With more than 300,000 users and 10 years of experience in the industry, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is an email marketing service worth trusting. You get access to an unlimited amount of contacts on any plan, and you can pair its email capability with SMS marketing and a completely built-in CRM to transform your email marketing strategy tenfold.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Compared to the Best Email Marketing Services
Brevo is an excellent email marketing platform, but hardly alone in the category. After reviewing dozens of options for our list of the top email marketing services, we found a few Golden Eggs that stack up well against Brevo.
Constant Contact lets you manage your email lists and navigate all of its features with ease. Start using it today for as little as $12 per month.
MailerLite is beginner-friendly, but also features powerful automations and robust reporting. Try MailerLite’s premium features on a 30-day free trial.
Omnisend offers a solution for ecommerce websites and lets you embed products into your emails. You can get started with Omnisend for free today.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): The Good and the Bad
Just like for all email marketing services, there are virtues and flaws of Brevo to consider. We’ve presented the highlights below, to make it easy for you to scan and spot benefits and drawbacks that can affect your purchasing decision.
What Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Is Good At
Brevo is a full-feature platform that goes well beyond just the email marketing it’s known for. Alongside a robust email builder and campaign manager, you’re also getting tools for managing your customers, social media properties, ecommerce channels, and more.
Unlimited contacts: First and foremost, this is how Brevo establishes its value. This platform offers unlimited contacts and email lists on any plan you choose. And Brevo’s contact segmentation improves your emails by targeting smaller groups of subscribers and engaging them with relevant content, filtering contacts by declared interests, previous engagement, purchase history, and many other options.
SMS marketing: You’re not just limited to email, either. Connect with your customers directly through Brevo’s SMS marketing to promote time-sensitive events or offers, send shoppable messages, and more. You can also personalize your messages using the segmentation information you have, such as recipients’ names or company.
Built-in CRM: If you’re marketing without a CRM, you’re creating more work for yourself. Fortunately, Brevo’s built-in CRM is an easy fix that helps you organize and track customer info and interactions. No installation is required; it’s ready to go on your Brevo account from the get-go. All you have to do is upload your contact information and you can start managing within minutes.
Brevo’s CRM also lets you organize contacts into different categories based on characteristics, source of acquisition, and steps in the conversion funnel. This can add more potency to your list segmentation. And, you can even create tasks within the CRM so your team never misses an opportunity or deadline.
Shared inbox: Your team can manage all your customer emails in one centralized place without interfering with one another. Brevo lets you coordinate emails effectively, assign conversations to team members, and mark conversations as resolved, so no one gets left out of the loop. You can connect your Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook email accounts to this shared inbox with just a few clicks.
Instead of wasting time trying to find hidden messages in hundreds of email threads, Brevo’s inbox has filters and a search function to help you find the conversations you need to prioritize. View complete conversation histories and assess the interest of each lead by tracking the open and click rates of every email you send, all from within this inbox.
Facebook ad tools: If you are looking for a solution to reaching a larger audience, Brevo has a comprehensive tool for Facebook advertisements. You don’t need to leave your Brevo dashboard to create the perfect Facebook ad. Upload your image, enter your text, and select a CTA corresponding to your goal. After you have defined your budget and ad duration, Brevo will do the rest for you.
Solid deliverability: Brevo can tailor your emails to match your sending needs perfectly. Brevo supports options for setup that include STMP relay, email API, webhook, and plugin—which makes it easy for you to send bulk emails and have more control over your batch sends. And the provider itself guarantees 97% deliverability under normal circumstances.
Marketing automation: Brevo offers special marketing automation software that integrates into its platform, which is free for up to 2,000 contacts. This can save you time by running campaigns on autopilot, updating contact information in real time, and automatically managing lists based on behavior.
To improve your conversion rates, Brevo’s marketing automation software can build workflows that guide customers to sales, follow up with online shoppers, and know when a customer is prime to convert. Brevo has both beginner and advanced workflow automations, including automatically sending welcome emails or creating an individualized experience for every customer with lead scoring.
Customizable landing pages: Building custom landing pages has never been easier than it is with Brevo’s intuitive builder. You can create the perfect landing page using templates and a drag-and-drop interface, or start from scratch and use its HTML editor. Create a more streamlined experience for your customers with a follow-up landing page with detailed questions, or confirm submissions with a thank you page.
What Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Is Lacking
While Brevo sports several outstanding features, there are still drawbacks that some users have experienced and noted in their public reviews. Judge these against Brevo’s virtues and your own needs to assess whether any of these are deal-breakers.
Basic reporting features: Unfortunately, Brevo’s affordable plans deliver only a very basic real-time reporting tool. Brevo has more advanced reporting tools, including geographic and device reporting, heat maps, and advanced open and click rates, but you will have to pay a hefty $65 per month to access them. While it’s great that Brevo offers this depth of reporting at all, other email marketing services have the same—and sometimes even better—tools on lower-priced plans.
Poor customer support: Brevo doesn’t currently offer live chat support and, similar to its reporting features, you only get priority phone support if you pay $65 per month. Many users have expressed their distaste for Brevo’s customer service, stating that it’s slow or unhelpful, with one mentioning that it took two weeks to hear back from customer support via email, which resulted in campaign delays.
Strict sender standards: One of the most important reasons to use an email marketing platform is to avoid your contacts’ spam folder or, worse, getting your email account flagged as a spammer. But, even on a platform like Brevo, you have to be mindful of negative results. If you’re not, those bounces and spam reports reflect on their platform and you may experience limited sending capability. Some users have noted that Brevo even closed their accounts because their campaigns had exceeded a certain amount of hard bounce and complaint rates.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Options and Pricing
Brevo is best known for its email marketing platform, but it offers a full suite of tools and services that can be used in combination with its primary product.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Marketing Platform
This is the bread-and-butter, and the Brevo product we’ve focused on in the strengths and weaknesses enumerated above.
As we mentioned, Brevo’s plans here can be quite affordable. And you’re going to get great value because every plan (even the free one) allows for unlimited contacts, at least 300 sends per day, customizable templates, transactional emails and SMS and WhatsApp-based campaigns.
Pricing comes in four main flavors:
- Free forever for up to 300 daily email sends
- Starter: $25 per month for 20,000 monthly emails with no daily limit
- Business: $65 per month for marketing automation, deeper reporting, and phone support
- Brevo+: custom pricing
Start from any of the first three plan options (Free, Starter, or Business), then tweak the number of monthly sends you need, add more credits for email, SMS, or WhatsApp campaigns, or add a dedicated IP for $251 per year to ensure better deliverability.
Brevo+ Platform
The customized Brevo+ plan is an extremely robust version of the Brevo platform for large businesses that need to scale their marketing efforts and accelerate their growth.
On this, you’ll unlock top-notch deliverability and security measures, including GDPR compliance and advanced email API for secure transactions. Brevo also lets you monitor and manage the entire customer lifecycle for increased retention and loyalty. You can create promotional offers, automated scenarios, multi-channel campaigns, and even retarget your customers with ads on Facebook, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
You can contact sales today for a free custom quote.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Transactional Emails
Shoppable emails are how online stores and companies with an ecommerce arm really boost the ROI on their email campaigns. Brevo offers transactional emails standard on any plan, which is a huge point in their favor.
Use Brevo’s dynamic templates and drag-and-drop builder to build a beautiful message with shoppable elements, such as embedding products that a recipient can click to purchase. You’ll also get detailed tracking and analysis of what your recipients view and click on in these emails.
While this feature comes standard, some Brevo plans limit the monthly number of transactional emails you can send. You can purchase additional email credits in quantities of 5,000 to send more, or pay for a separate monthly bill if you need to send 20,000 or more per month. The latter options starts at $15 per month for 20,000 monthly emails and scales up to $550 per month for 1 million.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) Live Chat
For customer support and sales, live chat is a fantastic tool to have in your arsenal. Brevo offers this, which can either be added to your marketing platform plan or purchased separately.
And, it’s easy to implement without knowing any code. Simply set up the look and feel of your chat widget and install it on your site, all of which takes just a few minutes.
With your live chat widget, customers, prospects, and visitors of all kinds can reach out to a representative of your company directly from your website. Inquiries and requests funnel right into your Brevo chat inbox and your team members can even see which area of your website they’re on when they initiate the chat.
And, of course, this syncs seamlessly with the overall Brevo marketing platform, allowing you to have up-to-date information if a contact reaches out to you via live chat.
You can get Brevo’s live chat tool for free for one user, though the paid version unlocks a lot more, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp chat, detailed visitor information, and more. That paid package will run you $15 per user per month.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) CRM Platform
We mentioned it as one of the platform’s strengths already, but it’s worth repeating that Brevo’s built-in CRM is a handy feature. Collect and organize the information you’ve gathered about customers, leads, and prospects, add notes and files to individual records, set custom attributes that will help with segmentation, and much more.
If you need a lightweight but functional CRM to pair with your marketing platform, this gets the job done well. Customize the CRM to fit your pipeline and funnel, track deals, visualize each leads’ progression towards a sale, and see a timeline of all activity for any contact.
Best of all, there’s never any need to pay for Brevo’s Sales CRM. It’s completely free, just add it to your Brevo account after you’ve picked your marketing platform plan.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) in Summary
Overall, Brevo is a solid email marketing service that is kind to beginners. But there are serious benefits you can take advantage of, too, such as their effective transactional emails and even the corresponding CRM they offer.
That being said, they may not be the best fit for your organization’s needs. Constant Contact and MailerLite are similar platforms—it’s worth comparing their plans to Brevo’s in order to make sure you’re getting the best feature set for the price you’re comfortable paying. On the other hand, Omnisend’s ecommerce-minded features may deliver more value to you than Brevo’s transactional emails can offer on their own.
Want to fully examine your options? Check out our full post, where we reviewed dozens of options and narrowed it down to the top six picks in the category of email marketing services.
