All about
Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing automation platform with 12 apps all under one umbrella. They are:
- Landing Pages
- Inbox
- Chat
- CRM
- Web Push
- Email Campaigns
- SMS
- Conversations
- Automation
- Transactional Emails
- Facebook Ads
- Transactional SMS
Their drag and drop email builder has a template creating functionality, offering 20-30 workflow templates that make it super easy to set up things like abandoned cart and post-purchase email sequences. They also offer a cool feature that lets their algorithm send emails based on the best time they think each recipient will open them. They have over 60 integrations, including adding your product feeds directly to your email and SMS campaigns.
They find that most Shopify merchants move over their transactional emails and it appears that having them come through Sendinblue gives them better deliverability and flexibility than Shopify’s native transactional email interface.
Sendinblue is available in 7 languages and is GDPR compliant.
They have dozens of landing page templates with more being created all the time.
They have a sales CRM that works for your B2B and wholesale deal accounts. You can create tasks for your sales team to follow up with contacts/deals, etc. And you can take notes on deals, accounts/companies, and contacts.
Plus, their Facebook ads app allows you to create Facebook ads directly from within Sendinblue, syncing your contact list to the ad campaign with ease. (*Note: this is not yet generally available.)
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Sendinblue was originally created as a Small Business (SMB) email marketing and automation platform, which has now turned into this robust platform catering to hundreds of thousands of businesses with a multitude of different use cases, most notably their investment into eCommerce use cases (of course).
They’re a large player in the space and are acquiring companies and growing quickly, adding more and more features for eCommerce merchants every quarter.
Their most notable differentiation factor is the true “all in one” automation. And I cannot understate the value of having all of these tools cohesively working together towards the same goal: Getting your customers to buy (and buy more) from you.
Another interesting differentiation factor is that Sendinblue takes their transactional emails very seriously. Many merchants may use their eCommerce platforms native order receipt or shipping notification emails (for Shopify merchants, these exist deep in your settings pages and while its nice that Shopify takes care of them for you, Shopify doesn’t offer much flexibility or control over these emails). For that reason, many Sendinblue customers often switch over their transactional emails to Sendinblue, and you can see noticeable upticks in open and click through rates from these very crucial (and often very frequently opened) emails.
One minor differentiation factor is that you pay based on number of emails (or SMS, etc.) sent, not the number of contacts in the database.
Sendinblue is all about streamlining your marketing communications to be all under one roof. This will save your team time and free them up to do other tasks. And it should yield a stronger result from channels like email, SMS, Web Push, and Facebook ads, as your campaigns begin to interact more cohesively with your audience through their platform.
Typically the CEO, CMO, or head of marketing is going to be the one choosing the marketing automation platform. You may also want to have input from the entire marketing team, those in sales/B2B/wholesale, and even your website and tech team - anyone managing landing pages and forms.
And then, a bit unique to Sendinblue is that you may want to get your customer service team involved in the decision to move to Sendinblue, as they have some components of chat and conversations built in, and your customer service team may need to manage that or integrate it into their Business Process Optimizations (BPO).
Setup time for a tool like this, with so much opportunity for complexity, should be taken very seriously and fully invested in - don’t buy Sendinblue and expect to only spend an hour getting setup. Total setup time will vary depending on how many of the sub-apps you plan on utilizing. Email and SMS automations can take a few hours. Or maybe you need to import copy or templates from another automation platform, which can certainly take a few hours to a few days of time, depending on what you’ve got going on. And you can expect time needed to increase as you layer in Web Push, Ads, Conversations, etc.
The great thing about Sendinblue, especially for those starting from scratch, is that they have dozens of templates and automations that are basically “plug and play.” To get you quickly up and running with many of those key “best practice” campaigns such as abandoned cart, order receipt, post-purchase upsell, re-engagement campaigns, etc.
You should also expect a team member to check in on automations and campaigns on a monthly basis at the worst, more likely on a weekly basis - so at least 1 hour a week needs to be dedicated to this tool, more likely 3-5.
Sendinblue can work for merchants of all sizes, from starting stores to 1,000 retail outlet chains. They have customers from everywhere doing everything with their tool. They will be especially effective when you have a head of marketing or email marketer in the company full-time - so that you can really maximize the value you are getting out of your channels.
Since they work for basically anyone, the number one reason I wouldn’t go with them would be if you need specific integrations that they don’t yet have. But with 60+ integrations, they are likely to have everything you need.