We will begin this Sendinblue review by answering the simple question in the title above. Does Sendinblue still offer good value for money in 2023? Simple answer, YES. With Sendinblue’s comprehensive feature set (which includes transactional emails, a CRM, marketing automation, SMS, landing pages and Facebook ads), compared to its very competitive pricing, Sendinblue still offers good value for money in 2023.
With 300,000+ users across 180 countries and over 10 years of experience in the email marketing software industry, Sendinblue is an email marketing platform deserving of respect. They have earned their place in the industry, and can be trusted at this point. Sendinblue gives you access to an unlimited number of contacts on any plan, and you can pair its email capability with SMS marketing and a completely built-in CRM to transform your email marketing game.
The company began as a digital marketing agency. The email marketing software was built to solve the challenge that small business owners were facing – email marketing automation on a budget.
For a relatively new player in the email marketing software industry, Sendinblue has done well so far. But how do they compare to other software in the same niche?
Disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in this article. This only helps to keep this website running and adds no extra cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. You can read our full affiliate disclosure here
How Does Sendinblue Compare To The Best Email Marketing Platforms?
Sendinblue is a great email marketing automation service, but is hardly alone in that category. We have reviewed some of the best email marketing services out there, and some of them fair a little better than Sendinblue.
ActiveCampaign is probably the most sophisticated email marketing tool on the market. Their top-notch automation and brilliant lead-scoring system let’s you launch automated and drip campaigns easily. Their price starts at $9/month and you can start with a 14-day free trial.
Constant Contact is the best all-in-one email marketing solution for small businesses requiring an easy to use platform that packs social media, automation, list building, email marketing and more. And their price starts at $9.99/month with a 30-day free trial.
Campaigner is for large businesses needing powerful marketing automation features, advanced personalization, and intuitive reporting. This platform allows you to scale your email marketing effort at the right price for your large business. Prices start at $59/month. You can get started with a 30-day free trial.
HubSpot is all the tool you need to complete your inbound marketing strategy. It provides a combination of tools for sales, marketing, customer service and even content management. HubSpot is probably the most advanced marketing suite of its kind on the planet, and is for large businesses looking to combine their inbound and outbound marketing efforts in one seamless platform. You can get started with Hubspot for just $45/month or check out the platform with their 14-day free trial.
Sendinblue: The Good vs. The Bad
Every product has its flaws and its merits, and Sendinblue is not an exception. To help you make the right purchase decision, we have highlighted the merits and the flaws of this email marketing service for you to consider below;
What Does Sendinblue Excel At?
Far from the email marketing software its already known for, Sendinblue is a full-feature platform that also integrates a robust email builder and campaign manager. Alongside that, you also get tools for managing your customers, social media properties, ecommerce channels, and more.
Built-in CRM
Sendinblue has a built-in sales CRM that helps you to organize and track your customer interactions and information. No additional software or installation is required as this feature is included with all Sendinblue accounts. Just upload and start managing your customers and interactions within minutes.
Managing customer interactions without a CRM is difficult, so Sendinblue lets you segment your contacts into various categories based on some criteria like:
- Charateristics
- Source of acquisition
- Steps in the conversion funnel
With this, it’s easy to know where each customer is in the sales funnel, and it’s easier to plan for their conversion, by creating tasks within the CRM so your team can keep abreast with opportunities and deadlines.
Unlimited Contacts
Every platform has one specific thing they’re good for. For Sendinblue, it’s their unlimited contact. This is how they have established their value. This software offers unlimited contacts and email lists on all their plans – even the free plan. You can then use segmentation to improve your email by targeting smaller subscriber groups and engaging them with more relevant content. You can segment contacts based on previous engagements, declared interests, purchase history and more.
Shared Inbox
With shared inbox, Sendinblue makes it easy for your sales team to manage all your customer emails in one centralized place without interference from one another. Sendinblue let’s you coordinate emails effectively by
- assigning conversations to team members
- marking conversations as resolved
That way no one gets left out of the loop. It’s also easy to connect your Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo email accounts to this shared inbox with just a few clicks.
Sendinblue’s inbox has filters and a search function. With this function, you can find conversations you need to prioritize, instead of wasting time wading through hundreds of email threads to find what you’re looking for.
Inside this inbox, you can also view a complete history of conversations with any lead and assess their interest by tracking the open and click through rates of every email you have sent to them.
SMS Marketing
With Sendinblue, you’re not just limited to only emails. You can also connect directly with your customers through SMS marketing if you need to promote time-sensitive offers. As SMS has up to 98% open rate, you can be sure that your offer will be seen by your lead. To increase this open rate, you can use the segmentation information you have about recipients to personalize your messages.
Marketing Automation
Sendinblue has integrated a marketing automation software into its platform and you can use it free for up to 2,000 contacts. With this automation, you can update contact information in real-time, automatically manage lists based on behavior and run campaigns on auto-pilot, freeing up time for you to handle other tasks.
Another way this automation becomes useful is in improving your conversion rates. You can use Sendinblue’s marketing automation software to build workflows that guide your customers to sales, follow up with online shoppers, and know when a lead is prime to convert.
You can create both advanced and beginner workflow automations with Sendinblue, including workflows as simple as sending welcome emails or as advanced as using lead scoring to create an individualized experience for every customer.
Facebook Ad Tools
Do you want to reach a larger audience with your marketing? You can use Facebook ads to do that. Sendinblue has a comprehensive tool for Facebook advertisement, and it’s right inside your Sendinblue dashboard.
After you have uploaded images, written your ads text and selected a CTA corresponding to your ad goals, define your budget and ad duration. Sendinblue will take care of the rest for you.
Customizable Landing Pages
Sendinblue makes it easy to build custom landing pages with their intuitive landing page builder. There are lots of templates to help you get started. With their drag-and-drop builder, you can create the perfect landing page in no time.
You can also start from scratch and build one using the HTML editor if you’re a more advanced user. Landing pages can help you create a more streamlined experience for your customers. You can always follow up with a landing page containing detailed questions, or confirm submissions with a thank you page.
High Deliverability
With all things being equal, Sendinblue guarantees you up to 97% deliverability rate – which is not bad. Sendinblue tailors your emails to match your sending needs perfectly. The setup options permitted include email API, webhook, plugin and SMTP relay. These make it easy for you to send bulk emails and have more control over your batch sends.
What Does Sendinblue Lack?
While Sendinblue has many outstanding features and excels in our overall review, there are still some areas where they are lagging behind. Users have echoed these concerns in their public reviews. Check if any of these are deal-breakers for you by assessing them against the areas Sendinblue excels in, and your own needs.
Customer Support
Users have expressed their displeasure openly against Sendinblue’s customer service. Some have called it slow or unhelpful, with one user mentioning that it took two weeks to hear back from customer support via email, which resulted in campaign delays.
Support can be accessed via a form on their contact page. Sendinblue does offer priority phone and live chat support if you’re on the Business and Enterprise plans. The Free and Starter plans makes support available only through emails.
Sender Standards
Sendinblue users have noted that the platform closed their accounts because their campaigns had exceeded a certain amount of hard bounce and complaint rates. One very important reason to use an email marketing software is to avoid recipients’ spam folder. Or worse, get your email account flagged as spam. This will greatly impact your email deliverability. Sendinblue is very mindful of negative results from user campaigns. Too many hard bounces or spam complaints can get you barred from their platform.
Reporting Features
Sendinblue has very advanced reporting features that include geographic and device reporting, heat maps, and advanced open and click rates. But these are all available on their higher-tier plans which start at $65/month. Sendinblue’s affordable plans deliver only very basic reporting.
While we like the fact that Sendinblue has this depth of reporting available, some of what it offers (and more) are available at lower prices with most other email marketing softwares.
Sendinblue Pricing Plans And Options
Sendinblue’s plans are structured to suite a wide range of users, even though they’re best known for their email marketing platform. The full suite of tools and services can be used in combination with the email marketing tool.
Sendinblue Marketing Plans
We have so far focused this Sendinblue review on the email marketing service, which falls under this marketing category. Their email marketing software is the cornerstone of the Sendinblue brand.
Sendinblue’s plans and prices are quite affordable, as we have already mentioned. And there’s so much value because every plan (beginning from the Free Plan) allows for unlimited contacts, at least 300 email sends per day, customizable templates, transactional emails and SMS and WhatsApp-based campaigns.
Pricing under this category is in four parts:
- Free: for up to 300 daily email sends
- Starter: starting from $25 per month for 20,000 monthly emails with no daily limit. You also get basic reporting and analytics, plus email support.
- Business: starting at $65 per month, you get everything in Starter, plus advanced marketing automation and statistics, A/B testing, send-time optimization, deeper reporting, phone support and more.
- Enterprise: this plan has custom pricing, and is for large organizations with more specific needs. You get everything in the business plan, plus enterprise-grade security, advanced integrations, personalized support, sub-account management, and more.
You can start from any of the first three plan options (Free, Starter, or Business), then tweak the number of monthly sends you need, add more credits for email, SMS, or WhatsApp campaigns.
Sendinblue Live Chat
Live chat is fast becoming an indispensable tool in the overall marketing arsenal. And with Sendinblue you can get it by adding it to your marketing platform plan or purchasing it as a stand-alone service.
In a few minutes, you can quickly set up the look and feel of your chat widget to reflect your brand and install it on your website. It’s easy to implement even if you have no coding knowledge.
After implementation, inquiries and requests will funnel right into your Sendinblue chat inbox and your team members can see which area of your website customers and prospects are on when they initiate the chat. This means it’s easier for prospects to reach out to your company representative directly from your website.
Another advantage is, if a prospect reaches out to you through your chat widget, their up-to-date information is synced seamlessly with your Sendinblue marketing platform.
This live chat tool is free to get started for one user. But for only $15 per user per month, the paid version opens up more features like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram chats, plus detailed prospect information and more.
Sendinblue Sales CRM
Sales CRM is a completely free add-on to your Sendinblue account. All you have to do is select and add it to your account after you’ve selected your marketing plan.
This feature is one of Sendinblue platform’s strengths and adds value to your subscription. With it you can collect and organize all information you have about customers, prospects and leads. You can also add files and notes to individual records, set attributes to help with segmentation, and more.
When you need a CRM that is lightweight but functional to pair with your marketing platform, this gets the job done well. Customize the CRM to fit your pipeline and funnel, track deals, visualize each leads’ progression towards a sale, and see a timeline of all activity for any contact.
Sendinblue Transactional Emails
One of Sendinblue’s powerful features offered on every plan is transactional emails. This is how most businesses, especially online stores boost ROI on their email campaigns.
You can create shoppable emails using Sendinblue’s dynamic templates and drag-and-drop builder. This type of email contains shoppable elements, such as products that a recipient can click on to purchase. Sendinblue also gives you detailed tracking and analysis of clicks and product views from these email campaigns.
This feature is standard with Sendinblue plans, but has a limit on the number of transactional emails you can send per month. To send more emails, you can purchase additional email credits in quantities of 5,000 or more.
But if you need to send between 20,000 to 1,000,000 transactional emails per month, pricing starts at $15 per month for 20,000 emails and scales to $550 per month for 1,000,000 emails.
Sendinblue Enterprise Platform
Sendinblue has this tailor-made plan that allows Enterprises use their fully-fledged digital marketing platform to power their campaign. You can also just use Sendinblue’s Email API to power your transactional emails and notifications distribution.
Using the Enterprise plan, you’ll unlock top-notch deliverability and security measures, including GDPR compliance and advanced email API for secure transactions. Sendinblue also lets you monitor and manage the entire customer lifecycle for increased retention and loyalty. You can create promotional offers, automated scenarios, multi-channel campaigns, and even retarget your customers with ads on Facebook, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
Contact Sendinblue sales for a free custom quote to get started on the Enterprise Plan.
Who Is Sendinblue Recommended For?
Sendinblue Is Recommended If:
+ You’re Into Ecommerce:
Sendinblue is well-equipped to serve ecommerce since they have features like customizable triggers based on purchase data, the ability to import customer orders, and customizable KPIs. Integrations with popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento are also available.
+ You Need To Send Transactional Emails, SMS and/or WhatsApp Messages:
Sendinblue is not just for email marketing campaigns, it’s one of the best tools for trigger-based and transactional emails. Its automation workflow designer allows you to build campaigns triggered by clicks, opens and even webpage visits. And its dedicated transactional section allows for messages such as password resets, and sign-up and purchase confirmations! There’s even an option to send SMS and branded WhatsApp campaigns to a segmented list.
+ You Want An Advanced Tool But Without The Costs:
Sendinblue works out to be 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 automations, advanced segmentation, live chat and dynamic personalization, Sendinblue is a great option.
Sendinblue Is Not Recommended If:
– You Need Multiple Logins And Different User Access Levels:
Sendinblue does not allow you to set up logins for multiple users on their lower plans. This feature is available only on their Business and Enterprise plans.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sendinblue
Sendinblue Review: Final Conclusion
Looking at our detailed Sendinblue review, you can see that, apart from reporting features which are too basic, and strict sender standards, plus sometimes slow customer support, the features and allowances you get with Sendinblue are very good. While its automation features may not be enough to topple the email marketing software giants like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot, it’s not a long way off.
Aside from offering a generous free plan, with its paid plans starting from $15 for up to 20,000 emails, Sendinblue are one of the cheapest email marketing providers on the market. Considering their very reasonable prices, we recommend this email marketing tool. It’ll make a great addition to your digital marketing toolbox.
Recommended Reading on DienyeDiri.Com: How To Build An Email List
Disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in this article. This only helps to keep this website running and adds no extra cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. You can read our full affiliate disclosure here.
- UK and US Forge Agreement to Create AI Safety Tests - April 2, 2024
- UAE Setting Up AI-focused fund to Build its Own Chip - March 25, 2024
- New AI Tool Detects Cancer Signs Radiologists Missed - March 25, 2024
Last Update: December 12, 2023 by Dienye Diri
