Brevo Review | PC Mag

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a robust email marketing solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It provides all the essential features businesses need to connect and engage with their customers, including superior automation, professional email templates, and built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Brevo has a few minor drawbacks worth noting, including occasional slow loading times and difficulty importing data, but its strong overall feature set and attractive pricing make it a great choice for Campaigner, HubSpot Marketing, and Mailchimp. Alongside, it's an Editors' Choice winner in the email marketing category.

(Editor's note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)

(Credit: Brevo)

Brevo pricing and plans

You can sign up for Brevo using either your email address, Google or Apple account. After a quick account verification, you'll be asked to enter details about yourself and your business, including your name, company name, business address, and website. Brevo also asks about the size of your team, how many contacts your company has (to help guide you to the right plan), and whether you sell online.

Once you have entered the requested information, Brevo will ask you to select a plan. There are four plans to choose from, each addressing specific business needs. All Brevo plans support unlimited contacts, so email volume is the most important metric here.

The free plan is perfect for businesses that want to try out Brevo's features without making an immediate investment. This tier limits you to 300 emails per day and provides email templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and transactional emails. You can also create SMS and WhatsApp campaigns. There is also no limit to the number of contacts.

Sending 300 emails per day is fine for experimentation, but if you have a large contact list, a free account won't get you very far. The next tier is the starter. Starting at $25/month, you get everything in the free plan, plus no daily sending limits. Provides basic analysis and reporting, email support, and 20,000 emails per month. You can increase your email volume using a convenient slider, but of course your monthly fee will also increase. Free and Starter plans use Brevo branding in your campaigns. If you wish to remove this, there will be an additional charge of $12 per month.

The $65/month Business plan is the next tier and is designed for e-commerce professionals and marketing managers. Starts at 20,000 emails per month and includes all the features included in Starter. However, it adds A/B testing, marketing automation, and advanced statistics. If your business demands even more, Brevo Plus is your top-of-the-line, most customizable solution. Brevo Plus offers enterprise-grade security, advanced integration, sub-account management, personalized support, and flexible contract options, but you'll need to contact sales to create the exact plan for your business. there is.

(Credit: Brevo)

Brevo's pricing is attractive in two ways. First, it's easy to understand because it's limited to one structure: monthly email sending. Competitors like HubSpot Marketing and Zoho Campaigns often have multiple structures based on email volume as well as inquiry volume (sometimes a combination of the two). This can be a headache when trying to predict the actual cost of a service. Additionally, Brevo simply costs less than many of its competitors. For example, Campaigner pricing starts at $59 per month for his 5,000 contacts. When you compare this to the expected email volume for that number of subscribers, Brevo wins, especially considering the new marketing power it offers.

That said, Brevo has some additional costs that aren't obvious at first glance. The platform allows you to create SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, but these are additional charges that use a credit system. You must purchase credits to send these mobile campaigns. This campaign will be sold in approximately 100 message bundles. Prices vary by region, but in the US, for example, a 100-message add-on costs $1.09. The 100 WhatsApp Messages add-on costs $3.16. This is relatively inexpensive, but depending on the number of mobile campaigns you plan to send, costs can add up quickly.

Landing pages are very useful for directing clients to campaign-related web pages, but they come at an additional cost. The Free and Starter plans offer nothing, while the Business plan offers just one. If you want to create multiple pages for multiple products or clients, 5 additional pages cost $24 per month.

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Brevo navigation

Brevo is a very user-friendly platform with a clean user interface (UI) that is easy to understand. In addition to a prominent welcome message every time you log into your account, Brevo provides a handy list of recommended tasks you should complete to optimize your reach. When you need to handle more relevant tasks, all important work-related tabs like Campaigns, Automations, and Contacts appear on the left side of the screen.

I like that Brevo is generous with their suggestions and makes it very easy for beginners to get started. Pop-up messages and windows are packed with help every time you start a task such as a campaign, segmentation, or automation, and highlight some of the more common tasks within the category. For example, when you create a new segment, Brevo selects predefined segments such as engaged email subscribers, inactive email subscribers, contacts with a specific country code, or contacts with pending tasks. suggested segments. This is very useful, and although experienced professionals may find the tips and onboarding a bit excessive, I appreciate any helpful suggestions.

The only real criticism here is that it's slow to load at times. Brevo is generally responsive, but it feels oddly slow when switching to a new task or another page. This didn't cause any major issues during testing, but it did make the tool feel a little clunky at times.

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After creating your account, the first step is to upload your contacts. To this end, I modified the Excel sheet containing the test email to match the fields suggested by Brevo. During the initial contact upload, some information was not transferred correctly. You can also choose not to upload fields that don't match.[連絡先]tab's[設定]You can also create new attributes and field types in sections. For example, you can add a date field for birthdays or a text field for gender. This issue is relatively minor and Brevo will highlight the discrepancy before saving your data so you can make the appropriate changes. The process wasn't as simple as Campaigner, which provides a sample Excel sheet to edit and upload, but overall it was a relatively minor inconvenience.

Once you've saved the client, you can return to Contacts and sort the client into the categories you need for your campaign tasks. Brevo's dedicated segments section allows you to easily create as many as you need, based on your own criteria or one of Brevo's predefined segments. You don't necessarily have to do this to start a campaign, but it can be an invaluable tool if you want to target campaigns to specific customers in the future.

Creating a campaign is easy. Select it if you want to integrate with email, Facebook ads, SMS, web push, or WhatsApp. You can also create custom automations. Using email, you can create a regular campaign or choose A/B testing to send different versions of your campaign to two different test groups. In either case, select a campaign name, subject, and sender email. You can also use AI to have Brevo create subject lines for you, but the results in our tests were pretty bland and robotic. Once you're done, you can go to the design module and create the face of your campaign.

Brevo offers over 40 great templates, but also six clean layouts that you can customize to your liking. Easily move and adjust elements using the drag-and-drop editor. If you're comfortable with HTML or rich text editors (or have someone on your staff who is), you can add the code manually. Once you've perfected the look of your email, you can preview it in your browser and schedule it if you like.

(Credit: Brevo)

Automation and Brevo integration

Brevo's marketing automation features are also incredibly easy to understand and use. The tool provides basic workflow templates that can be further edited and redesigned to suit your required tasks. Examples include welcome messages, birthday messages, activity-based templates, notifications triggered by abandoned carts, page visits, website visits, or product purchases. Most of these workflows are automated themselves and will pop up a message requesting information such as the target contact, duration, email template, etc. These are a great starting point for a commerce-focused drip campaign.

If you want something more specialized, you can start custom workflows of the following types: basic contact files, contacts who have completed an email or website activity, contacts who have submitted data, or Contact websites tagged while visiting. Once you decide which contacts to add to your workflow, create a sequence based on a set of if/then conditions to determine what to send in follow-up communications. There is no limit to the number of interactions you can create, but your account is limited by the amount of emails you pay per month.

These powerful automation features also strengthen Brevo's CRM integration. Convenient subscription tracking, analytics tools, and seamless contact management give you all the tools to make the most of the opportunities your campaigns create. Overall, Brevo's automation features stand out as being fairly robust considering the platform's relatively low price point. Indeed, Brevo aims its solutions squarely at small and medium-sized businesses. For email marketing and automation tools for enterprise-scale 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 activity-based workflows. If you have active subscribers on the popular social media platform, we also support Facebook advertising extensions to help you get the most out of the platform.

Brevo is a friendly email marketing platform

Moving on from its older branding as Sendinblue, Brevo offers a robust email marketing toolset that combines affordability and ease of use. SMBs can take full advantage of Brevo's engagement and connectivity features, and additional elements such as SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook integration round out the package nicely. It's a shame that some features (like SMS and additional landing pages) cost extra and aren't included in Brevo's plans, but what's on offer is still very impressive considering the price. That's why Brevo deserves the Editors' Choice Award for Email Marketing.