SENDINBLUE REVIEW: HOW IT WORKS, PRICING AND REVIEW (A MUST READ)

In this article, I review the Email Marketing platform called Sendinblue, its pricing, and how it works.

 

Sendinblue is the easiest, smartest, and best automotive email Marketing platform. It has solved one of the major challenges being faced by small-to-medium businesses as regards mobilizing the business to build and grow relationships.

One of the reasons why it is referred to as the best email marketing platform is because it has the capacity to cater to all your email marketing needs such as email campaigns, Marketing automation, transactional emails, SMS messages, Facebook ads, and a host of other features that would be discussed in this Sendinblue Review.

SENDINBLUE FEATURES

Sendinblue comes with quite a number of features that make your email marketing service less strenuous. These features made it easy to dispatch a large bulk of mails within a short period of time. These features include – Marketing Automation, Transactional Emails, Integration and Plug-in, Responsive Email Design tools, Unlimited Contacts, Email and phone customer support, customizable sign-up forms, pre-schedule campaign, WYSIWYG email editor, dynamic content, list management, triggered drip sequence.

– Email Marketing Automation

Under the email marketing Automation in Sendinblue, there is a smart feature known as “Best time” that automatically sends your emails at the optimal time, based on previous campaign performance. This is not a standard capability among the other tools in the market.

Email Marketing automation helps you build good interactions with your clients or Prospective Clients.

For example-

– It sends an email to someone who had just visited a particular page on your website. With this, the contact is enlightened on other information needed about the topic.

– It sends an email to someone who’s had an unfinished shopping process i.e abandoned their shopping cart

– A subscriber is celebrating their birthday, it sends an email.

– You have new subscribers, it sends a welcome email.

The good part of this is that it is not just a one-off process, you can design your automative sequence. There is a range of sequence templates you can choose from.

While starting out, you can select a custom workflow template that has basic contact files, contact who was tagged while visiting your website. In all, different contacts get different messages based on the classification of contact (also called list) they fall into.

Sendinblue lets you add someone automatically to a workflow. This automation technique of Sendinblue makes it quite easy to use.

–  Integrations and Plug-ins

Sendinblue has plugins for e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. With this, you can monitor both the digital marketing and the purchasing process of clients. Asides from this, Sendinblue creates the avenue to interact with other apps through its plugins. Apps like CRM tools and some analytics can be operated on via its plugin.

 

SENDINBLUE PRICING AND PLANS

Sendinblue has made available different prices and plans ranges to make it easy and accessible to all and sundry. One important thing to note, however, is that all the plans come with unlimited contact storage.

The different plans and their features are-

1) FREE PLAN – $0/month

Features

– Unlimited contacts

-Up to 300 emails per day

– Chat with 1 user

– Email and SMS personalization

– Email template library

– Mobile-friendly email designer

– Sales CRM

– Customizable Sign up forms

– Workflow Editor

– Marketing Automation workflow

– GDPR compliance

– Real-time Data

 

2) LITE- $25/month

Features

All the features in the free plan include:

-10,000 emails per month

-Email support

-No daily sending limit

– Remove Sendinblue Logo

– A/B testing

-Advanced templating language

 

3) PREMIUM – $65/month

Features

All the features in lite, including:

– 20,000 emails per month

– Marketing Automation

– Send time optimization

– Landing page builder (up to 5 landing pages)

– Facebook Ads

– Inbox chats with 3 users

– Geography and device reporting

– Heatmap reporting

– Advanced open and click statistics

– Telephone support

 

4) ENTERPRISE – begins at $69/month (Get your own personal quote/month)

Features

All premium features include:

– A team of dedicated experts assisting you each step of the way (customer success manager)

– Over 20 landing pages

– Over 10 chat users

– Unlimited log retention

– Priority sending

Signup Free on Sendinblue

 

EMAIL MARKETING PREPAID PLAN

This prepaid plan offers you an option of the pay-as-you-go. It is recommended for businesses that do not send emails frequently. There is no expiration on subscriptions, thereby enabling you to use them at your own pace. The deduction is done at the rate of one credit per email.

The email marketing prepaid plan offers all the features in lite and lite+ add-on.

The pricing depends on how many emails you are subscribing to.

5000 emails- $40

50,000 emails – $201

100,000 emails – $343

500,000 emails- $1189

1,000,000 emails – $1995

 

Unlike the regular plan that expires even if you have not exhausted all the features for the month, the email marketing prepaid plan only expires when you have used up everything you subscribed for.

Asides from the email marketing prepaid plan, there is also an avenue to purchase the SMS pre-paid plan. Just as for email, it also depends on how many SMS you intend to subscribe for.

 

SENDINBLUE EASE OF USE

The user interface at Sendinblue is quite friendly and easy to navigate. You get to locate all the key tools as soon as you sign in. 

The main menu is displayed at the top left-hand corner leading you to the other tools such as marketing automation, contact management, transactional emails, and campaigns. 

Right there, you will see the sidebar menu which takes you to where you can get the templates to begin your workflow, emails, Facebook ads, SMS statistics, and settings.

At this point, I would need to chip in that Sendinblue has an interesting flow from campaign to Production that is so easy to follow through. Sendinblue will start by creating a campaign for you. All you will just have to do is to provide the major details like the name you intend to use for the campaign, what the email in the campaign will be all about.

After that has been provided, you get to choose the design of the email as preferred by you. Sendinblue has made provision for an email design tool here you can make designs from.

As we earlier mentioned, the tools are user-friendly. At the left part of the page of the email design tool, you see the design elements, header elements, content elements, and footer elements.

This is also one of the places you make use of the drag and drop editor feature in Sendinblue. You can select an image from your gallery and drop it on the design box.

Now that the email is set, you need to decide who the recipients of the email are, and set them. Re-confirm and be double sure you are not sending the wrong emails to the wrong contacts.

It is even advisable to run a test email first by sending it to yourself. Once the recipients have been confirmed, the automation workflow comes to play and sends emails based on what you’ve set.

Very Simple!

You can always visit the dashboard to see the status of the email campaigns.

 

SENDINBLUE MARKETING TOOLS

The Marketing tools in Sendinblue are almost regarded as the most important features in Sendinblue. This is because it is the primary use of Sendinblue. These Marketing tools and software are-

– A/B Testing

– Customization

– Campaign Analytics

– CRM

– API

– Campaign Segmentation and Management

– Analytics/ROI Tracking

– Drag and drop

– Email distribution

– Dynamic Content

– Event-Triggered Action

– Landing Page

– Lead capture and qualification

-Multi-channel Marketing

– Segmentation

– WYSIWYG Editor

 

Drag and Drop Editor- Sendinblue offers a smart drag-and-drop email editor which is not only fast but easy to navigate. This is where you get to select and customize your email Designs with the use of the pre-set elements and templates.

 

Landing Pages- This tool is available in premium and Enterprise subscription plans. With Sendinblue, you can create your landing pages from scratch, or make it easier by choosing from the nice and pro-quality templates. Using these templates, not only makes it easy to set up your landing page but also helps to speed up the process.

 

A/B Testing– This Sendinblue Marketing tool helps you in selecting the best subject line for your email campaigns. You get to test the landing forms and pages and also the different email versions. A/B testing also helps you in optimizing the mail to generate high response rates and increase conversion.

Moreover, this tool comes with design testing where you can preview and see how these emails will be displayed to your clients.

 

Dynamic Content– One of the smart Marketing tools of Sendinblue is that it creates different dynamic content that resonates with the contact on each of your lists. Not forgetting that Sendinblue first helps you in generating the list according to the different purposes of your web visitors. This Dynamic Content feature lists out the items in each customer’s purchase order create welcome messages and messages for birthday celebrations of your subscribers.

 

Email Marketing Automation– This tool has been analyzed under the feature subheading. In addition to the fact that the “best time” feature in the email marketing Automation tool helps in automatically sending messages, it also provides score points for lead generation.

 

With that, you know how well your marketing campaign is generating leads. This tool also helps in transactional emails like the confirmation of purchases, listing of customers’ orders, and issuing receipts at the end of the transactions. This is one of the edges Sendinblue has over other email marketing tools.

 

List Management– Sendinblue helps you in the classification of your contacts into different segments. It could be classified based on interest, demographics, behavior (rate of opening emails and clicking on links), or lead scores. Having these well-defined contact lists will help you cater to their different needs. You won’t be sending the wrong mail to the wrong contact.

 

Facebook Ads– Sendinblue makes provision for Facebook ads as this will help you reach a larger audience. It helps you;

 

– Generate creative ads that suit your business goals. You just have to select the image you intend using for the ads, upload it, enter the content, and then indicate your call-to-action (CTA). Your CTA varies according to what the ad is meant for. It could be to promote your business, make more sales, inform the audience about an event you are hosting, and so on.

 

– Locate or find out new leads/audience that has similar interests to your best customers

 

– Set up the ad parameters for the ads- The only part of this that you have to focus on is defining the duration and total budget you have for the ads. The optimization and amount spent per day will be handled by Sendinblue.

 

-Monitor your ad performance

 

Registration/Sign-up forms: This is an email marketing tool in Sendinblue that helps you easily grow your email contact list. This tool even makes provision for subscribers to select which list they want to be. Captcha verification can be enabled to ensure that you are dealing with humans and not robots. Users also get to select more than one list to opt into.

 

SENDINBLUE VS. COMPETITORS

 

Some of the major competitors of Sendinblue are Getresponse, MailChimp, and Aweber.

Sendinblue Vs. MailChimp

According to reviews, Sendinblue was found to be easier to set up. It has a more friendly interface than MailChimp. Even with regards to pricing, Sendinblue has a fair price for its bulk of the value.

For MailChimp,

Free- $0

Essentials – $9.99/month

Premium- $299/month

 

For Sendinblue,

Free- $0

Lite- $25/month

Premium-$65/month

Enterprise- Request for a personalized quote

 

Whereas MailChimp is only classified under Email Marketing, Sendinblue is classified under Marketing Automation, Transactional Email, Landing Page builders, SMS Marketing, Email template builder and email template builder, and email testing.

MailChimp transactional email can be deployed on cloud, Saas, Web-based, Android mobile. Sendinblue, on the other hand, can be deployed on Cloud, Saas, Web-based, Mac and Windows Desktop, Android, iPhone.

 

Sendinblue Vs. Getresponse

Getresponse is also one of the major competitors of Sendinblue. It has a host of marketing tools.

Getresponse does not have a free plan like Sendinblue but does have a 30 day free trial, after which you have to subscribe to a plan.

Also, unlike Sendinblue which can be deployed on Mobile phones and Desktops and Cloud, Getresponse can only be deployed on Cloud, Saas, and Web-based.

 

Sendinblue Vs. Aweber

In Aweber, if you have a large number of contacts or a high growing database, the pricing is higher. However, with Sendinblue, you choose your plan according to the number of emails you intend to churn out. The number of contacts is not usually considered as it offers unlimited contact storage.

Aweber and Sendinblue offer free plans. Nonetheless, Aweber’s free plan features one list of 500 contacts and 300 emails in a month. Sendinblue’s free plan, on the other hand, includes unlimited contact storage where you can also send up to 300 emails PER DAY. This makes it a total of 9000 MAILS IN A MONTH. The difference is clear!

Even though Sendinblue and Aweber are both tools for email marketing, Sendinblue has an edge over Aweber with its email automation features. You can create workflows that take users on a more intimate journey. It is also worthy of note that with just Sendinblue’s free plan, you gain access to this complex automation for up to 2000 contacts. This can only be assessed in Aweber when you upgrade to the pro plan.

Asides from these, Aweber only focuses more on Email marketing. There is no provision for SMS and social media marketing. However, with Sendinblue, you have all your marketing tools. It is being referred to as an all-in-one platform. With Sendinblue, you can create and manage Facebook Ads, connect with customers through live chat campaigns, send SMS campaigns.

Also Read: HOW TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING (A Step By Step Guide)

SENDINBLUE PROS AND CONS

Here, I would highlight the many things you stand to gain when you make use of Sendinblue. Just as we also know that, nothing created is 100% perfect for everyone, some of the cons of Sendinblue will be made mentioned.

 

Pros of Sendinblue

The majority of the features had been expatiated on, earlier. However, this section will mention the striking ones that give it an edge over other email marketing tools.

SMS Marketing– This is not a feature that you find in most newsletter tools. It is one of the unique features of Sendinblue. To top that, it is quite affordable. You get to send 100 messages for a token of $1.34

 

Strong Email Marketing– Sendinblue has quite an impressive workflow automation. It ranges from triggering campaign actions to sending transactional messages to building a contact list to assigning lead scores. As well as creating Dynamic Content.

 

Relatively Low Price Plans– Sendinblue’s pricing is one of the things that makes it outstanding. To have a plan that allows you to send 10,000 emails for $25 with unlimited contact storage is not something we see every day.

Advance Content Tools- Sendinblue makes it easier to build your audience level by collating different email addresses from the forms that would also be strategically placed on your website

Advance Campaign Tools– With Sendinblue, there are advanced tools that give actionable analytics. Tools such as solid statistics and Heatmap will help you monitor the progress of campaigns and also give room for improvement.

 

Other benefits are

– Ease of generating a creative newsletter.

– Send Optimization feature

– WordPress Plugin

Therefore, if you are into e-commerce and you want a sophisticated tool with transactional Mails and SMS on a low budget, Sendinblue is your best tool.

 

Cons of Sendinblue

– You might have to create a new campaign to send new emails to subscribers who did not open the previous mails sent.

– No default font color set is available for different email sections.

– When loading certain pages, the web system can be a bit slow.

– When using the free plan, there is a sending limit of 300 emails which can be considered as few.

Apart from these few disadvantages, Sendinblue is an excellent marketing tool.

 

SENDINBLUE CUSTOMER REVIEWS

Here is what customers are saying about Sendinblue

 

Name- Kevin W.

 about 11-50 employees

Used Sendinblue for over a year

Remark

“I love the value of the product. I can send more emails to way more contacts for less money. The automation features are powerful and flexible, including jumping from one automation to another or repeating part of a workflow based on action or inaction. I love it. Deliverability is the best I have seen and they make it easy to track issues with particular domains. Thank you! The analytics and reports are solid

I was previously using Hubspot but had to switch from that to save money, improve deliverability and to include transactional emails. Though, when I started out, the onboarding was a bit messy but it has tremendously improved over the year and I believe that the onboarding process would have likewise improved.”

 

Name- Syazwani I.

Talent Acquisition Executive in Malaysia

Over 10000 employees

Used Sendinblue for over 2 years

Remark

“We had a good experience using this software. Our newsletter and email marketing campaign are fully automated and can be scheduled for the next 2 months forward. We are happy that we can have a full control on the leads and verification on the leads. All the emails are promptly received by the recipients. 

The only thing I feel Sendinblue should work on is the prompt response from the customer service. It takes them a while before responding”

 

Name- Michelle N.

Senior Marketing Bi Analyst in US

201- 500 employees

Used Sendinblue for 6-12 months

Remark

“Overall, Sendinblue has been a huge game changer for our company. I have been doing the email marketing for over 5 years and for out previous provider, it was a time-suck for little result. I’m happy that there are constantly updates and changes being made to stay current and enhance the features available. Not only has Sendinblue saved me a ton of time, it has increased the value of our email marketing program.

 

Sheldon S.

Website Developer and English language teacher in UK

Self Employed 

Remark –

“This is the Perfect software for chatting to customers. If you want more features, the paid subscription is great but if you just want the basics, the free option works a treat.

There isn’t really anything I dislike about the software. The only thing is maybe the free trial, which gives full functionality. So if you are going for a free or lower tier subscription, you might get attached to some features which later disappear.”

 

IS SENDINBLUE WORTH IT?

Sendinblue is not just the perfect email marketing tool for your small and medium-size Businesses or your e-commerce, it is the most reliable tool you can use. 

With Sendinblue, you can set up an automated system and have enough time to focus on your business. It saves time, energy and keeps your customers engaged. Your customer is satisfied, you are also satisfied. It is a win-win for everyone. 

Signup Free on Sendinblue