Sendinblue Annual

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Member since: Jun 2011Deals bought: 184
3 stars
3 stars
Posted: Jul 9, 2021

Definite Potential, Steep Onboarding

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.

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