Sendinblue: A Complete Guide

Sendinblue is a world-class marketing platform that’s commonly classified as an email marketing software. However, there is so much more to it.

In this guide, we take an in-depth look at Sendinblue to understand why it’s more than just a tool for your email marketing. Many of the Sendinblue reviews online don’t do it justice, especially since they seem to focus on its email marketing capabilities alone. This guide seeks to make a thorough and unbiased assessment of the software to help you understand why it’s more than just another email marketing tool.

In a nutshell, Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing platform that allows your business to reach out to its contacts via email, SMS, Facebook, and live chat. Along with these marketing tools, it provides valuable features like CRM, automation, audience segmentation, landing pages, and much more.

More than 175,000 marketers in 160 countries use Sendinblue to send over 100 million emails every day. The platform has been around for over a decade and requires no fees upfront, making it an ideal growth tool for businesses with limited budgets. After going through multiple reviews and exploring the Sendinblue website from top to bottom, this is the information we’ve collected.

Features of Sendinblue

Even though it is touted as an email marketer, Sendinblue’s functionality goes far beyond email advertising. Its features can be broken down and classified into these four categories: communication, customer management, conversion, and analytics.

Communication

If you’re considering Sendinblue for its communication features, you’ll find its thorough implementation of features like email marketing, SMS marketing, and live web chat to be more than satisfactory.

Email Marketing

Sendinblue allows you to create professional-looking emails quickly, even if it’s your first time using email marketing software. You can choose to start with an email template. Sendinblue’s template library is well-stocked, and you can customize the most delicate details until you get a design that you’re happy with.

If you’re well-versed with the process, you can take full control and build a whole new design from scratch. Even then, you won’t need a lot of special skills because the drag & drop builder is one of the easiest to use. You can add or remove blocks, edit the style, and even add your brand colors using the intuitive builder.

Sendinblue also lets you personalize emails to suit your audiences. It supports dynamic texts (text that appears differently to different users), so you can address each of your contacts by name or address. Choosing the recipients to send to is easy, and you can turn on features to send multiple emails and delay deliveries. You’re able to target your whole contact list or choose smaller segments based on demographics and metrics that you manually upload into the platform. We will discuss this in-depth once we get to the CRM feature.

Sendinblue’s email builder comes with a very valuable tool: an A/B tester. With this feature, you can compare two messages to find the best one. You can also turn on intelligent sending, which sends emails to your contacts at the perfect time—something that the platform’s powerful AI determines.

SMS Marketing

With Sendinblue, you can promote seasonal, time-sensitive events by taking advantage of their SMS marketing feature. It allows you to send bulk messages to a contact list of your choosing in three easy steps:

• Write the message.
• Pick a contact list.
• Hit send or schedule it to automatically send at a later time.

With the ability to communicate directly to your customers’ mobile devices, you can easily dispatch time-sensitive messages. This feature can be utilized to send transactional messages such as order confirmations and shipping updates.

Messages here can also be personalized endlessly using the platform’s AI-powered segmentation capabilities. You can also add dynamic customer information (names, company names, addresses, etc.) to personalize messages for each of your contacts.

Sendinblue allows you to keep track of your SMS marketing campaigns by collecting key engagement metrics and real-time deliverability and engagement statistics. This way, it’s easy to know what works and what needs adjustment.

Chat

Keeping your website visitors engaged requires a little proactivity, and Sendinblue facilitates that with a website chatbox. As with everything else on this platform, you can customize this chat environment to match your brand, reflect your business name, and carry your business logos to make it easier for customers to identify you.

Setting up the chat on your website only takes a few seconds. Once you have the configuration you need, simply copy the piece of code and paste it into your website’s header. That’s all you need to start chatting directly with visitors on your site.

Sendinblue’s chat feature is quite advanced. You can see which page the visitor is on without leaving your inbox. This makes it easier to solve their problem or answer their question. It saves both your team and your customers a lot of time.

It’s also easy to assign conversations to different chat agents if your customer base is large. You can delegate chats based on pages, queries, or other criteria to reduce response time and capitalize on all marketing opportunities whenever they arise.

Centralized Inbox

Sendinblue is very scalable, which means that you can use it whether your company is a small two-man team or has a staff of 100+ employees. With its centralized inbox, it’s easy to coordinate customer emails, messages, and chats with your team. Once you resolve a customer issue, you can mark the entire conversation as resolved, and the change will be reflected in all your team members’ inboxes.

You save a lot of time and effort when you share a common inbox with your team members. It’s also easier to keep track of customer email threads when they’re centralized. What’s more, you can access your complete message history here and use metrics like opens and clicks to evaluate your leads so that you know when to retarget.

Lastly, setting up is a breeze whether you want to connect to email clients like Gmail and Yahoo or a custom email address on your domain. It offers a nifty IMAP set up for that exact purpose.

Personalization

It is crucial to maintain a level of personalization when dealing with customers. Robotic or sales-oriented messages do not get the same engagement level as messages with a personal or human feel. Your customers want to know that they’re interacting with a human, not a bot run by a corporation. This is why Sendinblue’s personalization features can be extremely useful.

Customer Management

Tracking customer interaction is the key to sound Customer Relationships Management (CRM). Setting up the CRM on this platform will take you less than one minute. There’s nothing to install and no special services required. Simply upload your contacts and all relevant information, and you’re good to go.

You can store all your contact information—from addresses to notes from previous meetings—in one place for quicker, more convenient access. All this information can be directly uploaded into a contact’s profile, so you’ll always know the history of the customers you interact with.

If you wish to segment your contact list, Sendinblue excels at assigning categories. You can use criteria such as conversion funnel progress, contact source, and customer characteristics to classify your contacts for easier access to specific audiences within your contact group.

It’s very easy to manage CRM tasks with Sendinblue, especially since you can assign and add deadlines right from within the platform. For smaller teams, it is possible to set up automated follow-up emails and messages using the platform’s marketing automation.

Segmentation

You can boost your emails' relevance by targeting smaller segments of your contact list with tailored messages. Segmentation can improve your open and click rate because targeted messages are likely to be more engaging when sent to relevant audiences.

Segmentation follows various criteria. You can classify contacts according to declared interests, geographic/socio-economic attributes, purchase and engagement history, and more attributes. There’s unlimited room for attributes to classify your contacts and just as much space for your contact lists. Sendinblue allows you to collect and store as much customer information as you need without paying extra for it.

Based on your preferences, it is possible to segment entire campaigns and even set conditions for the dynamic information displayed to your contacts.

Transaction

You can create and customize transactional emails with on-brand styles and logos using Sendinblue. The platform offers different setup options, including eCommerce plugins, SMTP Relay, API, and automation. Some of the transactional emails you can create and send include password reset emails and order confirmations.

Designing transactional emails is just as easy, whether you prefer using a template or building one from scratch. The drag & drop editor allows you to tailor the design to match your brand. There are also a lot of customization options that allow you to personalize your emails using contact information, dynamic content, or other specific parameters that you wish to set.

Sendinblue promises reliable deliverability with its speedy SMTP infrastructure. Email deliverability is strictly monitored by experts that work round the clock to ensure that delivery is optimal.

And as with most aspects of this platform, you have the power to monitor the performance of your transactional emails via real-time deliverability and engagement statistics.

Automation

Sendinblue offers you marketing automation for free. That means that you can access the platform’s powerful automation tools without a premium membership. However, it is limited to only 2,000 contacts, so a paid membership may be necessary to unlock its full potential for businesses with bigger lists.

Several automation features are available, including pre-made workflows, A/B testing, user journeys, and personalized content.

Conversion

Sendinblue isn’t just another list-building software because it helps you go a step further by converting your visitors. Aside from its powerful collection and promotional features, it also puts several conversion tools at your disposal.

Facebook Advertisements

You can launch Facebook ads directly from within the platform to target new visitors or retarget previous customers. It’s as simple as creating your ad (uploading your image, writing your text, and inserting a CTA) and choosing the audience you want it displayed to. This feature is useful for brand awareness and promoting upcoming events. It can also be used to generate direct sales.

When picking the contacts to target, Sendinblue gives you the option to target a specific pre-made list or generate a list of new people with similar attributes to your existing contact list. This is formally known as the Facebook Lookalike Audience feature, and it is integrated straight into your Sendinblue dashboard.

You can do just about anything you need when launching a new ad campaign, including setting your desired parameters. You can define attributes like the campaign's duration, your marketing budget, and finer details like the maximum amount of money you wish to spend per day.

Sendinblue collects and sends you metrics about your Facebook ads' performance so that you can re-strategize and adjust your campaigns based on how well they’re performing.

Landing Pages

With Sendinblue, you can create dedicated landing pages for every campaign you run. Building the landing page is a simple process, and you can customize it to fit your brand even if you don’t possess any technical skills like coding.

There are dozens of pre-made templates, too, so you’re covered in case you don’t know where to start. A drag & drop builder helps you create landing pages from scratch regardless of how much you know about building landing pages.

When adding your CTAs, you have the option to add sign-up forms that are linked to your Sendinblue account. Therefore, any information you collect goes straight to your account database. This keeps your contact data centralized and conveniently accessible.

The landing page feature is far from rudimentary as it gives you the option to add follow-up pages. If you’re looking to segment your visitors, for instance, you can add pages with further questions and classify them based on their answers. You can also add a “thank you” page at the end to connect with your audience at a human level.

Launching your completed landing pages is as easy as clicking a button.

Sign-up Forms

Sendinblue lets you build professional sign-up forms in minutes using its drag & drop builder. You can customize the color to match your brand, add images, and add text to encourage your visitors to sign up.

There’s no limit as to how many fields you can add to your sign-up forms. You can also add dropdown lists and radio buttons to enhance your information collection. This is also useful for segmenting your new visitors into as many categories as you need.

The forms are flexible and can be placed anywhere on your site using an embeddable snippet of HTML code. You can link this code to your emails and social media pages as well. Sendinblue also lets you add sign-up forms directly to your customer management software (CMS) as widgets using plugins.

The platform’s sign-up forms adhere to GDPR regulations, which means that your visitors must click on a checkbox to opt into your email newsletters. You can even add a double opt-in confirmation to be twice as sure that your contacts want to receive your emails.

Retargeting

You can retarget your visitors when they’re on another website using Sendinblue’s retargeting feature. It works similarly to GoogleAds’ pay-per-click (PPC) ads. First, you must define the rules for your ads’ retargeting audience. That could mean people that have previously visited your website or visitors who take specific actions and visit certain pages. For example, you can retarget visitors who abandoned their shopping cart or left at the checkout page.

You can use different styles for your display ad networks. Sendinblue’s creatives work on both desktop and mobile devices.

Budgets are set right within the software, too, whether that means defining a weekly or maximum monthly budget. You can also use the integrated estimator tool to run a target cost ad campaign.

You have the power to tailor these ads according to their performance, which you’ll know thanks to the key metrics the platform tracks and collects.

Analytics

Analytics are necessary to improve your marketing campaigns and evaluate how successful your strategies are. Without metrics, it’s hard to know whether you’re deploying properly or how many people you’re impacting. Sendinblue collects a wide range of data for your tracking purposes.

A/B Testing

A/B testing helps you optimize your email campaign by letting you know which of your ideas are performing better. Testing is necessary to collect marketing insights, especially when dealing with an unfamiliar audience.

Sendinblue allows you to perform email A/B testing with precision by setting up as many parameters as you need. You can adjust the contact list to send to, the duration of the testing, and even the size of the samples you want to send, plus add many more tweaks to improve your results.

Real-time Metrics

Sendinblue collects real-time statistics on how your transactional and trigger emails are performing. Thanks to its potent machine-learning algorithm, it is possible to understand how effective your mailings are by studying results like open and click-through rates.

When it comes to analyzing these metrics, you can choose a global view to see all events over time or drill down to the specifics with the granular view. These statistics show you the entire journey of your email from the moment you hit send up until your contacts receive and interact with them.

Email Statistics

If your focus is on email marketing, then Sendinblue can be a very handy tool. It sends detailed email click map reports that tell you exactly how your contacts are interacting with your emails.

These email heat maps show you which CTAs perform better, the visuals that lead to more engagement, and general stats like the total number of clicks per email. You can stack these statistics side-to-side with other campaign statistics to gain a more in-depth insight into your overall marketing campaign's performance.

Open & Click-through Reports

Open & click-through reports lend some accuracy to your campaigns' performance by showing you the emails that do well and those that need to be improved. These reports contain information such as your contacts’ geographical location and email provider so that you can better understand why some emails perform better than others.

Besides showing you the reports in full detail, Sendinblue sends actionable insights to improve your marketing strategy. All the reports are updated in real-time, so you can track the metrics you need to keep up with your campaigns' performance.

Where Sendinblue Excels

On paper, Sendinblue seems to be the total package. Some of the areas in which the software outperforms its competition are:

User-friendliness

Sendinblue scores highly when it comes to usability. Its highly advanced features are designed in a way that’s easy to use and master. Creating email campaigns takes just a few minutes and is a hassle-free process from start to finish. You don’t need coding skills (or any marketing experience, for that matter) to use Sendinblue, and that’s where most of its appeal lies.

Automated email workflows make email creation a breeze. With its AI algorithm, you can send the right message to the right contacts at the best time, drastically improving your email campaigns' performance.

Personalization

Sendinblue has a data-driven sending optimization feature that dramatically increases the chances of your subscribers opening your emails. The more emails you send, the more data it collects. You can refine your campaigns for better accuracy based on its predictions and analytics.

Where Sendinblue Needs Improvement

Even though it exceeds expectations in most areas, Sendinblue fails in a particularly critical area: customer support. Many reviews point to this issue as a potential roadblock for businesses that require speedy resolution to the issues they encounter.

The lack of live chat support is a sore point as users want to get instant assistance whenever something’s not working right. However, Sendinblue responds reasonably promptly to queries and complaints, so the customer experience is not entirely lacking. It just could use a bit of tweaking to ensure faster responses.  

How Much Does Sendinblue Cost?

Sendinblue’s free plan limits you to sending a maximum of 300 emails a day. The free plan also doesn’t include most of its advanced analytics or the A/B testing feature. It’s seemingly packaged for small businesses that don’t have huge email marketing demands.

The paid pricing plans are as follows:

The Lite Plan - $25/Month

This plan lets you send up to 10,000 emails a month and includes the analytics and A/B testing features.

The Premium Plan - $65/Month

The Premium Plan includes up to 20,000 emails and comes with marketing automation features (Facebook ads, landing pages, etc.)

Each of these plans can be paid for annually at a 10% discount.