While previously viewed as a complementary medium compared to more traditional forms of outreach, digital marketing has slowly but surely surpassed traditional marketing strategies over the past decade. In this highly competitive field, it is important for marketers to step up their game to stay ahead of the competition.
Digital marketing solutions aim to streamline the full variety of marketing tasks, helping brands cut costs and achieve even better results. Sendinblue was launched in 2012, headquartered in Paris with over 300,000 active users in over 160 countries. For this Sendinblue (opens in new tab) provider review, we’ll take a closer look at the platform’s features and compare it to other top applications, such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Subscriptions and Prices
Unlike most of its competitors, Sendinblue offers a free subscription that is actually usable with no subscriber limit. The main limitation here is that free users can send a maximum of 300 emails per day, which affects the usability of the program. Still, this is worth a look for a small, small business just starting out with a lack of money.
The Lite subscription costs $25 per month ($22.50/month on annual payment) and introduces email support, along with a monthly limit of 20,000 emails, which can be increased to 100,000 emails/month at an additional cost. cost of $65/month. There’s also the Lite+ option, which can remove the Sendinblue logo for an additional $12/month and has advanced campaign reporting with heat maps and click stats.
If that’s not enough, you can upgrade to Premium for $65 a month, but it’s set back to 20k emails for the month at that price. Premium comes with everything in Lite and Lite+, and adds Facebook ads, multi-user access for up to three users, phone support, automation tools. For an additional fee, the monthly limit can be increased to 1 million emails at a cost of $599/month.
At the top of the levels, custom Enterprise plans are available for larger companies that need to send more than 1 million emails per month. Enterprise users also have access to priority support, single sign-on, a customer success manager, access for more than 10 users, and other advanced features.
Functions
Sendinblue has a strong feature set that covers almost everything most organizations need to reach customers. At the basic level, it provides excellent tools for creating and personalizing emails, text messages, Facebook ads, and other types of content. Sendinblue works as an all-in-one solution to cover a large portion of the most popular channels.
Depending on the tier you subscribe to, you can also leverage A/B testing, complex automation workflows, and extensive marketing analytics. After setting up a new email with an intuitive drag & drop builder to create the template, you can streamline future campaigns by reusing it.
Interface and in use
Sendinblue has a sleek, professional design with intuitive navigation. A shortcoming is that while a desktop app is available for Windows XP and above, Sendinblue does not have apps for any other platform: Mac, Linux, iOS or Android.
Overall, however, the Sendinblue is great at simplifying a wide range of complex functions. From the web dashboard, it’s easy to start a new campaign or template, view marketing analytics, or adjust some settings. We also appreciate that separate pages are available for transactional emails, as well as a list of your contacts.
support
As mentioned before, support for Sendinblue depends on your subscription. The Help page has detailed answers to numerous questions for both free and paid users, and it’s a great place to start if you run into any issues while using the service. There is even a ‘Sendinblue Academy’ for learning and certifying the use of this platform.
The pricing page lists email support as a perk for Lite subscribers, but it seems accessible to free users as well. The creation of a support ticket is performed by clicking on your company name in the top right corner and selecting Support. Phone and live chat support is available on the Premium and Enterprise tiers. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any stated opening hours or lead times for such questions.
Security
Sendinblue takes basic security measures, but there is a lack of crucial features like two-factor authentication and user activity tracking for team accounts. Constant Contact, a competitor, offers native two-factor authentication (2FA) through integrations with Okta Verify and Google Authenticator.
Alternatively, Sendinblue is AVG compliant, and an upgrade to an Enterprise plan allows single sign-on. Incoming connections can be enabled through the Sendinblue SMTP over port 465. When available, Sendinblue automatically uses the TLS protocol for outgoing connections.
The competition
Sendinblue is a fairly functional digital marketing provider with plenty of features to satisfy most users, but keep in mind that some alternative choices may be more effective for certain use cases. To get more specific, a competitor in the space, Constant Contact, offers additional content types, such as a survey or poll, but this platform starts at $20 per month.
Mailchimp offers a free plan that is an intriguing alternative to Sendinblue. Users can send up to 10,000 emails to as many as 2,000 contacts – with mobile apps available for both iOS and Android devices. Plus, free users can access surveys, basic automation tools, and seven marketing channels, including email, Facebook, and Instagram.
final verdict
In summary, we consider Sendinblue to be an excellent digital marketing automation provider with the tools most businesses need for monitoring emails, texts, landing pages, Facebook ads, etc. Please note that it lacks some notable tools, especially two-factor authentication, content types such as surveys and polls, and mobile apps, which users looking to manage campaigns on a smartphone or tablet are sure to miss. On the other hand, we expect these to be relatively minor issues for at least some users, especially when we consider the overall effectiveness of the platform.
While there are strong alternatives, Sendinblue is still among the top marketing platforms in 2022.
