Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a robust email marketing solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It offers all the essential features that a business needs to connect and engage with its customers, including excellent automation, professional email templates, and built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Brevo has a few minor drawbacks worth noting, such as occasionally slow loading and finicky data importing, but its strong overall feature set and attractive pricing make it an Editors' Choice winner for email marketing, alongside Campaigner, HubSpot Marketing, and Mailchimp.
(Editors' Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)
(Credit: Brevo)Brevo's Pricing and Plans
You can sign up for Brevo with either an email address or a Google or Apple account. After a quick account verification, you're asked to provide details about yourself and business, such as your name, the company's name, business address, and website. Brevo also asks for the size of your team, the number of company contacts your business has (to help guide you toward an appropriate plan), and whether or not you sell online.
Once you finish entering the requested information, Brevo asks you to select a plan. There are four plans to choose from, each of which caters to specific business needs. Email volume is the most important metric here, as all Brevo plans support unlimited contacts.
The Free plan is ideal for businesses that wish to explore Brevo's features without investing in it straight away. This tier limits you to 300 emails per day, and gives you email templates, the drag-and-drop editor, and transactional emails. It also lets you create SMS and WhatsApp campaigns. There's no cap on the number of contacts, either.
Although 300 emails per day is fine for experimenting, you won't get very far with a free account if you have a substantial contacts list. The next tier up is Starter. Starting at $25 per month, you get everything in the Free plan, but without the daily sending limit. You are given basic analytics and reporting, email support, and 20,000 emails per month. You can boost the email volume with a convenient slider, but naturally, this also increases the monthly rate. Free and Starter plans use Brevo branding in campaigns. If you want this removed, it costs an additional $12 per month.
The $65-per-month Business plan is the next tier up, and it's designed for e-commerce professionals and marketing managers. It starts at 20,000 emails per month and comes with all the features included in Starter. However, it adds A/B testing, marketing automation, and advanced statistics. If your business has even higher demands, Brevo Plus is the top-tier and most tailorable solution. Brevo Plus provides enterprise-level security, advanced integrations, sub-account management, personalized support, and flexible contract options, but you must contact the sales department to craft a precise plan for your business.
(Credit: Brevo)Brevo's pricing is appealing in two ways. First, it's easy to understand because it's restricted to just one structure, namely monthly email sends. Competitors like HubSpot Marketing and Zoho Campaigns often have multiple structures based not just on email volume, but also contact volume (and sometimes a combination of the two). That can be a headache when you're trying to project what a service will actually cost. In addition, Brevo simply costs less than many competitors. For example, Campaigner starts its pricing at $59 per month for 5,000 contacts. When you compare that with the expected email volume for that number of subscribers, Brevo comes out ahead, especially considering all the new marketing muscle it offers.
That said, Brevo does have a few additional costs that are not obvious at a glance. The platform lets you create SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, but these are additional charges that use a credit system. You must buy credits to send these mobile campaigns, which are sold in roughly 100-message bundles. Pricing varies by region, but in the United States, for example, a 100-message add-on costs $1.09. A 100 WhatsApp message add-on costs $3.16. This is relatively inexpensive, but that cost can climb quickly depending on the number of mobile campaigns you intend to send.
Landing pages are extremely useful when you want to direct your clients to a campaign-related web page, but they're additional costs. Free and Starter plans get none, while the Business plan only offers one. If you wish to create more than one, be that for multiple products or clients, it costs $24 per month for five additional pages.
(Credit: Brevo)Navigating Brevo
Brevo is a wonderfully user-friendly platform with a clean user interface (UI) that's easy to understand. In addition to the prominent welcome message whenever you log into your account, Brevo offers a handy list of suggested tasks for you to complete to optimize your reach. If you have a more pertinent task to handle, all the vital work-related tabs, including campaigns, automation, and contacts, can be found on the left side of the screen.
We like that Brevo is liberal with its suggestions, making it extremely easy for beginners to get started. Pop-up messages and windows are packed with help whenever you initiate a task, be that a campaign, segmentation, or automation, highlighting some of the more common tasks within the category. For example, when creating a new segment, Brevo suggests pre-defined segments, such as ones for engaged email subscribers, inactive email subscribers, contacts from a specific country code, or contacts with a pending task. It's quite handy, and we appreciate the helpful suggestions, even though a seasoned professional might find the tips and onboarding a bit excessive.
The only real criticism here is the sluggish loading at times. Brevo is responsive overall, but swapping to new tasks or different pages feels oddly sluggish. This did not lead to major issues during testing, but it did make using the tools feel a little clunky on occasion.
(Credit: Brevo)Managing Contacts and Campaigns With Brevo
The first thing you want to do after creating an account is upload your contacts. We modified an Excel sheet with our test emails for this purpose, to match the fields Brevo suggested. During our initial contact upload, some information was not correctly transferred. You can opt to not upload unmatched fields, or create a new attribute and field type in the Settings section of the Contacts tab. For instance, you could add a date field for birthdays and a text field for gender. The issue was relatively minor, and Brevo highlights inconsistencies before saving your data, so you can make the appropriate changes. The process wasn't quite as straightforward as Campaigner, which provides you with a sample Excel sheet to edit and upload, but the inconvenience was relatively minor overall.
Once your clients are saved, you can return to Contacts to segment them into whatever categories you need for your campaign tasks. Brevo's dedicated Segments section makes it easy to create as many as you need based on your own criteria or one of Brevo's predefined segments. You don't necessarily need to do this to start campaigning, but it is an invaluable tool when you cater campaigns to specific clientele in the future.
Creating a campaign is also a cinch. Choose email, Facebook Ads, SMS, Web Push, or WhatsApp if you integrate with it. You can also create custom automations. With email, you can either create a regular campaign or choose an A/B test to send different versions of a campaign to two different test groups. Either way, you select the campaign name, subject line, and sender email. You can even use AI to let Brevo cook up a subject line for you, but the results were fairly bland and robotic in our testing. Once done, you can jump into the design module to create the face for your campaign.
Brevo offers more than 40 handsome templates, but it also gives you six clean layouts that you can customize to your liking. The drag-and-drop editor lets you move and adjust elements with ease. You can manually add code if you are comfortable with HTML or Rich Text Editor (or have someone on staff who is). Once you finalize the look of the email, you can preview it in your browser and then schedule it as needed.
(Credit: Brevo)Automation and Integrations With Brevo
Brevo's marketing automation features are also surprisingly easy to understand and use. The tool features basic workflow templates that you can further edit and redesign for the tasks you need. Examples include welcome messages, birthday messages, activity-based templates, and notifications triggered by abandoned carts, page visits, website visits, or product purchases. Most of these workflows are automated in their own right, with pop-up messages that ask for information such as targeted contacts, a time frame, and an email template. These are a great starting point for commerce-focused and drip campaigns.
If you need something more specialized, you can start a custom workflow with the following types: a basic contact file, a contact who has completed an email or website activity, a contact who has submitted data, or a contact who was tagged while visiting your website. Once you've determined which contact to add to your workflow, you'll base your sequence on a series of if/then conditions to determine what to send in your follow-up communication. There is no limit to the number of interactions you can create, but your account is still restricted by the volume of emails you pay for per month.
These robust automation features are also what enhance Brevo's CRM integrations. The convenient subscription tracking, analytics tools, and seamless contact management give you all the tools you could want to capitalize on the opportunities your campaigns create. Overall, Brevo's automation features stand out because they are fairly robust, given the platform's relatively low price point. Admittedly, Brevo aims its solutions squarely at SMBs. For email marketing and automation tools that cater to enterprise-sized businesses, consider HubSpot Marketing or Salesforce Pardot.
(Credit: Brevo)Brevo currently supports 65 integrations, including e-commerce platforms, Google Analytics, Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress. You can combine digital marketing with basic product purchase monitoring, and add to them workflows based on their activity. It also accommodates Facebook Ads extension to get the most from the platform if you have active subscribers on the popular social media platform.
Brevo Is a Breezy Email Marketing Platform
In transitioning from its old branding as Sendinblue, Brevo delivers a robust email marketing toolset that blends affordability with ease of use. SMBs can make great use of Brevo's engagement and connectivity features, and the additional elements, like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook integration, round out the package wonderfully. It is disappointing that some features (like SMS and extra landing pages) cost extra and are not included with Brevo's plans, but what's on offer is still very impressive for the price. As such, Brevo is worthy of our Editors' Choice award for email marketing.
