It’s not a surprise that when it comes to the sea of email marketing automation solutions, we are quick to choose Sendinblue. This French company had the brash to get head-to-head with MailChimp – offering a simple but competitive offering that’s both simple to navigate, but still a champ at what it does. In this review, we’re going to try and go as much in-depth as we can into why we believe Sendinblue is a great solution for small businesses and startups (as well as larger businesses) as well as specific use-cases to make the most of the solution.

Let’s get right to the money. Signing up for an account on Sendinblue is free and easy, after you login, you’ll see a very simple menu with a limited number options to adhere to that simplistic feel. As soon as you login, you’ll want to head into your settings (Click “Settings” on the left-hand menu) and configure your sender id by just verifying both the sender’s email and domain by following simple instructions. Like with any account or new product, the initial setup may be the most tedious because in addition you’ll also need to make a basic email template (doesn’t need to be in HTML, but the options exists to use their WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) form and template designer. You’ll need to add some minimal amount of branding and fill out some terms and conditions related to your brand or website just to make sure that you’re on brand. This would need to be done with any email automation service.

One thing you’ll quickly notice is that there’s not a whole lot of menu options and choices – and we’ve seen that over time there’s been less, and less. We can only assume that this tool was very much built for the small business user who may not “live” in online marketing tools. But whether someone is adept at SaaS tools or not, we believe that everyone will appreciate the simplicity. The pricing is fairly simple as well: for the first 3 free and paid plans, there isn’t so much of a difference between them, aside from the fact that once is a paid subscriber to Sendinblue, he or she is not limited by a daily email cap. We figure that Sendinblue assumes that if you have more than a few thousand subscribers, you’re most likely making money off your email campaigns.

The pricing begins with 40,000 emails; if you compare that to how much the average small business sends through tools like MailChimp – this is actually an extremely generous amount. MailChimp’s premium tier begins with unlimited contacts but with around 2,000 contacts in automation workflows and permits up to 40,000 emails to be sent per month, but the problem is that most small businesses aren’t sending campaigns beyond once or twice a week, and likely don’t utilize sophisticated ecommerce automation features like abandoned-cart emails as well (although many are beginning to). The subsequent plans permit better analytics as well as 60,000 emails per month, with the highest plan adding a number of additional features like landing page builders, ad integrations, unlimited automation usage (the first 3 plans, including the free plan includes 2,000) , and much more.

One significant difference between Sendinblue and other email marketing providers is that Sendinblue does not cap the amount of contacts one can have. This is amazing as it allows from someone to be able to manage all of their data within the tool without the worry of being charged after surpassing around one to two thousand contacts. It’s also helpful for those who don’t necessarily have the “cleanest” list of scrubbed email addresses – thus one can store inactive contacts without the common worry of having to pay for those inactive contacts (almost all other email marketing providers make you pay for inactive contacts by adding contact list caps).

As email marketing tools have become less generous about their features over time, we feel that Sendinblue should be brought to the spotlight given its arguably generous free plan – especially when keeping in mind with the fact that a user receives unlimited contacts, automation tool privileges, A/B test, as well as full use of customizable forms. A business will have to be extra careful to not utilize all of its email credits in one day unless its transactional or promotional messaging uses a different tool, but otherwise few email marketing SaaS tools provide such a generous offering.

Especially for a free tool, we want to ensure that we highlight the automation offering which should be utilized by small businesses. As you can see in the screenshot, the automation engine is particularly visually-friendly, which always helps with mapping the customer (email) journey as defined by your conditions.  One can trigger the automation from a large variety of triggers such as behavioral triggers like clicking a link, or visiting a specific webpage, to data-based triggers like birthdays and the like. You can literally set this up in just a few clicks. The automation workflow then allows you to include features like A/B testing, or conditions simply within the workflow editor. The combinations are limitless and further more the automation workflow designer is on par with that of enterprise-level tools used by the Fortune 1,000 companies.

The use cases are varied and numerous, especially for local businesses. The reason why we believe Sendinblue is an ideal match for small business is because Sendinblue is simple and easy to use, there are several WordPress plugins and third-party services that have direct integrations with the tool, and also – the truth is that most small businesses don’t have such huge email marketing lists. Thus, most new and growing small businesses will find the free plan satisfactory, and can easily grow into the first tier of 40,000 messages per month with out too much of  a financial setback. If one is unlikely to surpass 500 users or contacts, Sendpulse may be a better solution as it offers 15,000 emails per month without any compromise of capability or limitations – however one should be aware that Sendinblue offers one of the most affordable solutions for someone to easily grow.

Sendinblue was founded in 2012 by French entrepreneurs
Armand Thiberge and Kapil Sharma in Paris, France. It has raised its third round of funding as late as 2017, with $36 million to expand operations.  Sendinblue claims to service over 80,000 businesses globally is over 70 different markets. In early 2019, Sendinblue acquired German competitor Newsletter2Go and began integrating its technology into its own product. In 2016, Forbes rated the company as 1 of 20 startups to watch in 2016. We here at B3Ware are watching this email marketing automation magnate as well.

If you have any questions, you can visit their support page to contact their support directly.