Brevo , 79 reviews

Background: We're a b2b company. Our list is subscribers only, no rented or scrapped names. We only email those who open within the last 120 days. Basically, we're not spammers but we do send a lot of email to our contacts. Pros:
- Overall a better than average UX. Easier to use than ActiveCampaign or Hubspot but far less power.
- Easy to use email creation process. Cons:
- You will not believe how militant they are about what email you are sending. I have never experienced anything like it. Their system will without warning stop your campaign if it isn't getting enough opens. They will randomly shut down your entire account without warning if they think you are sending too many emails or possibly unqualified names (yes, they email you after the fact but your account may be shut down for days if you don't keep an eye on your email). If you test a list and it doesn't perform well, your entire account is shut down. If you send too many transactional emails your account is shut down or throttled. When you submit a ticket to ask them to restart your account, it could be a day before you get a response, plus as a bonus you get a lecture - who are you sending email to, where did you get the names on your list, did the agree to receive email from you, what's your website address - over and over again. Recent example: we decided to test SMS marketing and purchased 100 SMS credits for a whopping $1.14. Purchase was put on hold without notice while they sent us a ticket where we were asked questions like, where did you get these names, what information are you going to text them, etc. Extraordinarily frustrating.
- The Shopify plug in doesn't do much without you doing coding - yes you actually have to write code in the app to do certain things. For example, they talk about how you can pull customer buying behavior from Shopify to send emails but good luck figuring that out, you have to do coding. The help files are almost nonexistent on this topic. Their reps couldn't even tell me how to do it.
- Customer support is generally poor. Many reps are not English first language so it is often challenging for English language users to know what the reps are saying. Most reps do not know the system very well so you will go round and round trying to get an answer. Wait times are long. - Looks less expensive at first but they ding you for everything - extra seats, landing pages, transactional emails, etc. - and it adds up fast. Neutral:
- Reporting is good but basic and leaves gaps in your ability to know how your list is performing. For example, want to know if your list is growing or shrinking? You have to manually report on the numbers in different time frames and do some math. How can there not be a report for this most important emailing metric?
- Automations are good but basic. Where are the automation templates for every day activities like DOI, re-engagement, reactivation, etc.?
- CRM is good but basic. That's okay for us but the layout is difficult to use quickly, UX is not great.
- Mediocre email templates. Not a major issue. Creating your own is easy with their drag and drop interface. Overall SendinBlue is a frustrating company to work with and an app that says it will do a lot more than it can actually do. Update: We've been throttled on transaction emails to 5 per hour. Blue states a quota of 100 transactional emails per hour. Technically this is our fault because we imported a new list of names and didn't realize they would all be pushed through DOI. No warning message. For a business with 70,000 contacts this quota is ridiculous.

Sendinblue has been a reliable email marketing app for us for many months, however their recent app update slowed down our website to a crawl. We used to have the option to disable behavior tracking (as this introduces 3rd party code to the website), but this option is now gone and all customer behavior on the site is tracked by default. Not only is this a detriment to our SEO ranking for site speed, but the customer privacy implications are also concerning.

This initially looked like a good Mailchimp alternative - I like the pricing model and wish more newsletter providers used it.

Pros: Clean interface, nice reports and the helpdesk exists, is responsive and really works to understand the issue

Cons: all of the embedded forms are buggy within Shopify - some won't even submit while others kinda work but the error checking (like duplicate registration) goes to a blank screen. This was issue #1 with the help desk which was finally identified after a few weeks but put on the backlog with no fix date.

The final straw was the previously undisclosed minimum number of subscribers to be allowed to send a campaign. So despite the pricing model being tiny/new business friendly, their rules aren't and weren't made clear up front. I don't know what other surprises might be lurking.

Switching back to Mailchimp...

The app works well for a simple email campaign but we have tried to contact their support multiple times and no one has responded in weeks. We need help setting up the tracking for our abandoned cart emails

Très compliqué à prendre en main, pourtant tout est en français, certaine application qui sont en anglais sont plus facile à comprendre.

I really wanted to like it... the interface is well designed and intuitive. But there were way too many bugs for me to rely on it. Customer data didn't sync properly with Shopify, and it isn't obvious if there's a way to sync data between the email and CRM apps. Many crashes/freezes as well. It seems the technical side is holding back what could be a really high value proposition here.