Sendinblue Review: Features and Pricing 2021

Sendinblue in a NutShell

What is Sendinblue?

In short, Sendinblue is a cloud-based digital marketing platform best suited to small businesses looking to expand their reach using email automation and social media platforms like Facebook. Founded back in 2007, since its establishment, the platform has helped thousands of SMB’s improve their marketing campaigns and communications with customers. 

You can use Sendinblue to create and send newsletters, email marketing campaigns, and automated trigger campaigns such as welcome emails. In addition, users get access to pre-made email templates, a chat function for your website, a sales and marketing CRM, and social media tools to help you reach wider audiences on Facebook.

Sendinblue Pros & Cons 

Now, let’s take a look at Sendinblue’s pros and cons. First, we’ll quickly list the headliners. Then, we’ll delve deeper into each of Sendinblue’s most notable advantages and disadvantages: 

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PROS

• SMS marketing: The average email is opened within 48 hours. In comparison, the average SMS message is read in under 5 seconds. That’s why Sendinblue’s SMS marketing feature is such an asset - especially if you’re looking to send time-sensitive information and promotions. With Sendinblue’s SMS marketing functionality, you can create bulk SMS campaigns to send to your contact list. In addition, you can personalize each message with contact attributes, including links to your website and more. 
• Advanced Automation: Generally speaking, advanced automation comes at a premium. Yet, Sendinblue has proved that you can benefit from quality automation at an affordable price. For example, their marketing automation features are entirely free for up to 2,000 contacts. By ‘automation features,’ we’re referring to the fact you can run campaigns on autopilot, automatically manage customer lists, and much more.
• You can store an unlimited number of contacts: Unlike many of Sendinblue’s competitors, with their free plan, you can store an unlimited number of contacts and send 300 emails per day.

• Competitive pricing: As we’ve already hinted at, Sendinblue offers excellent value for money. Their features are a lot more advanced than other software we’ve tested at similar price points. Mailchimp users, for example, seem to have a real issue with list management. You can’t include contacts from different lists in the same campaigns - this is nothing short of a headache for any SMB. In contrast, Sendinblue’s list management takes away the complexity of segmenting customers. You can filter contacts with ease using multiple conditions - all for an incredibly reasonable price (more about pricing plans in a sec)

• CRM: A CRM is included with Sendinblue’s free plan. This is a powerful feature that allows you to build stronger relationships with subscribers. For instance, you can store contact info and track all customer interactions from one easy-to-use platform. You can also organize customers in your CRM into specific lists based on similar characteristics, what stage they’re at in your conversion funnel, their acquisition source, and much more.  You can even create tasks here and assign them to your team members.

Sendinblue’s Cons:

• Slow support: According to feedback sourced from TrustRadius, some customers have complained of slow response times and ineffective support. This may deter potential users who value fast response times. 

• Deliverability rates: Traditionally, Sendinblue struggled with deliverability rate issues. However, this is something the platform’s reportedly worked on. In 2018, Sendinblue scored 75% efficacy on external deliverability tests. However, in 2021, this climbed to 96.3%. Though these improvements speak for themselves, their past failures in this area may raise doubts for some users. 

Who’s Sendinblue Best for?

• eCommerce entrepreneurs- You can integrate Sendinblue with many eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, to send various triggered-based emails - including promotional, transactional, order confirmation, delivery information, and payment receipts. 
• Those wanting access to sophisticated email marketing tools at an affordable price- If you’re on a tight budget, you can utilize their free plan - here, you’ll have a quota of 300 emails per day, including transactional emails and email marketing campaigns. You can also store as many contacts as you want. 
• If lead generation is a priority- you can add various fields to your lead capture forms and opt-in campaigns. You can also build landing pages and run Facebook ads straight from the platform. On top of that, the shared inbox is also great for lead generation, as you’ll be able to reply to customers much faster and assign messages to specific team members. 
• WordPress users- Sendinblue’s WordPress integration is incredibly popular with users. It has over 80,000 installs. With the marketing tracker, you can identify contacts when they visit your website, segment and score contacts based on their website activity, and much more. 

Who Shouldn’t Use Sendinblue?

• If you need to use lots of integrations- Some complaints gathered on TrustRadius complain that Sendinblue is much slower when used with other integrations. This complaint, and a slow loading interface, seem quite common with users. 
• If customer service is essential to you: Although Sendinblue offers live chat support, some users (like those on TrustRadius) complain about slow and unhelpful responses. Some customers have reported that responses can take hours and, in some cases, even days. 
• Limited landing pages: There aren't a wide variety of landing page templates to choose from. Other email marketing software can offer you better options. This shouldn't be an issue when you are first starting, but you might get frustrated with the simple designs later on. 

Sendinblue Video Review

Key Features and Workflows Analysis

Now lets cover Sendinblue’s key features and take a more in-depth look at the tools and services they can offer. 

Creating Emails and Campaigns (Rated: 5/5)

The first thing we noticed about creating email campaigns in Sendinblue is its simplicity. You just follow four simple steps:

The first thing we noticed about creating email campaigns in Sendinblue is its simplicity. You just follow four simple steps:

1. Design your message using one of Sendinblue’s templates or build your own with its drag-and-drop email builder (more on this in a sec).
2. Personalize the content
3. Select your audience
4. Send your message

That said, below we’ve listed some of Sendinblue’s stand-out email features:

• Email sent/opens/and links clicks – From the statistics tab, you can view info like: the total number of emails sent, the total number of emails opened, and the total number of links opened in your messages over a specified timeframe. You can also review metrics like total recipients, total hard bounces, and unsubscribes.
• Deliverability rates – Sendinblue automatically blacklists email addresses with high bounce rates, which helps boost your deliverability rate. There’s also a double opt-in feature - here, a subscriber is sent a confirmation email where they re-confirm they wish to subscribe to your mailing list. This goes a long way to limiting the likelihood of your emails being flagged as spam.
• Delivery by time zone Premium, Premium+ and Enterprise packages enable you to optimize the time you send campaigns for maximum opens and conversions.
• Creating and importing email lists – To import your email list, Sendinblue offers three options. You can upload a .CSV or .TXT file containing the email addresses, manually add contacts one-by-one, or you can copy and paste the list. The latter is recommended if you have a larger email list.

Creating and importing email lists on SendinBlue is easy. You can start by navigating to “contacts” on your main navigation bar.

In the next section, you will see various options on the left of your screen. Click on “lists”.

There you will see your default list created when you signed up to SendinBlue and the folder it is located in. To edit this default existing list, you can click on “Actions” and you will see a list of editing options.

To add a new list, you need to navigate to the “add new list” button. This will take you to a section where you need to insert your new list name.

When you are happy with your list name, click on “Create an empty list” and you will see your newly created list and the place to add your contacts. To add contacts, in the top right click on either “Add a contact” or “Import contacts”.

• A/B Testing – A/B testing campaigns are easy and intuitive. Just navigate to the email campaign page, click on the A/B test tab, create a design, select the recipients you wish to send your test to, and choose your split rules. After creating your A/B test campaign, you also have the option of sending it straight away or at a later date and time.
• Personalization – You can personalize your email’s subject line to include the recipient's name, the email “from” name, and the entire body of your email. (this could involve including special discounts to valued clients identified by Sendinblue’s lead scoring feature). While it does take some time to get familiar with the process, it becomes easy after a while.
• Promotional codes - You can send promotional codes as part of your campaigns, which is especially handy if you have an online store. You can also generate your own promotional codes using Sendinblue’s “voucher pool” function. You can read more about this here. 

Sendinblue Design (Rated: 5/5)

In terms of design, Sendinblue scores a perfect 5 out of 5. Its interface makes it incredibly easy to bring your vision to life. That said, let’s take a look at Sendinblue’s core design functionality in more detail:

• Drag-and-drop interface – Sendinblue’s drag-and-drop editor is designed to make it easy to build engaging emails even if you’re inexperienced with HTML or graphic design. Simply select the different design blocks available (background color, images, border-radius, spacing, etc.), and place them where you think they fit best. You can use Sendinblue’s drag-and-drop editor to build upon existing landing page templates like the email creator.

To create an email campaign and use the drag-and-drop interface on SendinBlue is simple. You can start by navigating to the “campaigns” tab in the navigation bar at the top. 

After that, you can click on “Create my first email campaign” and follow the instructions. Insert your campaign details and move on to the template section.

You can build your email template from scratch or select the “Template Gallery”. You can use the “Template Categories” to filter the templates and choose the perfect one that will fit your brand.

Each template is broken up into rows. You can delete, save, hide, or duplicate a row. To edit an element in your template, you can click on it and replace or insert new content.

To add content to your email, you can use the drag and drop content form on the left-hand side of your screen.

You can adjust both the desktop and mobile versions of your email by clicking on either the computer or phone icon at the top. When you are happy with both versions, you can test your email by sending a test email to yourself.

Preview your email and click “Next Step”. After that, it is time to select the list you wish to send your email to.

Review your email report and click on “Schedule”. You will have the option to send your email immediately or schedule it for later.

• Email templates- Sendinblue offers over 70 free responsive email templates. So, you can rest easy knowing that your emails will look as good on desktops as they will on mobile devices. These templates make it easy to design newsletters, B2B-inspired emails, transactional emails - to name a few! Simply pick an email template you like the look of and customize it to fit your needs.
• Include sign-up forms within your emails- To help drive engagement even further, you can include sign-up forms within your newsletters and emails. This makes it easy for new users to sign up for/subscribe to other newsletters or regular updates you may offer.  

Reporting and Analysis (Rated: 4/5)

When it comes to Sendinblue’s reporting and analysis features, we award them 4 out 5. All the core metrics are there, and finding and understanding them is easy. In addition, their whole interface is laid out beautifully, so you don’t have to go trawling through heaps of hidden links to get to where you want to be. 

Analyzing data is also easy - for example, finding the total number of clicks and identifying users through the Sendinblue tracker is straightforward.

Sendinblue also permits you to generate different types of reports to help you better analyze the effectiveness of your email campaign. With this info to hand, it’s much easier to see what you’re doing well, and more importantly, what you need to improve to boost the success of your email campaigns.

Below we dive into Sendinblue’s reporting and analysis features in a little more detail:

• Engagement reports – Here, you can monitor how readers engage with email campaigns in real-time, making it possible to make quick changes to adapt and improve email campaigns to better meet your readers’ needs.

• Heat map – This shows exactly which parts of your emails generate the most clicks and engagement. With this info, you’re better positioned to fine-tune campaigns with the best combination of links and text for producing the best results.
• Campaign comparison report – This report comes in handy for monitoring and comparing metrics like click rates and leads you’ve generated from different campaigns. Sendinblue lets you add data either manually or automatically from previous email campaigns. You can also see information like total recipients, total replied, total soft and hard bounces, etc., so you’ll gain a thorough idea of how well your campaigns are performing. We also found the graphic visualizations quite appealing, as this made it easier to compare data and see how each strategy performs.
• Segmentation – Segmentation is at the heart of every successful email marketing campaign. Fortunately, Sendinblue enables you to manage contacts by dividing and grouping them into segments based on interests, conditions (frequency of opened emails, links clicked, funnel stage, etc.). Having segmented your email list, you can then more send tailored content to your subscribers.
• Social media tracking – Sendinblue integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. So, for instance, once you’ve created a Facebook ad, a report page appears once the ad’s running, providing info like the number of people reached and the number of clicks.
• ROI analysis – Sendinblue’s conversion tracking lets you see which email campaigns generate the highest return on investment and which are lagging behind. With this info, you can replicate what’s working well and ditch strategies that aren’t providing fruitful results. 

To view your statistics and reports, you can navigate to “statistics” under your campaign dashboard.

Select the date range of statistics you want to view. 

Find the statistics and views on how your campaigns and SMS marketing are doing. You can view your total statistics on the right-hand side for your campaigns.

To edit your stats or campaign settings on SendinBlue is just as easy. To view your settings, navigate to the settings tab on the left-hand side of your screen.

Click on the buttons below the advanced settings to configure or personalize them. These advanced settings can help you save time and set up your account to perform at its best. 

You can also find additional settings by clicking on your name in the top right and selecting from the drop-down menu.

Sendinblue Integrations (Rated: 4/5)

We give Sendinblue 4 out 5 for the hundreds of integrations available to help you better optimize and streamline your workflows - regardless of which pricing plan you choose.

Integrations are organized into several categories, ranging from analytics and social media to more performance-based tools like APIs and CRM integrations. 

Below, we’ve listed some of Sendinblue’s more popular integrations:

• Google Analytics – When it comes to tracking web traffic, there’s no better plugin than Google analytics. With this integration, Sendinblue can automatically add tracking terms to your campaigns that Google Analytics recognizes. You can then integrate your accounts and monitor website traffic driven by your email campaigns. 
• eCommerce tools – You can integrate with most major eCommerce tools, including Stripe, WooCommerce, PayPal, and Magento. This makes it easier to track how each campaign translates into website visits, sales, and engagement.
• CRM integrations – There’s a whole host of different CRM tools you can integrate with, including  Zoho, Everwin CXM, SugarCRM, and Intercom. These plugins make sharing information about your users and email subscriptions easier and provide more in-depth segmentation options.
• Social media integrations – Sendinblue also lets you start your own campaigns or share existing email campaigns on social media. Simply click on the sent campaigns tab, click on the Actions tab, and share. You can choose to send campaigns to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Sendinblue Automation (Rated: 5/5)

With regards to automation, we give Sendinblue 5 out of 5. This is because you can easily create communication flows that keep customers engaged without requiring intense effort on your part.

When we tested Sendinblue’s automation features, we were amazed at how easy it was to create targeted messages and emails based on customer behavior. 

To help give you a better feel of the automation features on offer, we’ve listed some of Sendinblue’s most popular automation functionalities:

• The sending of emails/SMS
• The creation of CRM tasks
• The automatic segmentation of contacts into different lists
• You can automatically update information in your contact database

To create an automated campaign with SendinBlue, you can navigate to the “Automation” tab in the navigation bar at the top. 

At the next window, you can select the “Create a workflow” button to start a new automation.

Now you can create a custom workflow or select one from the given templates. For this example, we chose the “Welcome Message” template.

A pop-up will then appear with 3 steps. For the first step, you need to select the list that you want to add contacts to.

For step 2 out of the 3, you need to add a wait condition to your workflow. After that, you can click “Next”.

For step 3, it is time to create an email template. To do this, you can follow the steps and click on “Create a new email template”.

After this step, a new tab will open where you will edit the email settings and create the template. You can view how to create the template at the top of this review.

Once your email is complete, click on “Save and Activate”. This will activate your email template in your workflow.

After this, you need to return to the tab your automation is on and refresh the page (note: you might have to fill in the first 2 steps in the pop up again) and once you get to step 3, select your email from the drop-down menu and click on “Finish”.

To edit an existing block in your automation, highlight your mouse over the block and select the pen icon. 

To add a new block into your workflow, click on the “+” sign and choose which block you want to add.

For the final step, you need to choose and select an action or condition that you wish to add to your automation.

Once your automation is complete, click on “Activate the workflow” and your automation will be live.

Sendinblue Ease of Use (5/5)

It’s easy to find the Sendinblue login page once you’ve landed on its homepage. Once you’ve created an account, just head back here to log in.

The first thing that struck us when we started using Sendinblue was its intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The main menu is located at the top, making it easy to access your contact management tools, automations, campaigns, and transactional emails.

Understanding all those key metrics, too (like click-through rates and open rates), significantly improving your campaigns is made easy with Sendinblue’s campaign reports. These condense all this data in an easy-to-digest format, making it far more accessible to users, even those with limited marketing experience. 

Sendinblue Deliverability (Rated: 4/5)

We rate Sendinblue 4 out of 5 for deliverability. Historically, Sendinblue had a few deliverability issues. However, they’ve since introduced features like blocklisting email addresses with high bounce rates and subscriber confirmation emails, which have significantly improved their deliverability rate.

Sendinblue Pricing (Rated: 5/5)

Sendinblue’s pricing structure is competitive, mainly because you can access many of Sendinblue’s core features for free. As such, when it comes to pricing, we’ve given Sendinblue 5/5.

• Free: With this plan, you benefit from a quota of 300 emails a day, email campaigns, page tracking, a workflow editor, you can send transactional email and SMS, and more. 
• Lite: This package waives the daily sending limit and entitles you to advanced segmentation, core API features, and more. 
• Essential: Here, you’ll benefit from advanced open and click statistics, phone support, and heat map reporting
• Premium: This enables you to unlock landing page creation, Facebook ads, and multi-user access.
• Enterprise: Lastly, this provides you with managed setup and priority support, dedicated infrastructure and an account manager, and priority sending to reach those valued clients faster. 

Cancellation/Refund Policy

Canceling your Sendinblue subscription is very simple. Just navigate to your account's ‘My Plan’ page. Here, there’s a button that says ‘cancel my subscription.’ After that, you can use the remaining credits you have left until the end of the month. 

You can also downgrade to a cheaper plan if you aren't utilizing all the features you’re paying for. 

That said, Sendinblue doesn't offer refunds for unused credit unless there’s been a technical error. Of course, this technical error must be at the fault of Sendinblue. You can also get a refund if a user isn’t qualified to send from Sendinblue’s shared IPs. 

Sendinblue Customer Service (Rated: 4/5)

Although Sendinblue offers email and real-time live chat support on all of its pricing plans, we give Sendinblue 4 out of 5 for customer service. Namely, because Sendinblue doesn’t provide phone support on its Free and Lite plans. 

All users also have access to Sendinblue’s extensive online resource base. Here you’ll find all the information and tutorials you need about automation, CRM, integrations, API, etc. 

For non-users, you can fill out a contact form on Sendinblue’s website, and the support team will get back to you.

sendinblue login

It is easy to find the Sendinblue login page once you land on the homepage. After you have created an account, you can log in every time you visit the page.

Sendinblue dedicated IP

Email providers such as Sendinblue often use group IP addresses to send campaigns on behalf of their users, but Sendinblue wants users to build positive reputations with campaigns. Thus, allowing users to purchase a dedicated IP address. A dedicated IP address is reserved for a single sender, which will build a good reputation in your campaigns.

Sendinblue Cold Emails

Cold emails can be an effective strategy for marketers and entrepreneurs if it is done right. When you are considering using cold emails as part of your strategy, it is recommended to use a dedicated email provider such as Sendinblue. You can send emails in bulk without being marked as spam.

sendinblue tutorial

In the help center of the SendinBlue website, you will find a Sendinblue tutorial on various actions such as how to create campaigns or automation.

promotional code

Sendinblue gives you the ability to send out promotional codes with your campaigns. This is very handy especially if you have an online store.

Sendinblue Alternatives

In the interest of fairness, let’s take a look at some of Sendinblue’s most notable competitors:

Mailerlite

Mailerlite is a beginner-friendly software that’s much more affordable than Sendinblue. With this platform, you can create customer surveys - unfortunately, this isn’t a functionality Sendinblue offers. Also, Mailerlite provides an entire website builder tool for designing and launching a complete website. On top of that, they also offer a more comprehensive range of landing page templates. 

Constant Contact

With Constant Contact, you can build an entire online store without purchasing additional software like Shopify. However, their prices are rather steep. Although their plans start at around $15 a month, they can increase quickly, as this pricing is based on the number of contacts you have. In contrast, you can store 500 contacts with Sendinblue’s cheapest plan ($25/mo), and they offer a free forever plan with unlimited subscribers. 

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides everything you need and more to launch a successful email marketing strategy. You can create intricate designs and campaigns using ActiveCampaign’s advanced automation and segmentation. This software is on the pricier side, but considering the breadth and sophistication of its features, you get what you pay for.  

Our Verdict

From email and social media marketing to diverse automation features and a robust CRM, we think Sendinblue is a great marketing tool for small businesses.

What we liked about Sendinblue: After using Sendinblue for a couple of months, we were satisfied with how user-friendly the software is. You have access to all the critical features you need to run a successful email marketing campaign. The plugins are also easy to integrate and use.

What we didn’t like about Sendinblue: That said, we identified several areas where Sendinblue could improve. First, the number of template choices for landing pages is somewhat limited. Also, the available landing pages aren’t as strong as they could be either - some are a bit buggy and don’t appear well on mobile. 

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