Brevo Review 2024: Is it a fit for your business?

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is an established email/CRM platform that’s designed to help businesses implement their marketing strategies.

With a 4.2-star rating on TrustPilot, Brevo is praised for its intuitive interface, useful features, and excellent customer support.

In this Brevo review, we will evaluate its features, pros, and cons in more detail to help you make an informed investment choice.

Is Brevo the right tool for me?

Brevo screenshots

Brevo features: An in-depth review

Before getting to an in-depth Brevo review, here’s a quick comparison of Brevo and three of its competitors:

Now, let’s do an in-depth review of the features offered by Brevo.

Ease of use ★★★★☆

While the signup process on Brevo is easy, it differs from what most competitors offer. 

Users are first directed to a page where they can enable chat widgets, unlike other platforms where they are guided to enable signup forms, build the first email campaign, or launch workflows. This is probably related to their recent rebranding to a CRM platform.

Brevo does lack some of the time-saving features that other tools such as Omnisend or Klaviyo offer.

For instance, there’s no option to set up your brand assets in the initial stage. You will need to manually add the branding elements or let Brevo sync them from your ecommerce store.

However, the navigation is pretty clear and once you figure it out it’s pretty straightforward to use. 

Building an email campaign ★★★★☆

Brevo offers email templates and a campaign builder. 

While there are 42 email templates available, some look outdated. Unlike its competitors, Brevo offers very few occasion-ready templates, such as Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and Mother’s Day templates.

Also, the editing process is not as intuitive as what some of its competitors offer.

There is a “repeat block” feature that’s Brevo’s version of the dynamic content blocks offered on some other platforms. However, the process isn’t as user-friendly as you would expect from the best email marketing tools.

Less usual feature is “Sections” with ready-to-use sections with products, reviews and product listing. We find this pretty valuable.

Overall, getting started with email campaign building is easy. In your account, you need to go to the ‘Campaigns’ tab, click on email, then ‘Create an email campaign.’ 

Brevo lets you design and run regular campaigns, A/B tests, and transactional emails, such as order confirmations, shipping notifications, and password resets, that are triggered by specific customer actions.

Transactional emails are included in the free plan with a limit of 300 emails per day.

Marketing automation ★★★☆☆

Brevo’s email automation features, though logical, aren’t as robust as what some other tools offer.

While there’s an option to add splits and conditions, neither the content, style, nor company logo is automatically pre-filled. 

To set up email automation, you need to click on ‘Create a workflow’ under the ‘Automation’ tab, and then pick from the pre-built workflows to get started.

As you can see in the image below, Brevo offers 5 ready-to-use workflow templates, including abandoned cart, welcome message, product purchase, anniversary date, and marketing activity (email opens and clicks).

There’s also an option to create a custom workflow and set the required conditions and  trigger events.

However, the process of setting up automation workflows can be intimidating for inexperienced users.

For instance, the cart abandonment workflow is not ready-to-use. Users have to manually add the customer event name or make changes to the website source.

In addition, the automation features are limited to 2000 contacts in the Free and Starter plans.

Signup forms and landing pages ★★★★☆

While Brevo offers signup forms and a landing page builder, they are pretty basic in design. The platform neither offers forms for various occasions nor are the form designs modern and adaptable. Regarding forms’ analytics, only a number of subscriptions is available.

Also, if you’re looking for an email marketing tool that can automatically launch a popup window, Brevo might not be the best choice.

To set up the popup, you need to copy and paste the HTML code into your website. 

In contrast, Omnisend offers over 80 signup forms and landing page designs that are ready to use. The platform syncs the brand style with the brand assets that you added in the initial stage, or which is automatically taken from your online store.

For Brevo, the option to ‘create a new subscription form’ can be found in the ‘Forms’ tab. You also can choose to enable GDPR fields if it’s relevant to your business.

Brevo’s landing page builder has the expected features, such as landing page templates, drag-and-drop builder, and the ability to track metrics. However, the landing page builder is only available for premium plan subscribers.

Email list management 

Brevo lacks one of the most coveted features in email marketing—the ability to add tags to quickly segment your email recipients.

Instead, Brevo allows you to assign a score to your contacts to send relevant messages.

To do this, you need to create a ‘Score” attribute, as shown below, and then determine the number of points to assign to specific customer actions, a process that appears quite laborious.

There are several ways to import your contacts into Brevo. If you need to simply add a single contact, you can do so directly within Brevo by going to the ‘Contacts’ section.

Before finalizing your imports, you will need to select how your contacts are organized within Brevo. Again, this is quite a time-consuming process that isn’t very user-friendly.

The platform uses the contact attributes you create to match your imported contacts with the specific attribute.

Another useful feature that Brevo offers is the multi-list subscription, which allows subscribers to choose which lists they want to sign up for.

Segmentation ★★★★☆

Brevo’s segmentation features don’t really cater to the advanced needs of ecommerce businesses.

For instance, you can’t segment lists based on ecommerce events, such as website browsing behavior or shopping behavior. This is a serious limitation in an email marketing platform for ecommerce businesses.

However, Brevo allows you to segment contacts based on location, email activity,  and source.

Also, Brevo automatically creates segments based on the name you choose for your lists, such as ‘GDPR-SMS contacts.’

Analytics ★★★★☆

The metrics for SMS and email campaigns are available in the Statistics tab. You can pick a date range to get insights on your campaigns such as email engagement activity, geo-tracking, etc.

You can also get conversion reports, but you need to set it up before being able to track the metric.

Brevo also offers a heat map analysis for emails for premium plan subscribers.

Customer support ★★★★★

Brevo offers personalized chat and phone support only for Brevo Business and Enterprise plan subscribers. For the free and Starter plan subscribers, Brevo offers email support only. While many users are happy with the quality of support available, Brevo doesn’t offer 24/7 support or chat support, unlike most other email marketing tools.

The website also has a resource section filled with helpful articles, the email marketing course, and YouTube tutorials on email campaign building, automation, transactional emails, and more.

Integrations ★★★★☆

Brevo offers 60+ integrations with different types of platforms, such as helpdesk, payment, forms, CMS, ecommerce, and other tools. However, before choosing it for your ecommerce business, you should double check the integration with your ecommerce platform because with some of them Brevo doesn’t integrate out-of-the-box.

Compatibility with other marketing channels ★★★★★

Brevo allows marketers to automate their marketing efforts across multiple channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, and chat.

The SMS marketing seems to be very flexible. It includes regular SMS campaigns, personalized automated campaigns, transactional texts, and reports to understand the impact. 

The WhatsApp marketing integration is one of the stand-out features of Brevo. Each month, you can send the first 1000 messages for free.

The Facebook ads feature is available only for Business and Enterprise Plan subscribers.

To create a Facebook ad within Brevo, the first step is to connect your Facebook page to your Brevo account. You then need to go to the ‘Add more apps’ tab as shown in the image and choose Facebook ads to create a campaign.

You can pick your target audience or use the contacts created in Brevo to find lookalike audiences on Facebook.

You can also set a budget for Facebook ads within Brevo and manage your ad spending in a better way.

Brevo also offers a live chat widget that allows you to interact with your customers in real time. In addition to customizing the widget, you can use predefined responses for FAQs and route the chat to live support as needed.

Generative AI tools ★★★★☆

Brevo hasn’t released genAI to its full potential yet. However, the email content generator has been integrated into the email editor. So, regarding AI tools, Brevo is neither great nor terrible.

Brevo pricing plans ★★★★☆

Brevo offers a free plan in addition to three paid plans. However, the free plan offers basic features and limits email sends to 300 per day. 

What can you get in Brevo for free? 

Paid Plans 

Here are the inclusions and pricing points of the paid plans:

Comparison with alternatives

Unlike other tools that charge based on the number of contacts, Brevo charges for each email. A key advantage of this pricing model is that you can upload any number of contacts to the platform and send to only part of it. This scenario works best for occasional senders.

Brevo treats themselves as a tool for ecommerce. And that’s completely true. However, you will need to upgrade to the Business or Enterprise plan to access coveted features, such as a landing page builder, advanced reporting, and multi-channel marketing.

Brevo competitors

When looking at Brevo’s competitors, it is important to select a tool that has a stellar rating in addition to powerful features at a lower price point to optimize your ROI.

Here are our three top picks.

Omnisend

Omnisend is a comprehensive marketing automation platform with affordable pricing plans that cater to ecommerce businesses of all sizes.

The platform is equipped with powerful automation and segmentation tools, customizable templates, and detailed analytics.

With unique features, such as gamification, coupons, and product recommendations, Omnisend helps maximize your marketing efforts across various channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, and social media.

Mailchimp

One of Mailchimp’s standout features is its user-friendly drag-and-drop email editor, which makes it easy for users to create professional-looking emails without any technical knowledge.

While Mailchimp also offers a wide variety of email templates and analytics tools, some of the areas where MailChimp lacks are the automation options.

In addition, the tool is more expensive compared to MailerLite.

MailerLite

MailerLite is a user-friendly and affordable email marketing solution that offers a wide range of features at a very low price point to help businesses build and grow their email lists, create campaigns, and track their performance.

One of its stand-out features is the ability to gather insights on subscriber preferences with the dynamic survey block that helps you personalize your messages. Also, it has a generous limit of 12,000 free emails per month, which rolls over if unused.

However, it isn’t an ideal marketing tool for fast-growing ecommerce businesses as it doesn’t offer enough ecommerce features.

Conclusion

Overall, Brevo is an email marketing software with extended CRM features for small businesses that offers useful functionality, such as an intuitive campaign builder and omnichannel marketing capabilities. 

Some of its stand-out features are transactional emails, plus Facebook and WhatsApp marketing capabilities.

However, in comparison with its competitors, Brevo lacks advanced features, such as robust automation, segmentation, product recommendations, etc.

If you’re looking for an affordable all-in-one platform, Brevo is right for you.

FAQs

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Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.