Hey, Anthony here and welcome to our Sendinblue review.
Starting out as a transactional email service, SendInBlue has now become a full email marketing platform.
What’s the difference? Well, originally you would perhaps just use SendInBlue as the service which simply sends transactional emails, such as an order confirmation, once someone has bought something from your online store, for example.
Now, though, you can also use SendInBlue to create email marketing campaigns with their new drag and drop editor, and at a pretty reasonable price too. SendInBlue has one of the lowest entry price-points of the email tools we’ve tested so far, with a generous free plan and the ability to send up to 40,000 emails a month for under $8.
Of course, some limitations apply in the free plan. They also have pay as you go plans available, albeit slightly hard to find, and this may make more sense if you only send emails every now and then.
Once inside, you have the choice of marketing, transactional, and (if you’ve activated it) automation. If you click on transactional, it gives you the information necessary to set up SendinBlue as your email sender with SMTP and API settings.
There’s also a section which allows you to track emails and see if they’ve been delivered or opened, for example.
Marketing takes you to the dashboard, which gives you information on past campaigns, opens, clicks and blacklisted users. From here we can create a new campaign. Once you choose a campaign name and subject, you choose a sender email, and then you can create a custom sender name that your recipients will see.
If you click on the advanced settings on the side, you can choose some extra default and customization options. You can then choose a new, fully responsive template, or use HTML to custom-build your own. Any saved templates are also available to be used. You begin with a basic template, but there are also other pre-designed options you can choose at the top. The templates themselves aren’t too bad, with relatively modern options available. Let’s choose this one. On the left, you have the email elements, which you can drag and drop to add to the main section. Compared to other editors, the number of elements here is a little lacking, but it has the basics. You can easily move sections, duplicate them, or choose other options depending on the element highlighted. And placing your own media is pretty simple too. It even comes with its own image editor that might come in handy for some. Save and quit once you’re happy with the content.
Send a test email to begin with, and then you can perform a free inbox test (which can take upwards of 15 minutes) showing you if the email gets through various client’s spam filters.
There is also a browser preview available, giving you both mobile device and email client previews. You may find that some previews time-out, though, and it takes at least as long as the inbox test. It’s worth noting that both of these features are not only simple to perform, but also free. With some other tools, you may have to pay separately for these features.
Once you’re done, choose your list and send away. You, of course, have the option to schedule it too. If you have access to marketing automation, then you will have a third option available above your account page. Let’s have a quick look at what’s on offer. You’re given some Javascript code to place on a page that you want to track an action on, which can be as simple as a visit to the page by a subscriber. This action is what you then focus your automation around.
Your dashboard here is the ‘Scenarios’ page, where you can see all your automation. Let’s create a new scenario. You can create these from scratch or start with recommended scenarios. Using our example, let’s set up one for a page visit. First, you choose the web address, then the email template that will be triggered when someone visits this address. You can also decide upon the time to wait before sending the email, for example, one day, as shown here. Once you’ve created this scenario, you can edit it anytime, and see how many people have started, or finished, this process.
SendinBlue has enough features for the average user, and when you take into account their pricing it can seem pretty attractive. For the lower pricing tiers, they offer a pretty good bang for your buck.
With their clean approach, it’s quite easy to get your head around the system, even if you’re a beginner.
While there could still be some improvements, it’s a mostly intuitive design. It’s nice to see an automation service that is easily navigable.
Whilst it appears to be slightly less advanced when compared to, say, ActiveCampaign’s automation, there are enough functions to satisfy most businesses. Perhaps due to the fact that SendinBlue began as a transactional email service, the marketing tools, specifically, the newsletter editor, could do with a bit more polishing. The process of building a newsletter can be frustrating due to niggling user experience issues. While SendinBlue does offer several integration options with other applications, they can’t compete with the likes of other tools such as GetResponse.
As mentioned above, while SendinBlue offers enough tools for the average user, it’s still missing a few of more advanced features such as A/B testing and different access levels for team members.
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