If you own your own business, you probably don’t need to be told about the value of good email marketing and what it can do for your business. What you may need though, is a recommendation of which one to choose.
SendinBlue is an email marketing service that also offers SMS campaigns as well as “transactional emails”, which would encompass things like password resets, order confirmations, and account creations and would be heavily related to an ecommerce platform.
SendinBlue also offers a feature-limited “Free” plan and it’s cheapest plan starts at $7.37 per month, which is quite affordable. Another great thing about Sendinblue is its integration options with hundreds of plugins no matter which plan you choose. You can read more about it in the following Sendinblue review.
However, SendinBlue does have its downside and can be difficult to use at times. Read our full review to find out the pros and cons of using this service.
Pros
- Offers SMS campaigns
- Offers a free plan
- Responsive design templates are available
- Offers transactional and auto responder email options
Cons
- Templates are limited
- Account set-up can be confusing
Bottom Line
SendinBlue offers a promising email marketing solution with some great extras for user account and purchase related needs. Unfortunately, its templates can be a bit basic and it also lacks third party integration, which can be frustrating for uploading contacts.
SendinBlue Review 2018
SendinBlue offers four plans that range in price from free to $71 a month. These plans all include unlimited contacts and then uncap features from there on out. SendinBlue’s “Free” plan allows for 9,000 emails a month to unlimited contacts but all the other features are unavailable, which will make for a limited experience. Next is the Micro plan, which gives users 40,000 emails a month for $7.37 monthly, as well as no daily marketing sending limit and unlimited contacts. For $42 per month, you get the Bronze plan which also offers unlimited contacts and no daily marketing sending limit and then adds on 60,000 emails per month, advanced reporting and SendinBlue’s branding will be removed from the emails you send. Finally, there is the Silver plan for $71 a month. On top of all the features we have already discussed, the Silver plan also offers 120,000 emails per month.
There are also enterprise levels plans for large-scale businesses that scale all the way up to a whopping 15 million emails per month!
With all plans, you will get access to a variety of features like email and SMS personalization, an email template library, a mobile-friendly designer, contact management options and real-time reporting.
While SendinBlue does not offer a free trial, their free plan acts as free trial with no timeout and does not require a credit card to use. To sign up, all you will require is a
company name, email address and password. You will be able to start importing contacts and creating a campaign in minutes.
Keep in mind; you must verify your account’s email to successfully send a campaign. Users have encountered issues when they attempted to send campaigns from an unverified account.
When creating a subscriber list you will need to import your files (either CSV of TXT), copy and paste from a list or add them manually. You will be limited in your ability to upload contacts from third parties, as SendinBlue does not support this option.
The program recognizes email addresses and names but will not recognize dates or other text fields, such as genders. You can opt to not upload those fields and add them manually at a later date or to create a new attribute and field type and map it. We found this a slightly frustrating endeavour, both with SendinBlue’s inability to recognize extra fields and the fact that it does not work with third parties.
Setting up a campaign is relatively easy but does not include any ready-made template options. You will have to build everything from scratch, though you can import HTML files.
There have been some issues reported with usability of the responsive options with clients noting that SendinBlue makes design and use of the responsive options unnecessarily difficult.
Since SendinBlue can be confusing at times, you can at least benefit from their solid customer support. A help button on most pages will offer relevant information while tutorials and FAQs organized by category, though it takes several clicks to get the necessary info.
You can also request technical support by creating a ticket from your account center, and contact SendinBlue by web form or by calling a toll-free number, though most of their phone and chat options are sales inquiry directed.
Summary
We find SendinBlue to be a useful starting platform if you’re just getting into email marketing. It also can be very useful if you use WooCommerce, Magento or Prestashop ecommerce platforms, since SendinBlue has plugins for their platforms. It is also handy that you can send transnational SMS messages to customers, though you will have to pay more for that since it’s not integrated into any plan.
Unfortunately, we found SendinBlue to suffer from a lot of convoluted setups and lack of template options and it also suffers from a lack of support for features like polls and surveys. If you can live with these drawbacks, SendinBlue will serve you well.
Features Checklist
- Email Templates
- Unlimited Email
- Drag and Drop creation
- A/B Testing
- Automatic Responds
- Form Builder
- Responsive Design
- Edit Html source
- Landing Pages Creation
- Image Library
- Email Schedule
- Drip Campaign
- Inbox Preview
- Import Mailing List
- Survey Management
- Email Analytic
- Click-Through Tracking
- Add Social Media to email
- SPAM Compliance
- SPAM Check
- Unsubscribed Option
- Subscribe / Unsubscribe Database
- List Segmentation
- google analytic integration
Product Details
- Starting Price: $7.95 40,000 emails / month
- Free Version: Free 30 Days Try it Now
- Money Back: No Refund
- Support: Ticket, Live chat
Vendor Details
- sendinblue
- Founded 2011
- www.sendinblue.com/
- United States
