SendinBlue -The Best Email Marketing Application
EXCELLENT (4.0)
SendinBlue is
evolving from email marketing to a more comprehensive solutions hub with
expanded automation and built-in CRM functionality suitable for most small
businesses.
US Price$25.00
·
PROS
·
Now features basic CRM functionality
·
Impressive range of automation
·
Wealth of auto-responders and transactional email features.
·
CONS
·
Initial account setup can be tedious
·
Basic templates could use improvement
SendinBlue,
which begins at $25 per user per month for the Lite plan, is an email marketing
solution aimed squarely at small to midsize businesses (SMBs).
It sports a well-designed and easy to learn interface that covers not just
email marketing but also has support for newsletters, some automation, and
basic customer relationship management (CRM) functionality. Already an
outstanding value for businesses requiring email marketing plus SMS
functionality, SendinBlue is ramping up its feature set for 2020. Coming this
year is additional language support (including Italian and and Dutch), a new
editor for forms, the ability to support different accounts per company, and an
expanded App Center and integration page.
In 2019,
Sendinblue announced it was partnering with Vonage by adopting Vonage's Nexmo
APIs as the sole provider of SMS for SendinBlue customers. The partnership adds
additional email capabilities to Vonage's platform while offering an
alternative to transactional messaging for SendinBlue's customers.
Overall, we
liked its ease of use, and SendinBlue's Setup> Design> Receipients> Confirmation
workflow is powerful considering its four-step simplicity now even more so with
the new drag and drop builder. However, even with these improvements, it still
doesn't offer templates as effective as our Editors' Choice pick, Campaigner.
Pricing and Features
All of
SendinBlue's plans include unlimited contacts, with tiered pricing based on the
number of emails you want to send each month. Its free plan includes unlimited
contacts and 300 emails per day. Its aforementioned Lite plan costs $25 per
month for 40,000 emails, its Essential plan costs $39 per month for 60,000
emails, and its Premium plan costs $66 per month for 120,000 emails. There is
also an Enterprise plan with custom pricing for companies that need to exceed
the 120,000 email threshold (and, ideally, for companies needing 350,000 emails
per month or more).
SendinBlue's
free plan essentially works as a feature-constrained free trial, without a
timeout period and does not require a credit card. To sign up, you just need to
enter your company name, email address, and a password. You must confirm your
email address, but you can get started creating a campaign, importing contacts
and completing your profile in the meantime. Usually these emails arrive
immediately but we didn't see ours until several minutes after we signed up,
though we did receive a Welcome email from the CEO of the company in addition
to the confirmation email. The Welcome email included links to articles and videos
to help us get started plus a link to the Help section and email support.
Creating a Subscriber List
As part of your profile, you must explain how you got the email
addresses you're planning to upload. You also have to tick a box confirming
that your contacts have opted in, which triggers a pop-up window explaining
CAN-SPAM Act compliance.
Overall, my experience creating and matching fields was a little
convoluted with SendinBlue as compared to some of the competition, such
as Campaign
Monitor. With manual input, you can't add custom fields but you
can with uploads or from a submission form. After you import your file, you
have to map the fields to SendinBlue's corresponding fields. It recognizes
email addresses and names but not dates, such as birthdays or other text fields
such as gender. You can opt to not upload those unmatched fields or create a
new attribute and field type. For instance, for birthday, you would add a date
field, and for gender, a text field. Overall, the process could use some
simplification.
When users are successfully uploaded, you get an email alert,
which is helpful if you have really large lists. You can also export your
contacts at any time or even set the export to happen daily. Users can be
segmented based on the data you've collected from them as well as through a
wide variety of automatic triggers, such as the date they were entered into the
system, whether they've ever read or opened an email, among many other
segmentation criteria.
Importing Contacts and Setting Up a
Campaign
One of the first to-do items when getting SendinBlue Ready for use
is importing contacts. It is easy enough to import contacts from spreadsheets
or .CSV files as you would with most solutions. To add contacts, you can
import files (CSV or TXT), copy and paste from a list, or add manually. You can
also upload email and SMS contacts that you want blacklisted (such as contacts
who have opted out via a different service). Defaults fields are name, surname,
email, and SMS.
SendinBlue goes even further as it understands some customers may
be moving over from competing products. To ease in the transition, SendinBlue
makes it easy to bring your data and contact information from solutions like MailChimp, Sendgrid, Getresponse, and Active Campaign through
an easy to use Integration option. While this helps SMBs make the transition
between services, note that it isn't always a one to one conversion. If you
leave out fields in the mapping process they will not be synced within the
integration. It is only mandatory to map at least an Email or SMS field.
Creating a campaign is simple. Give it a name, subject line,
sender email, and name. Advanced settings include customizing the
"to" field to add the subscriber's name, use a custom Unsubscribe
page for the campaign, add tags, add an attachment (5MB maximum), embed images,
and enable mirror link, which allows subscribers to view the email in their
browser. Next, you choose a template builder, either responsive design or HTML
simple text. Responsive design is just what is sounds like: a design that
adapts to the size of the screen, making it instantly mobile-friendly.
We used the new drag and drop form builder to create a newsletter
template and found it quick and responsive. You can either start by dragging
and dropping elements to the page or use a pre-designed template. If you start
without a template, then the newsletter is pre-populated with a logo, image,
text, and button but you can swap out elements. Do consider that many of the
elements have embedded code, so you can run into errors where the design isn't
an exact representation of what you were trying to build. Businesses will value
the addition of certain elements like an anti-robot CAPTCHA functionality.
There's also a new landing page builder, a tool that was created from customer
feedback.
When we finished designing and tried to send a test, we were told
we had to complete our profile. This meant we had to exit the design tool and
click over to our profile, which seemed unnecessary when a simple pop-up dialog
with a "Complete" button would have sufficed. You can also preview
emails in your web browser. In addition to newsletters, you can send
transactional emails (account creation, password reset, etc.) of text messages
(code verification, order tracking, etc.).
Marketing Automation for SMBs
SendinBlue's marketing
automation tool is an easy-to-use solution for anyone who wants
to build new workflows or for newbies who just want to automate basic email
sequences. The tool features eight basic workflow templates that can be edited
and redesigned for specific tasks. Included with your account are a Welcome
Message, Birthday Message, Abandoned Carts, Page Visit, Website Visit, Product
Purchase, and activity-based templates.
Custom Workflows start with four entry points. You can start
workflows with the following file types: a basic contact file, a contact who
has completed an email or website activity, a contact who has submitted form
data, or a contact who was logged visiting your website. Once you've determined
which contacts to add to the workflow, you'll base your sequence off of a
series of "if/then" conditions to determine what to send for your
next communication. If someone opens an email, then they get a different
message than someone who didn't. There is no limit to the number of
interactions you can create within a workflow but your account is restricted
based on the number of emails you can send.
SendinBlue offers a simple way to create contact filters by
demographic, this can let uses automatically add someone to a workflow. For
example, if a contact turns a certain age or spends a certain amount of time on
your website, then he or she is added to a workflow that will attempt to
capitalize off of this interaction. This is one of the niftier automation rules
we've seen on any of the tools we've reviewed.
Thanks to SendinBlue's plug-ins with e-commerce platforms Magento and
WooCommerce, you'll be able to perform basic website and product purchase
monitoring that will subsequently let you add users to workflows based on their
own activity. Abandoned carts, product browsing, product purchases: SendinBlue
is a magnificent tool for marketers who hope to capitalize off of these basic
e-commerce behaviors.
The bigger story with SendinBlue is the potential brought about by
its automation workflows. There are close to 350,000 options to automate
marketing and sales processes. These actions include sending emails and SMS
messages, organizing contacts into different lists, and updating information in
your contact database.
Because of the workflow tool's ease of use, it's excellent for new
marketers who just want to start blasting off campaigns. SendinBlue is a
suitable platform for basic and niche use cases but it's certainly not an
automation behemoth designed for large enterprises. In those instances, your
best bets will be with HubSpot
Marketing Hub and Salesforce
Pardot, our Editors' Choice tools for marketing automation.
New Integrations
Since our original review, the SendinBlue team has added a number
of plug-ins to the system. You can now connect SendinBlue to a number of
different analytics, e-commerce, CRM tools,
and more. There are various available plug-ins. These include integrations with
the likes of Google Analytics (which
can be leveraged to monitor website traffic that comes through from your email
content) and Zoho CRM (which
can add new contacts from the system to SendinBlue's contacts). The platform
also comes with an open application programming interface (API), which lets a
competent developer on your team build new integrations to suit your
organization's unique needs. SendInBlue has a new Facebook Ads campaign
capability that should satisfy marketers aiming for that particular segment of
users.
When we first reviewed SendinBlue, we were disappointed by the
lack of third-party integrations. We're very happy to see these introduced, and
the fact that the API is open makes integration even better. The addition of an
App Center and Integration Page open the door to wider integration to various
business tools. The user interface (UI) is much improved and seems to perform
faster. There weren't many problems with the look and feel of the platform
before, but the new UI changes up the color scheme a bit and makes use of
larger fonts. These may sound like small additions but it makes a substantial
difference when you think of all the hours spent within the platform.
Bottom Line
Since SendinBlue might confuse new users, it's nice to know it
offers decent support resources. A Help button on most pages offers
context-relevant help. You can also view tutorials and search FAQs, which are
organized by category, though it takes several clicks to actually get to the
content. You can also request technical support by creating a ticket,
contacting SendinBlue by web form, or by calling a toll-free number.
SendinBlue is evolving from a useful tool for marketers who want
to reach their customers by text in addition to email, to a versatile small
business solutions hub. The push towards automation and the addition of some
basic but workable CRM features make it a more compelling solution. Especially
for smaller businesses and startups with modest needs. SendinBlue is well on
its way as an all-around marketing tool.
SendinBlue Specs