Marketing is the key to success of any business and email marketing is the backbone of online marketing. If used properly, email marketing campaigns can be used to build brand loyalty and relationships with prospects and convert them into customers. There are many players that offer email marketing solutions, but most of them are quite expensive or offer limited services.In this article, we will discuss the SendinBlue WordPress plugin that serves as an all-in-one email marketing plugin.

SendinBlue WordPress Plugin

SendinBlue was started in 2011 with an aim to offer a reliable and simple email marketing solution for everyone. SendinBlue is a powerful WordPress plugin that will take care of your complete email marketing for your business, including subscription forms, contact lists, marketing campaigns, transactional emails and SMS messages at a very reasonable price. The plugin is fairly simple and easy to use and they don’t need your credit card information at the time of signup. The best part is, you don’t need any special skills to create beautiful and engaging email campaigns. They have a huge database of resources and tutorials that makes it a breeze to go about the process.

Let’s discuss some of the key features and services that the plugin has to offer

Custom Subscription Forms: The plugin allows you to create multiple custom subscription forms and integrate them into your site in a couple of clicks. SendinBlue WordPress plugin gives you complete control over the subscription form, you can customize form’s header, description and fields as well as the design elements such as background, font size and color. You can also style subscription forms to give a unique look with custom CSS. You can preview them directly from the plugin and make changes with ease. You can easily integrate them anywhere into your site, including posts, pages or sidebar.

Contact Management: The plugin allows you to manage your contact list, import contact from the CSV, XLS, XLSX and TXT files. You can also take advantage of the advanced search and segmentation to design a targeted campaign. You can group your contacts as well as create dynamic lists based on certain criteria.

Marketing Campaigns: SendinBlue allows you to design beautiful campaigns with ease. It comes with drag and drop designer, a library of creative email design templates that you can use to create unique and compelling newsletters that inspire action from the subscribers. SendinBlue allows you to create mobile-friendly emails that look great on all screens. You can include your contact details and preferences in your campaigns for increased engagement. The plugin also allows you to schedule campaigns in advance.

Test Campaigns: This feature gives you to power to have full control of your campaign, test and see real-time results. You can test and optimize campaigns before sending it to your subscribers. You can also create a test email list and send your campaigns and see how it looks, once you’re confident you can send your newsletter to an actual list.

Campaign Reports: You can watch live, real-time results of your campaigns on your dashboard. You can export in-depth campaign reports in CSV or PDF formats for further analysis.

Advanced Statistics: The plugin also gives you further insights such as an openers & clickers world map that allows you to see the locations where your newsletters have the best engagement. The plugin also gives other useful data such as links, buttons, images that drives most engagement, and email platforms that your recipients are using. All the information will help you to optimize your campaign to suit your audiences for better results.

Marketing Automation: This feature allows you to seamlessly integrate SendinBlue automation into your WordPress website. The plugin will automatically install the required tracking script, enabling users to quick start their marketing automation strategy. This will allow website owners to use SendinBlue to build automated workflows that send targeted emails and SMSs to customers based on their actions and preferences such as email opens, website visits, product purchases and more. Your SendinBlue account also comes with an automation workflow designer that enables you to create multi-channel campaigns in a matter of minutes.

Transactional Emails: The feature ensures automatic replacement of default SMTP when you use the wp_mail () function. SendinBlue allows you to send transactional emails for order confirmation, shipping details, app alerts and much more. The plugin also offers real-time and exhaustive analytics on your message deliverability and engagement metrics. You can also create transactional email templates that are simple & effortless to reuse via the API.

Multi-Lingual: SendinBlue supports six languages, including French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.

Tutorials: SendinBlue comes with extensive tutorial documentation with tutorials on every topic that allows you to understand the plugin and use it effectively in a very short period of time.

Beyond the WordPress plugin interface, your SendinBlue account offers even more robust functionality

E-Commerce: SendinBlue also offers a WooCommerce add-on that allows you to create email templates for your WooCommerce orders. You can also record transactions using the transactional contact fields such as the completion of a transaction on your website. The information regarding the transaction will appear on your SendinBlue contact dashboards with details such as order ID, order number, amount, date of order and more.

White-Label: SendinBlue offers a white label program with its best features, you can also offer an email marketing solution to your clients.

Dedicated IP: The plugin allows you to have full control over sending reputation and you can use dedicated IP address to your newsletters and SMTP emails. There are many advantages of using a dedicated IP address, your email will have no mention of SendinBlue. You send send email with the domain name that you associate in SendinBlue. You can also use their tools to monitor your dedicated IP’s reputation.

Google Analytics Integration: This feature enables you to integrate Google Analytics with your SendinBlue account to closely monitor traffic website traffic and analyze your campaign performance.

API Integration: SendinBlue comes with an extremely comprehensive API, with all the features available in the web interface can be accessible through the API. The API is available in a variety of programming languages including PHP, Node JS, Python, Ruby and C#.

Plugin Integration: The feature allows to integrate popular CMS as well as eCommerce platforms with SendinBlue.

Zapier Integration: You can use Zapier to integrate various apps with SendinBlue with ease and integrate contacts into your account, the list includes Facebook, EventBrite, Google Contacts, Gravity Forms, Intercom, Stripe, PayPal, Pipedrive, Typeform and many more.

Is SendinBlue better than MailChimp?

I have used Mailchimp over the years and it is the obvious choice for millions mainly because it offers an intuitive user interface combined with smooth functionality, pretty much everything you need to launch a brilliant marketing campaign. But, do we really have any alternative, at par with the features and reliability that mailchimp has to offer.

SendinBlue wordpress plugin, although new on the block seems to be an alternative solution with sharp prices and great features in terms of usability and functionality. If we look at the prices closely, SendinBlue is much cheaper than Mailchimp. For the free email marketing plan, SendinBlue lets you have unlimited subscribers, however Mailchimp allows only 2000 subscribers in the free plan. While Mailchimp only offers email marketing and marketing automation, SendinBlue allows you to send transactional emails, transactional SMS as well as SMS marketing to your subscribers. To me this seems like a great alternative to Mailchimp and the best part is you pay only for what you send.

Price

While the plugin is free to download, SendinBlue comes with multiple pricing options for all types of needs. They have a free for life option but that has some drawbacks. It comes with a daily marketing sending limit of 300 emails, and the emails will have a SendinBlue branding logo which some of you might not want to see in your business promotional emails. Also, the free plan doesn’t come with heat map reporting, geography or device reporting or statistics based on clicks, opens and more.

SendinBlue has monthly plans as well as ‘Pay as you go plan’. We’ll discuss about these plans in detail.

Monthly Plan
SendinBlue comes with various monthly email marketing plans such as micro, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond and atomic. The micro plan starts at $7. 37/mo with a limit of 40,000 emails per month, however this plan comes with SendinBlue branding in the email footer. The micro, bronze ($39/mo) and silver ($66/mo) plans do not come with a dedicated IP, it is available in gold, platinum, diamond and atomic. The atomic plan allows you to send 15million emails per month at a monthly price of $1946.

Pay as you go
The pay as you go plan starts from $27 for 5000 email credits and goes upto $1,330 for one million email credits. These plans are for perfect for those businesses that do not need to send emails very often or do not have a huge list. What I liked about the plan is that there is no expiry date for the credits so you can use them at your own pace. For every email sent, one credit is deducted and you can easily buy more credits or shift to a monthly plan based on your need. I feel this is one feature that sets SendinBlue apart from its competitors.

Wrapping Up

With powerful features and functionality, stylish elements, numerous price plans, ease of use, no hidden charges, regular updates, SendinBlue looks quite promising. If you’re looking for an alternative solution for your email marketing, this is a great option to make the switch. SendinBlue is definitely quite impressive and highly recommended.

Let us know your thoughts if you’re using SendinBlue WordPress plugin for your website. Also, don’t forget to share your feedback and suggestions in the comment section below.