Previously seen as a complement to more traditional forms of outreach, digital marketing has slowly but surely overtaken traditional marketing strategies over the last decade. In this fiercely competitive field, it's important for marketers to step up their game to stay ahead of the competition.
Digital marketing solutions seek to streamline the full range of marketing tasks, helping brands reduce costs and achieve better results. Sendinblue was launched in 2012, based in Paris and with more than 300 active users in more than 000 countries. For this Sendinblue provider review(opens in a new tab), we'll take a closer look at the platform's features and compare it to other leading apps like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Packages and rates
Unlike most of its competitors, Sendinblue offers a truly usable free plan with no subscriber limit. The main limitation here is that free users can only send 300 emails per day, which affects the usefulness of the program. Still, it's worth the trip for a cash-strapped small business just starting out.
The Lite subscription costs €25 per month (€22.50/month when paid annually) and introduces email support, as well as a monthly limit of 20,000 emails, which can be increased for an additional cost up to 100,000 emails per month at a cost of € 65 / month. . There is also the Lite+ option, which for an additional €12 per month can remove the Sendinblue logo and have advanced campaign reports with heatmaps and click statistics.
If that's not enough, you can upgrade to Premium for $65 a month, but it resets to 20,000 emails a 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 cost, the monthly limit can be increased up to 1 million emails at a cost of €599/month.
At the top of the tiers, custom business plans are available for larger businesses that need to send more than a million emails per month. Business users can also access priority support, single sign-on, customer success manager, 10+ user access, and other advanced features.
Features
Sendinblue has a robust feature set that covers just about everything most organizations need to reach their customers. At a basic level, it provides great 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 good part of the most popular channels.
Depending on the tier you subscribe to, you'll also be able to take advantage of A/B testing, complex automation workflows, and full marketing analytics. After setting up a new email with an intuitive drag and drop builder to create the template, you can optimize future campaigns by reusing it.
Interface and in use
Sendinblue features a clean and professional design with intuitive navigation. One shortcoming is that although there is a desktop app available for Windows XP and higher, Sendinblue does not have apps for any other platform: Mac, Linux, iOS or Android.
Overall though, Sendinblue is strong at simplifying a whole set of complex features. From the web dashboard, it's easy to jump to a new campaign or template, view marketing analytics, or adjust various settings. We also appreciate that there are separate pages available for transactional emails, along with a list of your contacts.
Support
As mentioned above, Sendinblue support varies depending on your subscription. The help page has detailed answers to many questions for both free and paid users, and is a great place to start when you're having trouble using the service. There is even a "Sendinblue Academy" to learn and get certified in the use of this platform.
The pricing page lists email support as a benefit for Lite subscribers, but it appears to be available to free users as well. Creating a support ticket is done by clicking your company name in the top right corner and selecting Support. Phone and live chat support is available at Premium and Enterprise levels. Unfortunately, we were unable to find response times or response times for these requests.
Security
Sendinblue takes basic security measures, but lacks crucial features like two-factor authentication and user activity tracking for team accounts. A competitor, Constant Contact offers native two-factor authentication (2FA) through integrations with Okta Verify and Google Authenticator.
Alternatively, Sendinblue is GDPR compliant and an upgrade to an Enterprise subscription enables single sign-on. Incoming connections can be enabled via Sendinblue SMTP over port 465. When available, Sendinblue automatically uses TLS for outgoing connections.
Competition
Sendinblue is a fairly functional digital marketing provider with plenty of features to satisfy most users, but keep in mind that some alternative options may be more effective for certain use cases. To be more specific, a competitor in the space, Constant Contact, offers additional content types like surveys or polls, but this platform starts at $20 per month.
Mailchimp offers a free plan which is an interesting alternative to Sendinblue. Users can send up to 10 emails to 000 contacts, with mobile apps available for iOS and Android devices. Additionally, free users can access surveys, basic automation tools, and seven marketing channels, including email, Facebook, and Instagram.
final verdict
In short, we find Sendinblue to be an excellent digital marketing automation provider with the tools most businesses need to monitor emails, SMS, landing pages, Facebook ads, and more. Note that some notable tools are missing, notably two-factor authentication, content types like surveys and polls, and mobile apps, which users want to run campaigns on a smartphone or tablet. On the other hand, we expect these to be relatively minor issues for at least some users, especially considering the overall efficiency of the platform.
Although there are many solid alternatives, Sendinblue is still among the best marketing platforms in 2022.