Sendinblue Annual Reviews

First off, Cleaned our clients subscriber lists (both free and paid) uploaded everything just fine without issue. next went to do our first send, which was a bit lower open rates than our traditional sends (typically are around 9-10%, came in at around 6%) shut down and flagged all my remaining contacts due to not hitting their open rate. I then removed individuals that weren't active in the last 14 days, and was able to get our send to go through just fine. I then had another email go out, that was suspended because the open rate was reduced down to 3%. my most recent campaign I decided to focus in on our paid subscribers and those who have engaged since we switched to sendinblue. this most recent send I used the optimize delivery time over 24 hours, which I've typically seen better open rates from using. surprisingly the single worst send yet at 1.8%. Support is extremely unhelpful and I can't even get simple questions answered from them. Don't waste your money.

I bought this to switch from a really complex workflow using Mailpoet, Mailerlite, and Sendfox. (Sendfox for prospects, Mailerlite for Newsletters, and Mailpoet for transactional emails on a WooCommerce site.)

I had really one objective. If a client purchased {x} from our WooCommerce Store, send {y} email, add them to a customers list, and remove them from a prospects list. I had it setup and working via a combination of apps and zaps, but this looked ideal to remove potential points of failure, and give me a high deliverability rate for transactional emails AND also be able to customize WooCommerce transactional emails without digging into the guts of WooCommerce's templates, which suck.

Pros:
- It (finally) worked after I paid for a javascript modification to the SendInBlue script. Their plugins don't do this natively, which I think is a huge missed opportunity.

- Having unlimited subscribers is a tremendous help so I don't have to bounce subscribers between systems to keep the costs manageable.

- Their log files are helpful for troubleshooting and hacking automations yourself

Cons:
- Their plugins don't work as they should. I would have gladly paid for a plugin that added full WooCommerce integration. The documentation doesn't match the UI.

- SUPPORT IS USELESS. Honestly, there's a lot of documentation, but it's complex and confusing. Via tickets that were answered with huge hourly gaps, mostly overnight, support asked repeatedly for the same screenshots. Different agents asked the same questions and suggested things already tried and documented earlier. They regurgitate links to documentation you've already told them you've read and didn't understand. After *19* interactions back and forth, I called their Seattle office, which was in an "all-hands" meeting for two days, despite their voice message saying they would be "done at 10am." They might still be in the meeting, who knows. Or someone forgot to take off the voice announcement that doesn't let you leave a message.

Facebook Messenger opened a new ticket instead of answering the question in the open tickets, which confused their staff who closed all the tickets, requiring a new start.

I finally called their London office and after explaining everything *again* to an amiable person I got an email back 3 hours later with a simple answer that worked, but I'd already paid someone from Fiverr to fix the script and build the templates, really not believing that I would ever get anything from their support in any way resembling an effective response.

It's three tacos for the potential and power once you've got it setup.

But buy it with eyes wide open that you'll need more than *anything* beyond the basics, which is a shame because the marketing automations are powerful - IF, and it's a big IF, you can get them hacked to work.

Certainly the biggest disappointment of the purchases we made on Appsumo.

We have been working on Getresponse for a long time and the opportunity to benefit from Sendinblue's tools at a reduced price seemed like a good idea. The reality is quite different.

First, we exported our contacts from Getresponse, we cleaned our lists to remove emails that could cause us hard bounces, and we sent our first campaigns with Sendinblue.
Each time we sent them, the account was blocked: Sendinblue decided that the click or open rate was not sufficient to continue using their services, whereas we never had any problems with Getresponse or Mailchimp. Again, the lists have been cleaned up...

Secondly, the emails don't reach our recipients and go into their spam folders, unlike with Getresponse. Our open rate has dropped dramatically since we tested Sendinblue.

Honestly, skip it: you'll waste a lot of time contacting their support and they'll ask you to justify every send.

On the other hand, the price is OK for automations, and we will use Sendinblue only to send automatic emails based on customer actions.

But if you are looking for a tool to send newsletters, forget Sendinblue.

I've been working with Sendinblue for a day now, and there's some things worth sharing here:

The Bad:
- Their WordPress plugin. If you're using a SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP, just don't do it. Sendinblue's plugin will try to divert all your mail through their SMTP server. You can toggle it, sure, but WP Mail SMTP will scream bloody murder about having both on there.
- Their other WordPress plugin (the one that integrates with WooCommerce). It broke my site and needed to be removed. Awesome. Not off to a great start, are we?

A lot of people like these plugins, and its pretty cool that you can override your normal WP template emails with templates you build in Sendinblue; I gotta give props for that. It's just not going to work for me. I'll integrate my contact list another way. Skip.

--

UI/UX: It's not great. I mean it's not bad, but it doesn't have the friendly polish that a Mailchimp user will be used to. Don't get me wrong, I didn't expect it to be eleventy billion times better than Mailchimp, or even equivalent, but it's worth noting that there WILL be some adjustment here if thats where you're coming from.

Crafting Emails: I mean it works fine? It's a bit clunkier than Mailchimp's more polished builder, and it's missing things like Mailchimp's much deeper integration with WooCommerce and ability to simply 'add product' when building an email.

Verdict: I think I'm going to pass / return it. I wanted to love it, in no small part because of the savings that I'll get for a year and the savings I'd get per month after the year's up (70-ish CAD vs 79 USD for Mailchimp)... It's just missing some of the features that I've grown accustomed to with Mailchimp. Also the fact that its plugins and my site don't love eachother was cause for concern.