SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a promising email marketing solution, but it's not always easy to use as its templates are basic and it lacks third-party integrations.

MSRP
$7.37

  • Pros

    Attractive responsive design templates available. Several transactional and autoresponder email options.

  • Cons

    Tedious account setup. Not the most attractive templates.

  • Bottom Line

    SendinBlue is a promising email marketing solution, but it's not always easy to use as its templates are basic and it lacks third-party integrations.

SendinBlue's email marketing software (which begins at $7.37 per month) can be difficult to use at times. Its templates also pale in comparison to those offered by our Editors' Choice pick in this category, Campaigner. However, SendinBlue is a useful email marketing tool, especially for marketers who employ Short Message Service (SMS) outreach and often create new campaigns from scratch.

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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 9,000 emails per month. Its Micro plan is $7.37 per month for 40,000 emails, its Bronze plan is $39 per month for 60,000 emails, and its Silver plan is $66 per month for 120,000 emails. There are also enterprise-level plans with custom pricing for companies that need to exceed the 120,000 email threshold.

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 received a Welcome email from the CEO of the company (that's new) in addition to the confirmation email. The Welcome email included links to articles and videos to help us get started as well as a link to the Help section and email support.

SendInBlue Dashboard Overview

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. 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.

Overall, 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.

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.

Setting Up a Campaign

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 (5 MB 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. The HTML editor is for those who have already designed their newsletter outside of SendinBlue and can simply paste in the code they have already created.

We used the responsive tool. 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.

You can upload your own images but each must be 5 MB or smaller. Once you successfully upload a photo, you can access editing tools, such as crop, resize, change orientation, brightness, contrast, and so on.

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.).

Tracking a Campaign

You can view basic campaign reports on the Statistics tab of your SendinBlue dashboard or more detailed reports on the My Campaigns tab. Clicking the Show Statistics button at the top of the Statistics tab refreshes the screen. Opens and clicks were registered nearly immediately, though it required refreshing. On the right-hand side of the screen you can see all of the numbers for that period of time: total campaigns sent, total recipients, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, replies, and bounces. You can download the entire report into a CSV file for further analysis.

SendinBlue My Campaigns

Marketing Automation for Small Companies

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.

SendInBlue Workflow Template

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 Create New Workflow

The tool makes it incredibly easy to create contact filters by demographic, which in turn allows you to 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 WooCommerce and Magento, you'll be able to perform basic website and product purchase monitoring that will subsequently allow you to 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 basic e-commerce behavior.

Because of the workflow tool's ease of use, it's excellent for new marketers who just want to start blasting off campaigns. Unfortunately, the tool is so new that it doesn't have A/B testing, search marketing,or drag-and-drop workflow creation, and it limits the number of emails you can send each month. These limitations make SendinBlue a suitable platform for basic and niche use cases but it's certainly not an automation tool designed for large enterprises and marketers with complex campaigns. In those instances, your best bets will be with HubSpot and Pardot

, our Editors' Choice tools for marketing automation.

SendinBlue Build a Custom Workflow

Customer Support and Bottom Line

Since SendinBlue can sometimes be confusing, 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 or contact SendinBlue by web form or by calling a toll-free number.

SendinBlue is a useful tool for marketers who want to reach their customers by text in addition to email. It also offers order confirmation and other transactional emails and texts, which is essential if you have an e-commerce website or a website that requires a log-in.

About the Author

Juan Martinez Icon Juan Martinez

Juan Martinez is PCMag's Senior Editor, Business. His work and commentary has been featured on ESPN.com, NBCNews.com, FoxBusiness.com, Entrepreneur, Reuters TV, Esquire.com, Publishers Weekly, ClickZ, ZDNet, TechRepublic, TechRadar, Content Marketing Institute, CRM Magazine and Direct Marketing News. He has a master's degree in creative writing fro… See Full Bio

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See More Molly K. McLaughlin Icon Molly K. McLaughlin

Molly K. McLaughlin is a New York-based writer and editor with more than a decade of experience covering technology. She has tested and reviewed all sorts of software, mobile apps, and gadgets. Before launching her freelance business, she was an editor at PC Magazine, covering consumer electronics, followed by a stint at ConsumerSearch.com, a revie… See Full Bio

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