Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Reviews

Sendinblue becomes Brevo Marketing Platform

Sendinblue has announced its rebranding to Brevo. The decision to change the name reflects the company’s growth and expansion beyond its initial focus on newsletter services.

With an evolving customer landscape and changing expectations, Brevo aims to empower businesses by providing a simple and affordable platform for personalized customer experiences across multiple channels.

The new name, derived from the word Bravo, represents success and confidence in clients’ growth. Brevo marks a significant milestone in the company’s journey and emphasizes the importance of building relationships with clients, community, and partners.

Sendinblue Digital Marketing Tools

Nurturing leads is fundamental to the success of most commercial businesses, and marketing is an effective way of tapping into potential customers. However, marketing is a constantly moving industry that evolves with new technologies. Even so, some things never change, such as the importance of effective email marketing in developing leads. Many excellent email marketing solutions, such as MailChimp, Moosend, and more, are available.

But what about Sendinblue? How does this email marketing platform stack up to its competitors? In the following Sendinblue review, you can determine if this is your solution and how Sendinblue email marketing can power your campaigns.

Sendinblue is an email marketing platform that aims to be a little more. Aimed directly at midsize businesses (SMBs), Sendinblue wants to be more than just an email marketing platform. Also, it provides many digital marketing tools, including a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) service.

One of the things we were intrigued about heading into our Sendinblue review is whether that CRM offering sets the platform apart from its rivals or is it merely a gimmick. Certainly, with a strong suite of features and competitive prices, Sendinblue is an interesting alternative to MailChimp, HubSpot, etc. However, does it live up to its aspirations as a complete digital marketing solution?

Email marketing is one of the most important components of your business outreach, and it is an excellent way to engage with customers and convert leads. Sendinblue has grown from an average email marketing solution to one of the best on the market. In this Sendinblue review, we look at the Sendinblue email marketing features and see how expanding into wider digital marketing has helped the platform stand out from the crowd.

What is Sendinblue used for?

At the heart of the Sendinblue experience is its email marketing abilities. This is what the platform is about, first and foremost, even if it is increasingly branching out into other digital marketing tools. Unfortunately, while additions like a CRM solution are a nice touch, it is simply not powerful enough for most enterprise users.

Instead, the real reason to use Sendinblue is the email marketing features. It provides a clean and efficient way to automate your email marketing campaigns. You can reach potential customers using Sendinblue email marketing features without manually handling tasks. Moreover, allowing the platform to handle projects for you is a major part of the experience, and we think Sendinblue is a leader in email marketing automation.

Is Sendinblue Compatible with WordPress?

Yes, there is a plugin that allows WordPress to connect with Sendinblue. WordPress users can leverage the plugin to bridge their Sendinblue activity and their WordPress website. People can directly complete tasks by linking the two platforms without switching websites and apps. In fact, you can use the plugin to manage all your email and digital marketing right from your WordPress site’s admin panel.

Sendinblue Detailed Features

Sendinblue offers a suite of features that expands on traditional email marketing software tools by adding many digital marketing abilities. Below we will cover the core feature modules available on Sendinblue:

Let’s start with email campaigns/marketing, which remains the core of the Sendinblue experience. If you have used another email marketing platform, Sendinblue delivers what you would expect. You can generate email strategies and campaigns to a list of contacts and automate tasks for responses, feedback, and interaction.

Even if you are a beginner, the interface in Sendinblue is easy enough to get to grips with. Admittedly, it is not as user-friendly as a platform like Moosend, but it allows you to build emails and access features with minimum fuss.

A solid selection of templates allows you to add some design flourish to emails. You can customize emails with a simple drag-and-drop interface to add and remove template blocks. Finally, you can import your custom creations directly into the tool for those confident and skilled enough to develop their HTML email templates.

Of course, to have a functional email marketing campaign, you need to have contacts to send content to. On Sendinblue, there is a good system for contact management where you can collect contacts into groups, edit individual contacts, and segment groups based on stats and engagement.

When building your subscriber list, Sendinblue complies with regulations and standards. You must detail how you acquired a contact’s email address and information, and you must also confirm that every contact you engage with has opted in. When you do this, Sendinblue explains the CAN-SPAM Act regulatory compliance.

We guess experienced marketing teams will already be familiar with regulations around contact engagement and may find the CAN-SPAM Act reminder annoying. Still, it is a valuable tool that helps beginners avoid trouble if they unwittingly engage with contacts as spammers.

Contact management issues

While contact management on Sendinblue is decent, it is also an area of the platform we found frustrating. We uploaded 30 contact records in our tests, including the standard information such as name, location, email address, and phone number. However, when importing the information from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Sendinblue requests that the fields in the document match the available fields on the platform.

While this is standard for email marketing tools, Sendinblue complicated the process because it requires too many steps to complete the tasks. For example, it recognized matched fields such as names and email addresses but no dates, names, and other fields. When this happens, you must either continue without these fields or create new attributes for them. It is also not possible to add custom fields to a contact you are manually uploading.

We are sure there is a way to work around this problem, but it is not apparent on the main interface, meaning Sendinblue is not as smooth as other platforms. Simple is better, so the complex nature of managing contacts in Sendinblue is problematic, although admittedly not a dealbreaker.

Automation features are important to any email marketing solution. In fact, enterprise users put a lot of value in it because it allows them to hand off time-intensive repetitive tasks to automation and focus on more important tasks. After spending time with Sendinblue, we think it has just about the best automation tools of any email marketing tool.

You can set up triggers for email feedback and contact interaction from the dashboard. This allows an email to be sent when those specific triggers happen. Some examples of triggers include:

We especially like the ability to create a sequence of automations to extend far beyond just on-off response actions. As a result, Sendinblue arguably provides the most comprehensive set of automations in the email marketing realm, with over 350,000 options available.

As mentioned throughout this review, Sendinblue attempts to expand beyond email marketing into general digital marketing. The company’s CRM solution is not yet good enough to drive this expansion. Specifically, the CRM is a nice touch and useful for users, but it is not good enough to stand alone as a reason to purchase the platform.

In other words, if you want CRM software, you are better off looking at dedicated providers such as Salesforce, Zoho, or Freshworks. Still, we are not complaining because the CRM in Sendinblue does allow you to track contact activity and integrate it into your subscriber database. Also, it is worth remembering; the CRM ability sets this tool apart from other email marketing platforms.

Sendinblue Cost

We generally like the pricing system on Sendinblue because it is easy to understand and allows all features across each plan. In fact, the only restriction as you move through price tiers is the number of emails you can send. Also, this makes it easy for organizations to weigh the service costs depending on how many emails they expect to send in marketing campaigns.

Sendinblue Detailed Integrations

Integrations are key to fleshing out your productivity, and for an email marketing solution, it is important to tap into third-party services. Sendinblue does a good job with a broad selection of integrations from various payment platforms, eCommerce solutions, email builders, website creators, CRMs, and more.

Out of the box, the platform has direct plugins for eCommerce giants WooCommerce and Shopify. This lets you bake purchase tracking into your digital marketing. So, for example, you can see purchase activity across your contacts and see who is just browsing products and abandoning digital shopping carts.

Other noteworthy integrations include WordPress, Magento, LeadSync, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Zoho, Outlook, Facebook Lead Ads, MailChimp, Wix, and PayPal. Furthermore, you can also access Zapier, which allows you to install a wide range of integrations from over 2,000 apps. Finally, if you have developers on your team, you can use the Sendinblue API to build your integrated services.

Alternatives to Sendinblue

Many Sendinblue alternatives are available, such as the popularity of email marketing solutions. Here are some of them:

Sendinblue Review Conclusions

If you read this Sendinblue review a few years ago, the outcome would be less than positive. The platform was missing third-party integrations, lacked automation, and had below-average email design tools. However, in recent years, the tool has risen to the challenge of competitors and now offers best-in-class automation, a good selection of integrations, and excellent email design options.

Overall, it has been quite the turnaround for Sendinblue. And we can now recommend the platform as one of the best email marketing solutions. Throw in some gimmicky but still worthwhile CRM features and competitive pricing. And there is a lot to like about Sendinblue email marketing.