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In May 2023, the decade-old company Sendinblue underwent a significant rebranding effort, culminating in a new platform name, Brevo—as in, “Bravo! You’re growing your business!” Brevo has expanded its email marketing services to offer a comprehensive marketing hub that includes enhanced automation and segmentation and additional customer relationship tools like a CRM and CDP.
Brevo is a quality email marketing solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It has all the essential features a company needs to engage with its customers in an easy-to-navigate platform. We especially love Brevo for its e-commerce capabilities; in our best email marketing software review, it was our top pick for transactional e-commerce emails.
Brevo isn’t without drawbacks. In my testing, I noticed a few cons, particularly slow load times and limited campaign templates. Many of Brevo’s features, including A/B testing, marketing automation, and advanced statistics, require credits or cost extra and are not available in lower-tiered plans.
Brevo Review
Product Name: Brevo
Product Description: Brevo is an email marketing software company founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge.
Summary
Formerly Sendinblue, Brevo email marketing is known for its easy-to-use services, particularly newsletters and transactional emails. Brevo has recently expanded its offerings to include custom CDP, AI assistance, and web and mobile push notifications.
Overall
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Ease Of Use
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Features
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Customer Service
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Overall Value
Pros
- Quality free plan
- Unlimited contacts for all plans
- Simple to use
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Focus on transactional emails
- Good variety of autmation and integrations
- SMS and WhatsApp marketing support
Cons
- Free/low-tier plans have Brevo branding
- No internal survey feature
- Email template selection is limited (40 templates)
- Many features cost extra
- Slow loading
- Issues with data importing
- Limited customer support
Consumer Reviews
This is the aggregate score of reader reviews we’ve received. Have a good or bad experience with Brevo? Feel free to leave your own review in the comments. Please note that only ratings with valid review content will be published and counted.
15 Key Features
- Free plan that includes unlimited contacts and 300 emails per day
- A/B Testing
- Image library
- Marketing automation
- Segmentation and personalization
- Transactional emails sent via SMTP RESTful API
- Built-in SMS (text) messaging for SMS marketing
- Send web and mobile push notifications via Brevo Push to engage with customers across devices
- Social media integration
- Brevo AI assistant enables micro-segmentation and dynamic personalization of email campaigns on a large scale
- Customer relationship management (CRM) technology to manage all interactions with subscribers
- Customer data platform (CDP) collates data to help marketers better understand and retain customers
- Reporting and analytics
- Private (Dedicated) IP Address available ($251/year)
- Email and phone customer support, depending on plan
Pricing
Brevo email marketing offers a free plan with unlimited subscribers and 300 emails per day. For additional features, users can choose between three other plans: Starter, Business, and Brevo+. Each plan includes unlimited contacts.
| Free Plan | Starter Plan | Business Plan | Brevo+ Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $0/month | $25/month | $65/month | Starting at $1,000/month |
| Email Sends | 300/day | 20,000/month | 20,000/month | Contact sales |
For testing Brevo, I decided to stick with the free plan. For small businesses, this is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of email marketing without any monetary investment.
Brevo Email Marketing Review
Setting Up Your Account
Setting up your Brevo account is super easy. To start, Brevo asks you to provide your name, company name, and website (optional). From there, you are taken to your Home page, where you can access all of Brevo’s features. Navigating the website is incredibly intuitive. Novices and experts alike will appreciate Brevo’s ease of use. It’s a very user-friendly platform with a clean user interface (UI) that’s easy to understand and navigate.
To add contacts, you have the option to add subscribers manually, import from a file (csv, xlsx, or txt file), copy-paste from a spreadsheet, or use one of Brevo’s integrations (Google Contacts, Outlook, Shopify, etc.). Once you’ve added your contacts, you can organize and manage them individually or as a group.
Some users report finicky data importing, so keep this in mind when considering Brevo.
Under the “Contacts” sub-navigation, you’ll notice that there’s also an option to create a subscription form, lists, segments for targeted interactions with subscribers, and landing pages. Landing pages are handy when you want to direct your subscribers to a campaign-related web page, but they cost extra.
Sending A Campaign
Brevo allows you to create an email campaign from scratch or use one of its templates. You also have the option to create an A/B test campaign to compare engagement; however, this is only available through an upgrade.
Selecting a template is pretty straightforward. While Brevo offers attractive templates, its template gallery is extremely limited, especially compared to competitors. Brevo offers around 40 templates and six plain layout options that you can customize based on your needs. Users also have the option to start from scratch and code their own email.
When creating campaigns, the drag-and-drop editor is simple and fast, allowing you to add various elements from the left-side menu. Clicking each element lets you further customize your selection. For example, after adding your text, you can change the font, color, and size, and add links.
Automation Tools
Brevo’s marketing automation is super easy to understand and set up. Its automation tool also features basic workflow templates you can edit and redesign to suit your needs.
Brevo’s robust automation tools allow you to capitalize on various client interactions. It’s truly Brevo’s standout tool for marketers.
Reporting & Analytics
Brevo’s real-time reporting and analytics are relatively basic for the free and lower-tired plans. You’ll need to invest in one of Brevo’s more expensive plans or use an integration like Google Analytics for additional tracking.
My Personal Experience With Brevo Email Marketing
Overall, Brevo is an easy-to-use email marketing platform offering a robust variety of tools and engagement features. That being said, I do have a few complaints about the service. First, I experienced prolonged load times when navigating the site. Second, I am disappointed that many of Brevo’s features require additional costs.
Customer Reviews
We scoured the web to find out how real users rate Brevo. We’ve found some reviews to give you an overall picture of Brevo from a customer’s perspective.
Praise
We need a simple but effective way to connect our database users with campaign lists without compromising our database. We love the way we can have different folders for each user and send specific campaigns or emails based on those properties.
We also like to track each user with notes, so if we have an [sic] special interaction, its [sic] interesting for us to take notes so we can give each user a more specialized attention.
– Verified User, TrustRadius 02/27/2024
Brevo Transactional Email is a powerful and affordable transactional email service that offers a variety of features and benefits. Here are some of the things I like best about it:
Affordability: Brevo’s pricing structure is based on the number of emails you send, rather than the size of your contact list. This makes it a great option for businesses of all sizes, especially those with large contact lists.
Ease of use: Brevo is very easy to use, even for beginners. The drag-and-drop email editor makes it easy to create professional-looking emails, and the automation features allow you to send personalized emails to your customers at the right time.
Features: Brevo offers a variety of features that are specifically designed for transactional emails, such as:
Dedicated IP addresses: Brevo offers dedicated IP addresses, which can help to improve your delivery rates and reputation.
Email templates: Brevo provides a variety of email templates that you can use to create your own transactional emails.
Automation: Brevo’s automation features allow you to send personalized emails to your customers based on their behavior, such as when they sign up for your account or make a purchase.
Overall, Brevo Transactional Email is a great option for businesses of all sizes that need to send high-volume transactional emails. It is affordable, easy to use, and offers a variety of features that are specifically designed for transactional emails.
In addition to the above, I also like that Brevo offers a free plan with generous limits, making it a good option for businesses that are just starting out. Brevo is also constantly adding new features and improvements, which shows that the company is committed to providing its customers with the best possible experience.
– Verified User In Computer Software, G2 11/04/2023
Complaints
We are a small community-based institution that has used Brevo for almost five years. Our account has been in good standing during that period, with a list of over 60k subscribers and over 100k emails sent in some months. We use a dedicated IP, which has a good reputation.
I arrived at work this morning to find access to our account suspended, and it [was] plastered with banners indicating, ‘Your account has been suspended for not following our Terms of use.’ (Innocent until proven guilty, anyone?) This suspension appears to be due to a single complaint from an email address added six months ago as part of a prize draw we ran.
I have provided evidence confirming this, including screengrabs of consent and opt-ins. I await their reply.
In the meantime, I couldn’t be more upset by their treatment of a loyal customer, and the trigger-happy way in which their compliance team handled this. Heads up: it’s poor customer service to accuse your customers of wrongdoing and suspend them without warning before asking for evidence or giving them the chance to respond.
Having previously been a happy customer, I am now sadly aware that Brevo cannot be relied on for business-critical functions, as there is evidently a risk they might suspend your account at any time. So I have begun searching for a more professional provider.
For some time, Brevo appears to have been focused on growing revenue by over-diversifying and trying to be all things to all people – CRM, Helpdesk, Advertising Platform, SMS, WhatsApp – while neglecting their core email marketing functionality.
Time for this professional email marketer to move on, I guess.
– Ben, Trustpilot 02/13/2024
After 8 months of testing Brevo and working with them to resolve issues that rose the first month, I can confidently say I do not recommend that you trust your business with Brevo. Here’s why:
- Incompetent Customer Support: I have counted at least 6 times where I had to copy and paste my reply from other tickets because there’s no follow through. In addition, their customer support team does not work North American time, so if you have an emergency, you’re on your own.
- They do not send the email to your entire list, no matter what you do. The emails are sent, at best, to 80% of your list. No matter how many ways you verify your contacts and them replying it’s satisfactory, they will continue to suspend your campaigns and cause disruptions to your email sends. This resulted in losses of thousands of dollars for us.
- Onto the last and most important point. The account suspensions are too often and too easy, especially when we made it a priority to be in compliance with all their recommendations. This resulted in us blocklisting 50% of our send list – mind you, these contacts where [sic] subscribers on our other platform. And to top that off, they still suspended us after their recommendations.
Absolutely unprofessional.
– Hazem, Trustpilot 02/01/2024
Brevo’s CRM Suite
As part of Brevo’s rebranding, the company rolled out a new CRM suite. Watch this short video to learn more about how to use Brevo’s CRM.
Brevo Alternatives
Choosing an email marketing service can be difficult because of the sheer number of companies available. But how do they compare to other top providers, such as Mailchimp and GetResponse? Check out our email marketing comparison to find out.
Think you might try Brevo or are you leaning towards another provider? Let us know in the comments!
Why Trust We Rock Your Web?
Since joining the We Rock Your Web team, Tara has covered topics ranging from email marketing to online legal services. She knows that small business owners today must familiarize themselves with online tools, and she’s dedicated to helping them learn how to do just that. Tara spent eight hours reviewing Brevo’s email marketing and CRM platform. This review included testing Brevo’s templates, automation tools, and real-time reporting and analytics.
Tagged With: Email Marketing, Reviews
