Starting from a digital service provider, Sendinblue's email marketing platform was developed to meet one of the biggest challenges small and medium-sized businesses face: automating email marketing. email on a budget.

Everything from the comprehensive feature set (including CRM, marketing automation, transactional emails, SMS, landing pages and Facebook ads), to the extremely competitive pricing, shows that Sendinblue is serious. Serious about becoming a major player in the email marketing software market. The platform even has a very popular email plugin for WordPress.

Sendinblue's efforts seem to have paid off, with over 175,000 users and 100 million emails sent every day! For a relatively new company (founded in 2012), this is quite admirable.

Sendinblue Review: What's special ?

Sendinblue has a free plan with unique features, including email templates, workflow automation, phone support (for the first 60 days), and up to 300 emails per day. Advanced automations include providing web tracking and lead scoring. Unlike other providers, they charge based on the number of email marketing campaigns you send rather than the number of contacts you have. Paid plans start at $25 a month for 20,000 emails (price updated February 2022).

Now, let's dive into the Sendinblue review specifically to see if this email marketing platform is a good and user-friendly all-in-one solution.

Advantages and disadvantages

Outstanding advantages of Sendinblue:

• Low-cost plans:
  Sendinblue offers a very competitive price in the market, with plans starting from $25 for 20,000 emails and unlimited contacts.
• Powerful email automation:
  This platform has great workflow-based automation capabilities. We can trigger campaign actions based on customer interactions with your website, score leads, send transactional messages, and more.
• Transactional email and SMS marketing tools:
  There aren't many similar tools that offer transactional email and SMS marketing, so it's great that Sendinblue does just that.
• Sendinblue WordPress Plugin:
  Sendinblue's plugin has over 80,000 active installations on WordPress, with a 4.5 star rating. The interface mirrors that of the web application, at a seamless user experience.

Some notable disadvantages:

• Free plan sending limit:
  Their free plan has a daily sending limit of 300 emails.
• The system is sometimes a bit slow:
  Sometimes the web application is a bit slow when loading certain pages.

Is Sendinblue the right email marketing service for you?

Recommended if:

• You need to send transactional emails and SMS:
  Actually, Sendinblue does more than just execute email marketing campaigns, it is one of the best tools for automated and transactional emails. The platform's automation workflow designer lets you create campaigns triggered by clicks, opens, and even website visits. And its dedicated transactions section allows notifications like password resets, subscription confirmations, and purchases! There's even an option to send SMS.
• You want a sophisticated tool on a low budget:
  Sendinblue works a lot cheaper than other comparable tools if you send few emails to the same people. If you're after a value-for-money service with automation, advanced segmentation, live chat, and dynamic personalization, it's a notable choice.
• You're an ecommerce player:
  With features like customizable triggers based on purchase data, the ability to import customer orders, and customizable KPIs, Sendinblue is well equipped to serving e-commerce. Integration with popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento are available.

Not recommended if:

• You need multiple logins and different user access levels:
  Unfortunately, Sendinblue only allows you to set up logins for multiple users on their Premium and Enterprise plans.

Rating details

Ease of use:

• Rated 4.5 stars. The user experience is quite good and the menus are easy to navigate. Having gone through several updates, the drag and drop email builder is very user-friendly. There's also a fun, easy-to-follow campaign production process.

Newsletter editor:

• Editor (4.5 stars): As with most tools, Sendinblue offers a drag-and-drop email editor that is both fast and smooth. There are a number of preset elements to choose from, these should be enough.
• Personalization: Simply add one of the ‘attribute conditions' by clicking the personalization button – the same goes for the subject lines and preview text of your campaigns and templates . They also offer conditional content, which allows you to show certain elements of an email to specific contacts (for example, discounts for VIP customers), and dynamic lists, which let you include includes dynamically updated content (for example, items purchased on customer orders).
• Email types (4.5 stars): Newsletters, autoresponders, A/B testing, transactional emails and SMS

Design options and flexibility:

• Rated 4 stars. Sendinblue provides 42 email templates, all of which are responsive and have a fairly standard design. However, if you can't find what you're looking for, you can always upload your own from providers like Stripo.

Automate email marketing:

• Rated 4 stars. Some of the automation options are truly impressive. Sendinblue's workflow editor lets you set up a number of smart-triggered campaigns, based on contact data, email engagement, web behavior, and e-commerce activity. The scoring system rewards leads and lets us test our workflows before launching them. Sendinblue is also unique in offering transactional email, allowing you to send messages such as purchase confirmations and receipts via SMTP. Side note – there's also a handy ‘Best Timing' feature that automatically sends your emails at the optimal time, based on previous campaign performance.

List Management:

• Rated 4 stars. You can create ‘filters' that serve as segments, based on contact field criteria and behavior (email opens, clicks, etc). You can also set up automated workflows to create new mailing lists based on demographics, behavior, and lead scores. Import your contacts via .xlsx, .csv or .txt file. However, there is no option to migrate contacts directly from another provider.

Registration form/ Opt-in and opt-out process:

• Rated 4 stars. These forms are surprisingly advanced, with some really cool personalization features. You can let subscribers choose the list(s) they want to be opted in to (for example, based on interests or industry). You can also enable Captcha verification. And if users come to the form via email, you can pre-populate the form fields with their data – impressive! There is also the option to choose between single opt-in and double opt-in.

Reporting and analysis:

• Rated 3.5 stars. Sendinblue has most of the reports you could need, such as click maps, geo-tracking, and Google Analytics integration. You can also access conversion data.

Language:

• Rated 4.5 stars. The website and help center are available in 6 languages ​​(EN, ES, PT, DE, IT, FR).

Other features:

• Spam- and Design-Testing (3.5 stars): There's a nice built-in previewer to see how emails will display in different email clients. However, there is no spam testing.
• Bounce Management: Hard bounces are automatically blacklisted. Sendinblue provides a list of both hard and soft bounces.
• Block list: Can export your block list from the tool.
• Available memory for data and images: There appears to be no limit to the total number of images or individual image sizes.

Pro Features:

• Dedicated Domain Name: Available if you purchase a dedicated IP with Sendinblue (note – this is not cheap) or if you have a higher level plan with this included. Landing pages can be hosted on your domain without the need for a dedicated IP.
• Different account access levels: Available on Premium and Enterprise plans only.
• Integrations: Some integrations are available, however, many are yet to be added. That said, Sendinblue is also part of the Zapier library.
• Landing Page Builder: A very beautiful and modern landing page builder is available for those on the Premium and Enterprise plans. There are some beautiful templates to choose from or the option to create one from scratch.

Customer support:

• Rated 4 stars. Customer service is one of Sendinblue's strengths. A general help button is available, allowing you to access Sendinblue's knowledge base, leave a message, or access their agents via live chat. There's also the Sendinblue Academy for those new to email marketing.

Overall rating: 4.2/5 stars

From a price and value perspective, Sendinblue is truly a great email marketing software, considering that the features it offers are quite advanced. A/B testing, advanced marketing automation, and CRM features can serve your email marketing needs well.

Conclusion

After doing a Sendinblue review and looking through the platform's full feature set, it's clear that Sendinblue has built some very smart options to help marketers optimize their email campaigns, including including advanced email automation, segmentation, personalization, and building landing pages and forms geared towards increasing conversions.

While its automation features may not be enough to topple email marketing software giants like ActiveCampaign, it's not by a long shot.

Sendinblue has also been working on their CRM features, incorporating a transactional pipeline and inbox where you can email customers directly by integrating with your email client.

Besides offering a generous free plan, with paid plans starting at $25 for up to 20,000 emails, Sendinblue is one of the cheapest email marketing service providers on the market. In terms of features, there's no denying that Sendinblue is very impressive.

Hope this article is useful to you. Please share your experiences and questions about the email marketing platform you have been using and plan to use at the Marketing Automation Community .

Source: Blog article translated from Sendinblue Review – The Cheapest All-in-One Solution? by Roberta Phillips (EmailToolTester)