SendinBlue Review: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives

If you’re looking for a SendinBlue review that helps you decide whether this is the best email marketing software for you, you’re in the right place.

Most people won’t buy from you when they meet you for the first time–this is why sales trainers tell students, “a huge key is in the follow-up”. The most successful salespeople are great at following up: whether they sell online or offline. Email marketing is a tool that helps business owners to be more successful with their follow up because you can automate parts of the process, but which email service do you use? In this SendinBlue review, we’ll be looking at a fairly new trailblazer in the email marketing software industry,

We’ll be analyzing:

• The Background on SendinBlue
• Pros and cons
• Features of the software
• What others are Saying
• and my Opinion

The goal is to help you decide whether SendinBlue is a good email marketing service for you.

SendinBlue Review – A Little Background

SendinBlue started as a digital agency in 2012. Since, they’ve transitioned to becoming a communication SaaS company that builds software to help with business to consumer communication. The founders are Armand Thiberge and Kapil Sharma, and since startup, they’ve had notable accomplishments including:

• Growth to 250 employees
• 50,000+ customers
• 30 Million emails and SMS sent daily
• Offices in the US, France, and India
• and Customer support in 6 languages

It’s unclear how large they want to grow, but they’ve made major moves over the last 7 years.

SendinBlue Review – User Experience

User experience is a major component when deciding which email marketing service to use. The last thing you want is a software that has all the “bells and whistles”, but makes you feel intimidated, low confidence, and overall dread using it. It’s important that even if the email service isn’t the most “savvy” and full of features that it “makes sense” to you and makes you excited to send out emails to prospective customers.

The SendinBlue user dashboard is fairly simple. It doesn’t have a lot of prompts, so the simplicity may be helpful for you. There are tutorial videos in many places to help you with setting up automation or other components of your marketing campaigns.

SendinBlue Review – Optins and Landing Pages

Landing pages are a key component to converting prospects: from interested onlooker to paying customer. They help to build trust, to demonstrate the value of your product or service, and to give enough details to help them make the buying decision.

Some email services include landing page builders in their plans and others don’t. If they don’t, landing page software can cost upwards of $30/mo by itself (unless you use an amazing WordPress pagebuilder like Elementor). Luckily, landing pages are included in the SendinBlue premium plans.

They have a few landing page templates and a landing page builder, so you can build your own from scratch.

SendinBlue Review – Sales Funnels and Automation

One of the main reason for paying for email software is to help strengthen your sales funnel. It can help you to take potential customers from the awareness phase of the buyers’ funnel to the advocacy phase when your campaigns go well, and with good software, you can automate the process!

Email Sequences and Automation

With email sequences, you can write a series of emails that can be sent out sequentially when a subscriber takes an action. For example, when they sign up for your email list, you can automate a series of emails that will go out–this function is fairly mainstream. Most email marketing services will provide the ability to automate email sequences.

Trigger Workflows

A more advanced feature SendinBlue offers is the trigger workflows. With trigger workflows, you can send out tailored emails based on actions like:

• A visit to a specific page on your website
• A click on a link in your email
• An anniversary or birthdate
• Abandoning a shopping cart
• or other…

This means, you can send out follow-up emails that can help prompt the potential customer to buy or buy again–this can be very powerful. For example, let’s say a person clicks from your email to a sales page, but they don’t buy. You can use SendinBlue to send a follow-up sequence that helps you understand their objective, and addresses that objective. You can greatly improve your sales conversion rates with the trigger workflows.

Workflow Templates

Rather than creating all of the workflow ideas yourself, SendinBlue has templates to help you set up automations that can improve the conversions in your sales processes.

Facebook Retargeting Ads

If you have a premium plan, you can also sync your list or create look-alike audiences for Facebook ad campaigns from within SendinBlue. I haven’t personally used this feature, but it’s very cool.

SendinBlue Review – Integrations

It helps to choose an email service that will integrate with the other software tools you use–this way, you can have the most efficient backend setup. Unfortunately, SendinBlue doesn’t have a lot of integrations at this time, but they say they’ll be working on this more going forward.

SendinBlue Review – Do They Have a Mobile App?

If you’re looking to manage your email marketing campaigns on-the-go, it might help to have a mobile app. Unfortunately, SendinBlue doesn’t offer a mobile app at this time, however, their website is responsive, so you can do some activities from their website.

SendinBlue Review – RSS-to-Email

Another feature I love about email marketing services is the ability to send the most recent content published on my blog to my email subscribers. It helps to send ongoing value to your email list and it helps to update them about what’s new on the blog. RSS-to-Email isn’t a built-in feature in SendinBlue, however, you can set up a Zapier integration that will update your list when there’s something new on your RSS feed.

SendinBlue Review – What Others are Saying – Good and Bad

For SendinBlue to be 7 years old, there are quite a few people talking about it all over the world, and you probably should know the good and bad things they’re saying before you buy.

Common Positive SendinBlue Reviews

I read from 3rd party review sites like EmailToolTester, PCMag, and VentureHarbour. I also read thru reviews at sites like G2Crowd, Capterra, and Trustpilot, so I could compile for you a general consensus of what others were saying. The positive reviews I saw most commonly were:

• Extremely competitive pricing
• It’s nice how you can send SMS messages–that’s rare for email services
• It’s nice if you need to send one-to-one emails list password resets, sign-ups, and purchase confirmations
• They have high deliverability ratings
• They have a great free plan
• Better and cheaper than Mailchimp

Common Negative SendinBlue Reviews

I also read reviews of people who had bad experiences or a low rating of SendinBlue to see what the limitations are. Out of 513 reviews on Trustpilot, 18% were between average to poor ratings, and 14% were poor–this isn’t a great result. Here are some things that were repeatedly stated by people who had bad reviews.

• My account was closed
• No spam testing feature
• The customer service has a slow response time
• Campaigns interrupted abruptly without warnings
• Lots of rules about spam

Most Helpful Positive SendinBlue Review

There are two key things that have kept us using SendinBlue for the past three years: transactional emails and deliverability. Of all the email marketing platforms we’ve used, SendinBlue is noticeably ahead of the competition with these two feature sets and you definitely want these in your email marketing strategy.

So why don’t we use SendinBlue as our only email platform?

Well, a key reason is that SendinBlue didn’t have the automation features we needed when we first looked at it. We also wanted more on the CRM side of things and this is where ActiveCampaign really proves its worth as an enterprise email, CRM and marketing automation suite.

Aaron Brooks, VentureHarbour.com

Most Helpful Negative SendinBlue Review

A G2Crowd reviewer named Will E. summarized a complaint I’d seen quite a few times when reading users’ feedback. When asked, “What do you dislike?”, he said:

SendinBlue Pricing

SendinBlue is most loved for their pricing model. Rather than pricing based on list size, they charge based on the amount of emails you send–this can lead to significantly lower prices for some people.

Side note: Landing pages, live chat, and Facebook ads are included in the $25/mo or higher plans

Does SendinBlue Double Count Subscribers?

Since they don’t charge based on subscribers, you can have an unlimited amount of subscribers and still pay fairly low prices for the service. With other services, you pay more as your list grows, and some services will count one subscriber numerous times because they are on several of your lists. You don’t have to worry about that with SendinBlue.

SendinBlue Review Chart

SendinBlue Review at-a-Glance

SendinBlue Closing Comments

Overall, SendinBlue is an awesome tool for those who need:

• Support from one of their 6 customer support languages
• transactional emails
• SMS messages
• Trigger-based automation
• and, who can navigate their spam rules

It’s still a fairly new company, so you can get on board to hopefully see lots of ongoing growth and new features when you check out SendinBlue.