Sendinblue Review

What Is Sendinblue?

Sendinblue is a suite of communication tools for relationship marketing. The software has vastly evolved since its launch as a newsletter and transactional email solution in 2012. With four offices across three continents, a headquarter in Paris, and employees from more than 40 nationalities, Sendinblue takes pride in its diverse organization.

Its automation capability has expanded over the years, and the selection of third-party integrations has grown. Besides, it now supports built-in customer relationship management (CRM) functionalities.

Considering the many unique features, you’d expect to pay a premium. But the plans are some of the most competitively priced with handy add-ons and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) email and SMS options.

Despite its aggressive global expansion, Sendinblue is selective in allowing subjects its clients can cover. Topics such as currency exchanges, erectile problem remedies, “get rich quick” schemes, hiring solutions, and weight loss are considered taboo on the Sendinblue marketing platform.

Although not banned entirely, clients concentrating on astrology, dating, money games, and gambling have to meet certain conditions to use the service.

Despite its content restrictions, Sendinblue has a user base of over 100,000 across 160 countries and delivers no less than 70 million emails and text messages a day. 

Sendinblue Features

Unlike most Sendinblue reviews, we looked at each browser-based app’s functionalities to give you a deeper understanding of what makes it such an excellent solution.

Marketing

Here's what Sendinblue has in store for your marketing campaigns:

Email and SMS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

Irrespective of what plan you pick, you have access to the core API features. They power everything you can do on the platform, from composing emails to tracking events with Sendinblue webhooks.

Email and SMS Personalization

You can customize SMS messages and emails to make them more authentic and effective. The software helps you leverage Sendinblue contact attributes to tailor your messages to individual recipients. You can include the contact’s name, company, or colors.

Email Campaigns

Launching a Sendinblue email campaign is simple, and you can use it without spending a dime. With the free plan, you can design and send up to 300 professional-looking emails per day.

Email Designer

Available on all plans, Sendinblue’s drag-and-drop email and newsletter editor is intuitive. Using flexible text blocks along with typographic, formatting, and customization options, you can craft your message in a visually attractive way.

This tool is designed with mobile users in mind, so your emails are responsive to any screen size. Although the software has no email spam testing available, it displays a preview of your messages on different email clients.

Email Template Library

You can use one of the 65 Sendinblue email templates to start crafting your campaigns. Some of them may share similar design elements with different layouts, but all of them are mobile-friendly.

Advanced Templating Language

Using data gathered from your contact database or through an API, Sendinblue’s Django-based templating language enables dynamic emails and renders content customization with ease.

Requeue

This feature kicks in when you exceed your daily sending allowance in the middle of a Sendinblue email campaign. The platform pauses and continues sending your emails once your credits refresh.

SMS Campaigns

With or without a paid plan, Sendinblue helps you reach and engage with your customers using promotional and informational text messages. You can do this by buying prepaid SMS credits.

You can get between 100 and 10,000 SMS credits simultaneously, allowing you to scale your marketing efforts as you see fit. We love that they have no expiration date. The software gives you detailed reports that you can share via email to measure your Sendinblue SMS marketing campaigns’ success.

Transactional SMS and Email Sending

By leveraging the Sendinblue SMS and email API, you can send time-sensitive confirmations, password-reset messages, and customized notifications after every transaction. You can build each transactional message from scratch or edit a template.

After testing it ourselves, our Sendinblue review can confidently state that your “triggered” messages will reach the inboxes of your contacts successfully.

Dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) Address

Want to boost your reputation? Sendinblue gives you the chance to do so by upgrading to your own IP address. Unlike a shared IP, a dedicated one safeguards you from the perceived negative behaviors of other Sendinblue users.

Although a free, dedicated IP is reserved for Enterprise subscribers only, you may not need one if you’re not a high-volume sender. Since setting up your own IP isn’t without any hassle, its benefits may diminish if you don’t intend to send mass emails to a sizable audience frequently.

Chat

Sendinblue enables you to set up a chatbox at no cost. Other than having a useful tool to provide your customers with instant on-site support, you can control the chat environment too. You can play with its colors and display your logo to match and improve brand awareness.

A/B Testing

Available on the Premium and Enterprise plans and as an add-on to Lite users, this feature lets you test two ideas on a sample of your contacts. We were surprised that we couldn’t find a single Sendinblue review that showed how this technique could conveniently shorten the trial-and-error process for your email campaigns.

After the test, the software automatically selects the version that performed better to be used from then on.

Zero Daily Sending Limit

Paid subscribers enjoy limitless email sending every day. While there is an hourly limit of 40 transactional emails for new users, this is only temporary.

Sendinblue Logo Removal

Subscribers of top-tier Sendinblue email marketing plans can send emails without the “Sent by Sendinblue” logo at the bottom of each message.

If you opt for the Lite plan, you can unlock the app’s advanced email functionalities for an extra fee and rid your correspondence of the company’s footprint.

Send Time Optimization

Sendinblue uses a machine learning-driven algorithm to help you send your emails at the best time. The more you use the software, the more it learns about your contact’s behavior. The software combines the data with profiling information to predict when your contacts are most likely to see and open your messages.

Landing Page Builder

With this tool, you can create custom landing pages without any coding. With dozens of Sendinblue templates to choose from, you can make well-designed pages or build from scratch with ease using the builder’s drag-and-drop feature.

Facebook Ads

Premium or Enterprise subscribers can launch an online advertising campaign on Facebook without leaving the Sendinblue marketing platform.

From uploading an image to picking an appropriate CTA, the software gives you the power to conveniently boost your lead acquisition efforts using the world’s most popular social networking site.

Retargeting

With the Premium or Enterprise plan, you can retarget unconverted site visitors with display ads. You can define the rules of which audiences the software should retarget.

Automation

Workflow Editor

With the Sendinblue automation software, you can build custom workflows. You can choose from various entry points that trigger the beginning of a workflow, actions that determine your response to contacts that engage with you, and conditions that filter specific demographics.

Despite being user friendly, you can’t avoid being on a steep learning curve in the beginning. To accelerate your progress, we recommend capitalizing on basic and advanced pre-made Sendinblue templates.

Once you familiarize yourself with all-too-common workflows, like welcoming new users or following up on abandoned carts, you can effectively create custom templates designed for your operation.

User Behavior Tracking

Collecting behavioral data helps the Sendinblue marketing automation platform perform even better. The software enables you to track page visits and abandoned carts.

Lead Scoring

Sendinblue lets you build a lead-scoring model. You can create refined automated workflows for leads that express your business’s most significant interest or have the highest buying potential.

Ultimately, lead scoring can help you produce personalized content, offer deals to the right contacts, and get more insight into your sales pipeline. This tool lets you harness the full potential of Sendinblue email marketing software.

Limitless Contact Targeting

The Sendinblue marketing automation platform lets Premium and Enterprise subscribers create workflows that target an unlimited number of contacts. Lower-tier plan users can build automated workflows for just up to 2,000 contacts.

Nevertheless, we consider this limitation quite generous since you can begin implementing a marketing automation strategy at no cost.

Contact Management

Unlimited Contact Storage

You can save as many contacts as you want on all plans. Since you can add custom attributes, you segment your contacts and send highly targeted messages.

Advanced Contact Segmentation

The Sendinblue email marketing platform makes it easy for you to group your contacts by interest, demography, or previous engagement. Other than improving conversion, contact segmentation enables you to nurture healthy long-term customer relationships.

Signup Form Customization

A customized registration form can compel people to sign up and share a great deal of useful information upfront. The Sendinblue form builder lets you create web forms that can reflect your brand identity and allows you to put them on your social media profiles, emails, webpages, or as a widget in your CMS.

With opt-in confirmation options, customers have the freedom to choose whatever type of email to receive. This helps you stay compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Sales CRM

The Sendinblue CRM allows you to see how your relationships with your leads and converted customers blossom over time. You can record all touchpoints, giving your team a 360-degree view of your interactions with your contacts.

This feature requires no special service or installation. You can import contacts, store all relevant details about them in one convenient location, and create individual profiles for frictionless management.

Shared Inbox

Using the Sendinblue CRM, you can view your correspondence histories with all your contacts. With multi-user access, you’ll be able to organize your communications and ensure that the right members of your team can receive, read, and respond to the correct emails.

Free and Lite users get one inbox while the Premium plan comes with three-user access and the option to increase it to ten. But if you sign up for an Enterprise plan, you’ll have ten shared inboxes at no extra cost.

Reporting

Email Heat Maps

The heat map reports tell you which images and CTA are the most persuasive. With color-coded visualization, you can identify the most clicked elements and links in your emails.

Geography and Device Reporting

The software gathers geolocation and device statistics to present them in digestible reports. The data from these documents can help you maximize all features.

Advanced Open and Click-Through Statistics

This marketing platform provides you with advanced reports for every Sendinblue email campaign. This enables you to analyze your customer engagement by several factors, including chronology or email provider.

Real-Time Reporting

With up-to-date insights, you can understand how different contact segments interact with your messages, identify weaknesses and strengths, and fine-tune your overall marketing strategy over time.

Ease of Use and Interface

Sendinblue is friendly to international clients as its application supports six languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German) and comes with an option to adjust time zones. The company accepts 17 currencies on direct debit, all major credit cards, and PayPal.

We hardly had any complaints about the software’s interface. While we hope for a more simplified initial account setup, it’s forgivable. 

Sendinblue has four standard tabs: Campaigns, Automation, Transactional, and Contacts. But you can increase it to seven if you enable additional apps like the Sendinblue CRM. Even in its most crowded state, Sendinblue’s interface didn’t feel overwhelming.

If you require more information about a specific functionality, the API documents and other resources are tucked away under the help icon. You can see all the latest activities through the notification bell icon.

Sendinblue Integrations

While integrations haven’t been the software’s strong suit, ours isn’t the only Sendinblue review to notice that the company has worked on this deficiency.

You can now synchronize your Sendinblue with ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, Drip, HubSpot, Intercom, MailChimp, Mailjet, Pipedrive SurveyMonkey, and Typeform to compile your contacts. Likewise, the software lets you set up RSS campaigns.

Further, Sendinblue has client libraries in place for the following coding languages:

• C Sharp
• Go
• Java
• Node JS
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• TypeScript node
  

Currently, there are 57 integrations. If you don’t see value in the existing ones, a competent developer can build one that suits your business Sendinblue’s open API.

Sendinblue Pricing

Sendinblue has four plans:

There are no free trials available for the paid versions. Only the Enterprise plan has a free, dedicated IP, but you can purchase more if you wish. The Sendinblue dedicated IP price is $251 per year for every additional one.

Moreover, Sendinblue offers PAYG options for purchasing SMS and email credits.

Prepaid SMS credits

• Between 100 and 10,000 credits
• Sendinblue SMS pricing varies by country
• Billed in euros
• No expiration date

Prepaid email credits (come with all Life plan features, including the add-ons)

• Minimum of 5,000 credits for $40
• Maximum of 1,000,000 credits for $1,995
• No expiration date

Credits cannot be refunded unless there is a technical error within Sendinblue or the user doesn’t qualify to send emails or texts through the shared IP.

Sendinblue vs MailChimp

Sendinblue and MailChimp are dominant players in email marketing. Both technologies support marketing automation, come with CRM capability, and provide thorough reports with advanced stats, reliable editors, and customizable forms. Although the two observe freemium pricing models, their no-cost plans aren’t of equal value.

The free Sendinblue version has a daily limit of sending 300 emails. On the other hand, MailChimp’s free plan lets you send up to 10,000 emails to 2,000 contacts. Sendinblue renders custom workflows accessible at no cost. Besides, you can’t use webpage visits as automated workflow triggers on MailChimp. 

While there are no Sendinblue limits to contact storage, MailChimp caps it at 2,000 contacts. Many Sendinblue reviews can’t help but praise its lenient policy on transactional emails, while MailChimp continues to sell them separately.

When it comes to paid subscriptions, Sendinblue charges you based on your preferred monthly email sending limit, whereas contact count dictates MailChimp prices and email send limitation.

In terms of SMS marketing, Sendinblue has the edge over MailChimp. Although it has a Text Marketer plugin, MailChimp doesn’t support transactional text messages and automated SMS sending.

Deployment is where MailChimp has a clear upper hand. Unlike Sendinblue, it has mobile apps for iOS and Android. And compared to MailChimp’s 800+ integrations, Sendinblue still has work to do to narrow the gap.

Both companies provide email, phone, and chat support on top of multiple knowledge bases and video tutorials. However, MailChimp extends its email support to free plan users for only 30 days only. With Sendinblue, Enterprise subscribers can get priority support through email and phone from a dedicated account manager.

Although Sendinblue and MailChimp serve the same businesses, the former markets itself as an economical choice. The latter does offer a generous free plan and paid subscriptions with low street prices, but its cost can quickly add up when you need to store more contacts and boost your email sending limit.

Sendinblue Review - Verdict

The usual takeaways from Sendinblue reviews are that the software is highly affordable, offers a wealth of automation features, and boasts tons of autoresponders. After thoroughly testing it, we can confirm that this platform’s deliverability is exceptionally reliable.

Sendinblue is still a work in progress, but it’s encouraging to know that it’s the number of integrations has been steadily on the rise.

You might find its free plan slightly restrictive if you wish to send a campaign to a long contact list. Nevertheless, the subscription is an excellent gateway to many unique and advanced features. If you can keep your email requirement to a bare minimum, an upgrade is a definite bargain.