages.
Contact segmentation
Once you’ve grown a decent-sized list, you might want to create more targeted emails based on your subscribers’ interests or behaviors.
Sendinblue makes it easy to segment your contacts based on criteria like,
- Their declared interests
- Engagement or purchase history
- Geographic or socio-economic characteristics
You can improve your engagement level with your readers by using contact segmentation to send targeted emails with tailored messaging.
Transactional email
One area in which Sendinblue excels compared to its competitors is with its transactional emails.
If you’re selling products, Sendinblue’s transactional emails make it easy to send,
- Order confirmations
- Payment receipts
- Password resets
- Subscriptions and sign ups
- And whatever other emails you need to conduct a transaction and keep customers connected to your brand.
Sendinblue offers transactional email templates, as well as delivery features and detailed analytics reports.
You can see if your emails are being opened or landing in people’s junk folders (or if someone gave you an invalid email address).
Not all of Sendinblue’s competitors offer transactional emails or support this part of the customer journey, making Sendinblue a great platform for companies that sell products or subscriptions online.
SMS marketing
Want to take your relationship with your subscribers to the next level and text them directly? With Sendinblue’s SMS marketing feature, you can.
Its SMS marketing lets you access your contacts, at least the ones that provided phone numbers, and schedule SMS messages to send anytime.
Of course, you don’t want to over-do it, but SMS communication can be an effective tool for time-sensitive alerts, limited-time deals or special promotions.
Sendinblue gives you access to your messages’ engagement statistics and delivery reports so you can see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Inbox
With this feature, you can connect your Sendinblue inbox to your Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo for easier email management.
You can coordinate customer emails between team members while marking conversations as resolved without working in multiple inboxes.
Sendinblue’s inbox feature makes it easy to stay organized, reply fast to your customers, and coordinate customer emails between team members.
Chatbox
Do you want to up your customer service game by providing a live chat box on your website? With Sendinblue’s chat feature, you can set up a chatbox on your site and collect customer questions and feedback in real time.
You can respond right away or let them know when to expect a response via email. It’s easy to setup this chatbox and customize it to match your site’s branding.
The chatbox feature also lets you see the exact page a visitor is on to craft a real-time response.
Using a chatbox is a great way to provide support to your customers, as well as to learn more about your customers’ questions, concerns and pain points so you can better target your marketing efforts.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
If you’re looking to build relationships with your customers, you’ll appreciate Sendinblue’s built-in CRM software. It allows you to store all the information you have about your subscribers.
This could include notes from a call, meeting, or email series, as well as any relevant documents. You can upload all of this directly into each of your contact’s profiles.
A/B testing
Like many email marketing providers, Sendinblue lets you A/B test different versions of an email to determine which one performs better.
You can send Version A to a small segment of your audience and Version B to another segment. Then, compare the two to see which performed better.
At this point, you can send the winning email out to your full list. This A/B testing feature is a great way to hone your email marketing efforts and boost the success of your campaigns.
Facebook ads
Sendinblue also lets you grow brand awareness and your email list by creating Facebook ads right from your Sendinblue account.
You can choose a template, upload one or more images, add text, and send your ad to your Facebook page.
Plus, you can set limits and your budget and decide whether to share your ad with new people or people who have interacted with your brand before.
Then, use Sendinblue’s detailed reports to analyze your ad’s metrics and performance.
Learn about email marketing with Sendinblue’s free course
Not only does Sendinblue offer a robust help section to teach you the ins and outs of its platform, but it also offers a completely free e-course on email marketing.
This is an excellent resource for beginners who want to learn more about how to effectively use email marketing to connect with their audience and make money.
This free course includes expert advice on,
- Email marketing, including market trends
- How to build lasting engagement and relationships with your subscribers
- Important aspects of email marketing, such as segmentation, optimization, and tips to grow your subscriber list
Here’s the course outline so you can see exactly what lessons to expect:
- The Fundamentals of Email Marketing
- Introduction to Sendinblue
- Data Protection in Email Marketing
- Managing Contacts & Segmentation in Email Marketing
- Growing Your Subscriber List
- Campaigns & Reporting in Email Marketing
- Boosting Your Email Marketing KPIs
- A/B Testing in Email Marketing
The email marketing course is four hours long and comes with 63 videos and eight quizzes. You’ll get a certificate upon completion of the course.
Sendinblue pricing
Now that you’ve read through the features section of this Sendinblue review, let’s consider its pricing structure.
Sendinblue is reasonably priced compared to its competitors. Unlike some other email marketing platforms, its pricing is based on the number of emails you send, not on how many subscribers you have.
It offers four plans: Free, Lite Premium, and Enterprise. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Free plan
Sendinblue offers a completely free plan that allows you to send up to 300 per emails per day.
This plan includes email campaigns, transactional emails, unlimited contacts, and CRM support.
You’ll also have access to support in the first 60 days of using this plan to help you get used to Sendinblue features. Additionally, you can use free email automation for up to 2,000 subscribers.
However, this free plan features the Sendinblue logo in your emails, which you might not want while you’re building your personal online brand.
Lite plan
Cost: Starts at $25/month
This plan starts at $25 monthly, which includes 10,000 emails per month. It comes with email support and A/B testing. Plus, you can remove the Sendinblue logo from your emails.
Similar to the free option, the Lite plan also comes with email templates and email campaign support.
Premium plan
Cost: Starts at $39/month
The Sendinblue premium plan lets you create seamless customer experiences for only $39 per month by generating email automation workflows and SMS campaigns.
It also comes with marketing automation, Facebook ads, multi-user access, and telephone support. With this plan, you can send up to 20,000 emails.
Enterprise plan
Cost: Starts at $65/month
Sendinblue’s enterprise plan starts at $65 per month. While you receive all the Premium plan features, this plan incorporates other tools, such as machine learning, to optimize your email open rates.
It also grants you access to the chat box functionality, ten user accounts, and Facebook ads. Additionally, this plan comes with custom volume emails and priority sending.
Sendinblue vs. MailChimp vs. ConvertKit pricing
Sendinblue, MailChimp and Convertkit all offer basic free plans with some restrictions.
It’s tough to make an apples-to-apples comparison of their pricing models, since Sendinblue charges you based on the number of emails you send, whereas Mailchimp and ConvertKit base their pricing on number of subscribers.
However, let’s say that you have 5,000 subscribers and send fewer than 10,000 emails per month. In this scenario, Sendinblue would cost you $25, Mailchimp’s standard plan would cost you $79.99, and Convertkit would cost $79.
However, if you wanted to send 20,000 emails per month, Sendinblue’s pricing would go up to $39/month. For 60,000 emails per month, it would cost $69/month.
Sendinblue is typically the most affordable option compared to these other tools, with its first paid plan starting at $25/month (but it depends on how many emails you send each month).
Pros of Sendinblue
- Has a free plan which gives you a test run of the software’s features and lets you decide if it is suitable for your business needs.
- Offers easy-to-design email newsletters, forms, and landing pages, as well as email automations that you can make as simple or complex as you want.
- Allows for contact segmentation and customer relationship management.
- Prices are highly competitive when compared to similar service providers.
- Offers over 60 email templates to pick from. The email function is also diverse and can handle all types of documents, including newsletters and receipts.
- The email editor is easy to use, even for beginner bloggers. You don’t need advanced technical knowledge to learn how to use this email marketing tool.
- This software’s email automation functionality is flexible and customizable.
- Transactional email tracking one of the best features of Sendinblue, allowing customers to stay connected to your brand.
Cons of Sendinblue
- Setting up logins for different users is only possible when you’re on a Premium or Enterprise plan. This single-user limitation can be inconvenient if you manage a small team that requires different access levels for team members.
- Sendinblue doesn’t have as many third-party app integrations as some other softwares, though it has improved considerably in this area in recent years.
- With Sendinblue, you can only get a dedicated IP address with the Premium or Enterprise plans.
Customer support
No Sendinblue review would be complete without considering the company’s customer service.
Sendinblue has a help button available to users on its site. Whenever you have a question or are running into technical issues, you can click on this button to access Sendinblue’s customer service team.
Sendinblue customer support agents are well trained and knowledgeable on all matters of email marketing. They’re also friendly and quick to respond to your questions or concerns.
What’s more, the team offers support in six languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German.
How to sign up for Sendinblue
If you’ve read through this Sendinblue review and decided to try this marketing platform, you can get started by heading to Sendinblue’s website.
Once there, click on the ‘Sign Up Free” button at the top right corner. Enter the name of your company, email address, and password, and then click on the Get Started button.
After that, you’ll receive a confirmation email to verify your email address.
Once your email address is verified, you can go ahead and fill out your company information and pick a plan that suits your business needs.
Sendinblue review: Final thoughts
Once you’ve explored Sendinblue’s features, you’ll see that it’s an excellent option for your email marketing needs. This software has advanced, user-friendly features that will optimize your email and SMS marketing campaigns.
It also offers crucial marketing features such as email automation, segmentation, personalized sign-up forms, and landing pages.
Additionally, Sendinblue has a generous free plan that includes everything a beginner email marketer needs to start growing their list and messaging their audience.
Overall, Sendinblue is an impressively powerful yet reasonably priced tool that can transform the way you market your business while increasing your revenue.
