Email marketing is changing. No longer that we have to endure the struggle of feeling impersonal when we email our list. The software is getting better and smarter. The result? Email marketing is one of the fastest ways of increasing revenue. Not only that, but it also has the lowest costs. This rapid advancement also meant an increase in software companies to choose from. But which one is the best for you?
In today's review, we are going to take a thorough look through Sendinblue. At the end of this article you will know:
- What you can do with Sendinblue
- How you can have a 4000% ROI with email marketing
- To make your customers loyal fans
- Whether Sendinblue is good value for money or a waste of breath
Enough chitchat, time to dive into our Sendinblue review of 2021!
What Is Sendinblue?
Sendinblue describes itself as an all-in-one platform to grow your business through Email, SMS, Facebook, Chat, and CRM. Basically, this means they focus on marketing automation for everything related to customer relationships. Their core business is the email marketing service they provide. This is the number one reason for marketers and entrepreneurs to be interested in Sendinblue. The other services are kind of build around email marketing as an addition.
In the next chapter we will dive into the technical features of Sendinblue, but first, let's take a closer look at their approach. One thing I really like about Sendinblue’s approach is the small business perspective they use in designing their software. The software is adaptable to the size of your business. Whether you are just starting or are trying to scale up, Sendinblue has the right solution for you.
This small business DNA is confirmed by its CEO.
“I always keep in mind where I come from: we started as a small business, but with a hunger to accomplish something great. That’s why we worked to develop a tool that empowers companies to achieve their own ambitions”
Armand Thiberge // CEO of Sendinblue
I have seen many software companies who act like they understand marketing but are more ICT than anything else. With Sendinblue I recognize my own ‘marketing language’. They understand how you should address your customers and how to convert them into buying from you.
5 Reasons To Consider Sendinblue
It’s time to dive into the features of Sendinblue. What do they have to offer you? And most importantly, what are the results you can expect? In this chapter, we will discuss the 5 strongest reasons why you should consider Sendinblue to be your email marketing partner.
ROI Of 4000%!
Did you know that email marketing has an average ROI (return on investment) of 4000%?
Email marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools we have. SEO for instance has on average a return of 2000% that’s only half of what email marketing can provide. Paid banners have an average return of 50%. Now the fun part is that email marketing is also the cheapest form of them all!
With email marketing, you have a direct way of online communication with your customers. You can make these emails feel very personal and that’s the main reason why the returns on email marketing are so high. The customer feels special because they will experience good email marketing as personal and caring.
With Sendinblue you can make your emails feel tremendously personal. You can add pictures and videos to your emails, and address your customer by their name. Furthermore, (and this is really brilliant) with the premium plan you can make use of Send At Best Time. With this function, you will ask the AI to search for the best time for each subscriber to receive an email. This will result in a higher email opening rate and thus in more profit!
Customer Loyalty
To create loyal customers you need to print your brand in the head of your consumer. One way of strengthening your customer loyalty is to send a weekly email. In this email, you should provide a lot of value without your customer having to pay for it. If they have to pay for it, it will only look like a promotion instead of genuine interest.
The ratio we use at Mark’d Agency is 1:3. For every 4 emails that we send we will make 3 with free value. For instance, we will keep our subscribers up-to-date with the latest trends in branding and digital marketing. Occasionally we hand out free e-books or handouts. We truly want to make a difference for our client, that's why we offer more value than other agencies would give. Now the 4th mail of the month is a promotional email. Sometimes it's a friendly reminder if they are ready to grow their business to the next level. But it can also be products or anything else that will create value and also revenue for the agency.
Source: Sendinblue
The Power of Free Value
When you provide a lot of free value, your customer will transform into a loyal fan. These loyal fans will talk about your product or services. With all the advertising possibilities that we have, mouth to mouth is still the most powerful one. How great would it be if you had an army of loyal fans gathering business for you?!
Creating and distributing great free value will build this army. It will take time but it's definitely worth it.
With Sendinblue you can easily send emails to your subscribers. Do you want to make it more personal? Through segmentation, you can split your subscribers into categories. Now you can create even more personalized emails by sending content that applies to them directly! For instance, if you own a pet store you could send emails to dog lovers and cat lovers. These will be different emails and therefore directly speak to your customer. Furthermore, you can create sequences to automate the welcoming process or other campaigns. You can be as creative as you want to be. The possibilities are endless.
Smart System To Prevent Getting Blacklisted
If you have bad eggs in your email list you will likely end up on a blacklist. This means the deliverability of your emails will decrease massively. Email deliverability is the key metric in how successful you are in delivering emails to your recipients. If your deliverability ratio is bad, you won’t be able to get through spam filters. Naturally, this will hurt your traffic, brand awareness, and revenue!
How does this happen? One way is if people place you into their spam folder. If you keep sending those people emails you will receive negative points that could lead to being blacklisted. An even more annoying one is the presence of email bots. They will fill in your signup forms but sending them emails will create a link between you and a known spammer. This will also decline your deliverability rating.
So what can you do against it? Remove anyone that impacts your deliverability score negatively. Sendinblue makes it easy to do this. It will flag your contacts with statuses. The blue status means the recipient is solid and good to have on your email list. If a contact is flagged red you have to worry. This means there is something wrong. Either they put you in the spam, don't open your emails, or are known spammers. With a simple click, you can easily exclude them from your mailing.
This will keep your deliverability score clean and you will be able to maximize your reach.
How To Boost Your Revenue
The majority of the Black Friday sales came from email marketing activities. Once more this underlines the massive ROI of email marketing.
We have already discussed the power of sending emails regularly. It will build brand loyalty and turn your customers into fans. However, you can also use email marketing to give your revenue a nice spike! How do we do this? By creating campaigns with follow up sequences that will firstly get your customer in the mood and finally activate them into buying.
One of your goals as an entrepreneur is to sell your goods or services. That's your main focus in sending an email, but this doesn't apply to your customer. They are often not ready to buy anything from you yet. So please don't send emails where you immediately ask them for money. Especially if you have high ticket items to sell. This will not work efficiently and most likely also piss off your customer.
How To sell The Right Way
If you want to sell successfully you should make use of PAS:
- Problem
- Agitate
- Solution
Create an email sequence following these 3 steps.
Problem: in this first email you will make your subscriber aware that they have a problem. Don’t be too forward by saying: YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. This can be intimidating. You could start by stating a shocking statistic. Did you know that brand colors count for 90% in the decision making of purchases? Oh wow, no I didn’t know that! I want to know more about this.
Agitate: they will only buy when it really hurts. Make the problem applicable to your customer. Put a little bit of salt into their wounds. The human brain is only willing to undertake action when it feels it has to do something to preserve itself. People react the strongest when they are afraid they will miss out on something and fall behind. Spend 1 or 2 emails on this part.
Solution: now it’s time to present your solution. In your final email, you will tell your subscriber how they can get rid of their pain (problem). Exactly, by buying your product or service. Make good use of the arguments of your previous emails.
Sendinblue has intelligent marketing automation that makes it easy to create these sequences. The competition also has these tools but they are often not working properly or are too expensive.
Source: Sendinblue
Easy To Use
When we select software as an agency it’s crucial that our clients can use it without having any tech skills whatsoever. You should never be dependent on a partner to perform simple tasks as editing your email campaigns, blogs, or website pages. Sendinblue was thinking about the same thing when they developed their software. It needs to be for every small business owner. It needs to work fast, easy, and get results. You have a business to run so time is of the essence.
The email design tool is a drag and drop editor. You don't need any coding or tech skills for this. You can easily grab the elements you want and drop them into your email. The entire customization is easy to use and you can create beautiful emails in a matter of minutes.
Marketing Automation Features – Create A Marketing Machine
The marketing automation features of Sendinblue are incredible and make my marketing heart beat a little bit faster. You can set up simple and effective campaigns to increase your revenue, but you can also go wild and make highly advanced campaigns. You could add features like SMS marketing, Chat, and integrate Facebook Ads plus retargeting.
Your business will start to perform tasks that you would normally have to do all by yourself. At first, you have to put in a little bit of work to set it all up, but afterward, you can watch the software do the work. This means you will have more time to spend on other tasks, projects, or go do something romantic with your beloved (don't worry, you don't have to if you don't want to…)
Source: Sendinblue
Your business will start to perform tasks that you would normally have to do all by yourself. At first, you have to put in a little bit of work to set it all up, but afterward, you can watch the software do the work. This means you will have more time to spend on other tasks, projects, or go do something romantic with your beloved (don't worry, you don't have to if you don't want to…)
The software works with a workflow that you can easily edit with a few clicks. It works fast and you have a clear overview of your total marketing automation. It really gives you a helicopter view of the situation. You can add elements any time you want. For instance, you can add transactional emails, segmentation, or put tasks in the CRM system.
The tools are designed to create the one thing that every small business owner really needs: more time.
This Could Have Been Better…
You know the good now let’s face the bad. There are mainly two factors that are a bit of a letdown. It isn’t anything major but foremost just annoying.
Template Diversity (?!)
The standard templates all look the same. They are not very refreshing or totally different. Now on the bright side, you can easily adjust and customize them to give them your own touch. However, sometimes it would be great to just pick a random template and not having to alter the design too much.
In the future, I hope to see more and better standard templates. It would make my life a lot easier and also be of more value to my clients. For now, I will just keep customizing it a bit harder which really isn't the end of the world. It's more a point of convenience.
Amount Of Integrations Is Limited But Growing
The amount of integrations is in comparison with the competition (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign) not very impressive. The company is founded in 2007 and therefore relatively young. It's by no means surprising that the number of partnerships is therefore limited. The good news is that Sendinblue is working hard to increase its partnerships and the integration list is growing rapidly. I expect that it's only a matter of time before they have the same amount of integration options as the competition.
Sendinblue Pricing vs Its Competition
Now that you have a good understanding of what you can do with Sendinblue, it’s time to look into the financial side. What will it cost you? We will compare their pricing with a couple of direct competitors.
Mailchimp Pricing
Mailchimp is often used as the to-go option when you are looking for a free email marketing provider. To be completely transparent, I am not the biggest fan of Mailchimp. I think the design looks old and just doesn't feel very fast and part of an innovative company. That means when I send an email with Mailchimp that my customer will probably think that my business is old and basic. Not really what I had in mind!
I see Mailchimp as a basic email marketing provider. It will do the task but don’t expect anything too sophisticated from it.
The pricing on the other hand is attractive. As we said before, you can start with a free plan that gives you an unlimited amount of emails you can send. However, the number of contacts that you can add is limited to 2000.
The premium plan is really not necessary for most companies and you are fine with the essentials or standard version. Essentials ($9.99/month) focus on email marketing while standard ($14.99) also includes a couple of ‘smart tools’. They are not the best in the industry so I wouldn’t spend money on those. From the three email service providers, Mailchimp is the most affordable. It could be a good fit when you are doing email marketing on a budget.
Source: Mailchimp
ConvertKit Pricing
ConvertKit is a great email marketing provider that focuses mainly on online creators whether those are content creators, musicians, marketing consultants, or others. It fits the best with businesses that want to sell online products. All the plans allow you to sell digital products and subscriptions. Furthermore, they also give you unlimited landing pages and forms to give your conversion rate a good boost.
For other businesses, ConvertKit doesn't fit completely. Yes, you can make it work but you will also pay for features that you simply do not use. For businesses with physical stores, you are better off with Sendinblue or even Mailchimp.
ConverKit has a free plan that you could try out. You can send an unlimited amount of emails but again you are limited in the number of subscribers you can add. ConvertKit has set this limit on 1000 and is thereby the least favorable free plan in our opinion.
With Creator, you can start making use of their automated funnels and sequence system. The Creator plan starts at $29/month but important to know is that number is a starting number.
For a full review on ConvertKit [click here].
Source: ConvertKit
Sendinblue Pricing
You already know the technical features so there is no need to discuss these as thoroughly as we did with the competitors. Instead, we will dive directly into the pricing and compare them with what we have seen with the others.
The pricing is fair and value for money. When you look at the competition you don’t have to struggle with a maximum amount of subscribers. You can add all your contacts (unlimited) without any costs. As you can see below you can start with Lite and send 10,000 emails. That’s plenty for most small business owners and you don’t need Premium unless you want to integrate Facebook Ads and advanced marketing automation. If your business has a great portion of its revenue coming from online then we suggest you take the Premium plan.
Sendinblue is more expensive compared to Mailchimp but you can also do more with the tools of Sendinblue. In comparison with ConvertKit, Sendinblue is more affordable and you pay less per mail sent.
The free plan is brilliant. You can add unlimited contacts and send 300 emails per day. This is great for when you just start. You could even choose to use 300 emails on your first 300 subscribers on a Monday and use another 300 on your other 300 subscribers on Tuesday.
Source: Sendinblue
Sendinblue Review: Final Verdict
Pros
Cons
ConClusion
We have discussed their vision, distinctive features, and pricing. The time has come to give the final verdict on Sendinblue. Is it worth your money? And will it help you get results?
Yes, Sendinblue is asking a fair price when you look at what they offer. A powerful and complete email marketing and automation toolset. If you have a small business then Sendinblue is worth to be considered. Their software is getting smarter and smarter giving its users a great competitive advantage.
The two things that we would like to see improved are the basic templates and more integration partners. The templates are just too basic and require more work from us. And the partner integration is too thin.
Lastly, the free plan is the best out there. If you are curious about Sendinblue then you could give it a try completely for free and experience it yourself. As always, do your own research!
If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment in the section below.
Stay safe.