Transactional emails are very different from marketing ones. Not only can any website or application make use of them, but they also need to be personalized with dynamic contact information to deliver registration info, order details, and password resets. That’s why speed, deliverability, and security are top priorities when choosing an email service provider. 

Let’s look at the SendGrid offering and how SendGrid competitors stack up. 

What SendGrid Offers

SendGrid is a large-scale email solution, providing email automation, signup forms, and list management. It’s used by big name clients like Uber and Airbnb. However, it’s best known as a leading transactional email platform offering email Rest API and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). 

SendGrid is developer-oriented and usually integrated into stand-alone applications, rather than used as a SaaS.

Pros

• Email templates with conditional formatting available 
• Advanced testing options (inbox look, links, spam filter risk)
• Email validation API available to check email addresses before emails are sent and bounce.
• Good email delivery rates
• Monitoring and tools for sender reputation management 
• Paying customers get chat, ticket, or phone (on higher plans) support
• Scalable for large-volume operations 

Cons

• They sign you up for ISP feedback so you can remove contacts who complain about your emails from your list. Other solutions save time by automatically removing them for you.
• Only 3 days of transactional messages history included, 30-day email activity history is a paid add-on.
• You need other Twilio add-ons for chat, SMS, and push notifications.
• You need a separate email marketing plan to be able to send other kinds of emails apart from transactional. Charges for it are based on contact list size.
• You also need this other plan to use a drag-and-drop email editor if you don’t want to code your emails.

SendGrid Pricing

There’s a free forever plan, 100 transactional emails a day. Plans start at $14.95/month. Dedicated IPs are available on Pro plan or higher, starting at $89.95/month. Marketing Campaigns plans also offer a free plan (2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails/month) and start from there at $15/month.

Sendgrid Alternatives Compared

Here’s an overview of the prices and main features SendGrid and its competitors offer as transactional email solutions.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is the most cost-effective SendGrid alternative. Let’s explain why.

API, SMTP, and more

As a SendGrid competitor, Sendinblue offers transactional emails via email marketing API, and SMTP relay. But that’s not all.! You can also connect it to all major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop) via plugins. Or set up automations to trigger transactional emails when certain events occur. (Our SMTP server lets you set up webhooks and track events.)

We understand performance is essential for this type of communication. That’s why Sendinblue offers detailed email analytics on all key metrics. Plus, it offers the advantage over other email delivery services of keeping unlimited logs (i.e. the history of individual emails sent to each recipient).

Premium deliverability

We have a dedicated team of email deliverability experts who monitor sender reputations on our shared IPs to make sure your emails reach the inbox. We also have a strict vetting process to keep spammers out and protect your sending and open rates. 99.98% of emails are delivered by Sendinblue in less than 20 seconds.

All-in-one email

Sendinblue covers the full range of email marketing services on one marketing platform and plan. No need to use separate tools, or pay different plans on top.

Grow your list first with signup forms and start sending a newsletter. Then, run a promotional campaign. Confirm each individual order that comes in. After that, automate engagement with tailored offers based on the products purchased. And maybe send a mass email to announce a new product range. Send all your transactional, marketing, and automated emails from one place. 

Sendinblue also works as a bulk email service. You can use the email API or SMTP to send large volume marketing campaigns faster and with better results.

And if that’s not enough, live chat, landing pages, and SMS marketing are also available. Complete with a CRM, you have all customer data and communications on the same platform. 

GDPR

Sendinblue is one SendGrid alternative that takes GDPR very seriously. 

It offers signup forms that make collecting consent legal and managing subscribers preferences easy. If someone one accepts transactional but not promotional emails, you won’t be able to email them by mistake and annoy them. This protects your sender reputation as you won’t get marked as spam for unwanted communications.

Also, the API syncs contact activity with the CRM in real time. So hard bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complainers from transactional emails are automatically blacklisted in your CRM so promotional emails are not sent to those addresses either. And unsubscribe links are automatically inserted in all email templates to take one more thing off your plate to remember. 

Read more: 11 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Email Bounce Rate

For developers AND marketers alike

Sendinblue as a SendGrid alternative makes transactional email (and not only) accessible to users who are not as tech savvy as a developer. Here are our developer resources but if you’re not one, you can still make full use of the marketing platform. 

First, you don’t have to code your transactional emails. The user-friendly drag and drop email builder lets you create any type of email you want from scratch or customizing one of the ready templates available. This way, your transactional emails can be branded and look just as good as the marketing ones. 

With Sendinblue, customizing your transactional emails with individual information like order status is also easy. Ready-made elements for dynamic content personalization are available in the email editor. 

There’s no need to code your marketing automations either. Just add the steps you want in the visual workflow builder. You can even add transactional SMS or rules to manage the contact based on their behavior, too.

Sendinblue vs SendGrid

• All email marketing needs taken care of in one place: bulk email, newsletters, marketing emails, automated campaigns, and every other email marketing use case
• Not just 2, but 4 options for sending transactional emails
• Ready-to-use ecommerce plugins for quick and easy integration
• Unlimited send logs
• No charge for contact list size
• User-friendly email design tool and templates for marketers who don’t have coding skills
• Easy use of dynamic content for personalization
• Preview on different email clients and devices
• Customer support in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese

Overall, Sendinblue is a SendGrid alternative for small businesses when you don’t know how to write code for transactional emails and want to send everything from one platform.

Pricing

You can activate API or SMTP service even on Sendinblue’s free account (300 emails/day). Paid plans begin at $25/10,000 emails/month with automation, signup forms, templates, A/B testing, SMS, CRM, and no daily sending limit.

Mandrill

Mandrill is another SendGrid alternative for transactional email. It offers a full range of features: dynamic content (merge tags), conditional rules and webhooks to react to specific behaviors, click tracking, A/B testing. 

However, it’s owned by Mailchimp and unfortunately you have to pay for both to be able to use Mandrill’s API or SMTP. 

No contact storage available on Mandrill is another downside. You need Mailchimp for list management or the API/ SMTP will make a call to your external database every time it’s sending an email.

Pricing

You get 500 emails to test Mandrill for free. After that, you need a Mailchimp Standard or Premium plan (from $17 for 500 contacts) and add blocks of 25,000 emails starting at $20/month. Price per block goes down as volume goes up but unused email quota doesn’t roll over to the next month. Dedicated IP add-on is $29.95/month.

Related: 10 Best Mailchimp Alternatives Compared by Price (2022)

Mailgun

Mailgun is a close SendGrid competitor. It’s an API-first solution for developers or B2B and is often white labeled by other applications. It offers additional email deliverability services, inbox placement, email verification, and transactional SMS as well.

If you’re a marketer, though, Mailgun can be intimidating. 

You’ll probably need developer’s help for sending any email because it’s not done directly from the platform as with email marketing software. At least you have an alternative to creating the emails in HTML. Mailgun acquired Mailjet for email marketing (promotional emails, newsletters, drip campaigns). Now, you can use Mailjet’s drag and drop email builder to create transactional emails as well.

Pricing

Mailgun offers a trial period of 3 months with 5,000 emails/month. Then, it’s $0.80/1,000 emails. Marketing campaigns are paid on separate plans starting at $35/mo

Dedicated IPs are available on the Foundation 100k plan and up. Validations are an add-on, from $1.20 / 100.

Postmark

Postmark is another SendGrid competitor on the transactional side. It’s built as a transactional email service provider for applications so it’s perfect for SaaS, apps, etc. It’s a robust solution for the tech savvy with detailed reporting and 45 days log retention, boasting superior customer support.

But it lacks campaign building capabilities such as list management, contact segmentation, or a user-friendly design tool needed for ecommerce marketing, for example. Only pre-built transactional email templates are available or alternatively you can use their open-source toolset MailMaison with CSS.

Pricing

Postmark’s pricing starts at $10 per 10,000 emails a month, and you can top up with additional blocks of 1,000 for $1.25 each. Dedicated IP addresses cost $50/month.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES can be counted as a SendGrid alternative as it’s the most basic solution for service emails. The name literally stands for Simple Email Service. It offers APIs and SMTP, core metrics, and a focus on the tech side as it’s a part of the AWS suite for enterprise. Prominent users are Reddit, Netflix, and Duolingo.

It’s a developer tool, usually integrated into stand-alone applications. And so you can’t log in and simply send your emails from its platform. It doesn’t offer a user-friendly interface or email marketing functionality. It works best if you’re hosted on Amazon too.

Pricing

Amazon SES is often cited as the cheapest SendGrid alternative. This can be true, but keep in mind that price depends on your location, your setup, and hosting. There are no set fees, it’s $0.10 / 1000 emails charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. Dedicated IPs are $24.95/ month.

Choosing a SendGrid Alternative

All of the listed SendGrid competitors offer the basic functionality for sending transactional emails. From there, your decision depends on what additional features you need in one email service provider. It’s a good idea for small businesses to try a few SendGrid alternatives for free and see which one’s easiest to use.

The post 5 Best SendGrid Alternatives for Transactional Email (2022) appeared first on Sendinblue.

But it’s always smart to check what Klaviyo alternatives are there, too. Comparing prices and capabilities will help you choose the best tool for your own needs.

So here we’ve selected the top email marketing solutions that can be called Klaviyo competitors in terms of features and pricing plans. You can look at the price comparison table and explore how each one compares to Klaviyo to decide whether to switch or not.

What Klaviyo offers

• Ecommerce focused
• SMS Marketing
• Automation — advanced triggers, split flows, combine emails and SMS
• Segmentation — behavioral and transactional data, customer profiles
• Personalization thanks to extensive data
• Forms — including multi-step ones
• Reports — focused on revenue, not email metrics
• predictive analytics — predict certain customer metrics and attributes
• Email templates available
• Integrations with all major ecommerce platforms, special focus on Shopify

Klaviyo pricing

This is an overview of Klaviyo’s pricing for different contact list sizes. This is only for emails, texting comes on top. 

Klaviyo downsides

And here are a few reasons to make you look for Klaviyo alternatives:

• Steep pricing. Emails and SMS to 10,000 contacts a month will cost you $600.
• SMS available only in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.
• Customer reviews most often mention dissatisfactory customer support.
• If you have or want to grow to a large contact list, price can be prohibitive.
• If you don’t run an ecommerce store where emails can pay for themselves directly, it might be too expensive for its worth. 
• It might have features that are too complex for what your small business needs, e.g. predictive analytics.
• Because of its high price, complexity, and a tendency to push you to talk to sales instead of letting you sign up directly, it feels like more of an enterprise solution.

Klaviyo Alternatives to Switch To

This is a price comparison table of the top alternatives to Klaviyo. It looks at the monthly price of sending email marketing campaigns only. Keep in mind that each platform provides different features (e.g. automation, logo removed) at different price tiers. 

*Prices above are based on pricing pages accessed in Jan 2022 and take email + SMS plans where available (SMS credits not included) for the closest possible comparison to Klaviyo.

Now, let’s look at each Klaviyo competitor and how it compares to it to help you choose.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing platform much like Klaviyo. It combines email marketing and automation tools (incl. transactional emails), SMS marketing, CRM, live chat, shared inbox, and landing page and signup forms builder. Push notifications and advanced ecommerce analytics are coming soon, thanks to Sendinblue’s recent acquisition of PushOwl and Metrilo respectively.

Sendinblue is a comprehensive email marketing service, offering all email features you’ll ever need:

• an intuitive drag and drop email builder;
• a huge range of dynamic content for email personalization;
• A/B testing beyond the subject line; 
• a library of email templates.

Further features provided by Sendinblue are: 

• multichannel automation (email + SMS + contact management);
• pre-built automation flows (abandoned cart, product purchase, welcome message, interaction with a campaign, anniversary or birthday, etc.);
• rich contact segmentation;
• GDPR-compliant and multi-step forms;
• and advanced subscribers list management.

What Sendinblue offers that Klaviyo doesn’t

• Sendinblue doesn’t charge you for your contact list size! You pay only for the number of emails sent to unlimited contacts. Sendinblue’s mission is to help small businesses grow and not charging for contact storage is one way we do that. 

• Dedicated transactional email capability. Klaviyo lets you send those through the email marketing automation, which is not ideal for deliverability and might take too much time. In contrast, Sendinblue offers you four ways to make sure your customers get those essential emails on time: a dedicated SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), API, ecommerce plugins, or automation. Pick the best option for your website and business!

• Tons of merge tags (a.k.a. dynamic content) options
• Email testing on different email clients
• Email Send Time Optimization — send emails at the best time for each individual contact
• Focus on GDPR across features
• Additional marketing channels: live chat, landing pages, more coming soon

Reasons to choose Sendinblue over Klaviyo

First and foremost, Sendiblue’s way more budget-friendly than Klaviyo, while providing comparable service and tools. It even offers a generous free plan! See a simple price comparison: 

Why switch from Klaviyo to Sendinblue?

Other reasons to switch from Klaviyo to Sendinblue are:

• Sendinblue is better for reaching European customers. It has EU-based servers and all the consent tools to help you be GDPR-compliant.

• Klaviyo is aimed at ecommerce stores. For service-based businesses, non-profits, consultants, SMBs, offline businesses, or businesses with a longer sales process, Sendinblue can better answer your needs.

• If you run a small business, non-profit organization, or otherwise want to engage your audience rather than sell directly, Klaviyo won’t pay for itself. Sendinblue is more suitable for sending mass emails to unlimited contacts to engage them at a better price. 

Here’s a detailed comparison of Sendinblue vs. Klaviyo to help you decide.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers all core email features and is wildly popular. Its ease of use is great for beginners just starting out with email marketing. 

Some noteworthy features are:

• Import of branding elements from your site for easy and quick customization of emails
• Predicted demographics
• Website builder, forms and landing pages
• Send time optimization
• Surveys for gathering feedback
• Subject line helper
• Benchmark to peers

A few cons of Mailchimp:

• No SMS marketing offered
• Ready-to-use email templates are available only on paid plans. (Check out those 9 sites for free email templates.)
• Advanced features like dynamic content are only available on more expensive plans.

Mailchimp vs Klaviyo pricing

Like Klaviyo, Mailchimp’s pricing isn’t based on the number of emails you send as much as the number of contacts you store. For those just starting out, this isn’t much of a problem. But once your business grows, you’ll quickly have to upgrade your plan.

For ecommerce businesses, note that Mailchimp changes a transaction fees on all purchases it handles in addition to making its users foot the credit card processing fees. To avoid this, consider these Mailchimp alternatives. 

Other than that, Mailchimp is more affordable than Klaviyo (see table above), especially if you don’t sell online.

Constant Contact

If you have a small business, non-profit, or organize events, Constant Contact might be the Klaviyo alternative for you. 

In addition to essential features such as a drag-and-drop editor and subject line A/B testing, it lets you collect feedback, request donations, and ask for RSVPs in emails. You can also manage events and even collect email addresses on the spot through Constant Contact’s integration with Eventbrite. 

A landing page builder is available for both lead generation and shoppable product display. CC doubles as a social media scheduling tool, too. You can post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and monitor performance and engagement.

If you’re looking for a more affordable alternative to Klaviyo, though, be warned that if you sell anything online, Constant Contact charges you 1.5% of all your online sales on top of the subscription plan. That’s a lot for ecommerce businesses! The good thing is you can take up their 60-day trial to see if you like it enough.

Read more: Constant Contact alternatives

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is yet another Klaviyo alternative. It tries to position itself as a marketing automation platform for small businesses, non-profits, tech companies, bloggers, real estate, and more, but mostly highlights its ecommerce functionality.

Regardless of your industry, you can take advantage of ActiveCampaign’s advanced automation that lets you set up complex sales funnels with conversion goals such as webinar sign-ups. This can be a challenge for beginners as much as it’s useful. Luckily, AC’s big library of pre-built automations and email templates can help.

Additional features include live chat and sales tools like pipeline management for companies with complex sales processes. 

Two reasons to choose it instead of Klaviyo:

• AC’s SMS marketing works outside of the USA.
• They offer you a price lock for 2 years, which gives you some room to grow your email list before you have to move to a higher tier.

Omnisend

Omnisend also positions itself for online stores. It offers email, SMS, and automation just like Klaviyo. It’s also closest to it in terms of pricing.

Omnisend has most features an ecommerce marketer would need under one roof:

• Pop-ups and forms
• Segmentation
• Push notifications
• Reports

Its best feature is the ability to create multichannel automations, including email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, and Google retargeting. Omnisend also offers a wheel of fortune sign-up form.

One downside of it is that there’s a limit on the number of emails that can be sent despite the pricing being tied to email list size. For example, with 5,000 contacts you can only send up to 60,000 emails unless you upgrade.

Drip

Drip is another close Klaviyo competitor. It is also focused on SMS & email automations (as the name suggests) for ecommerce businesses. 

It offers ready “playbooks” or automation workflows for most common ecommerce scenarios such as abandoned carts and welcome series. Powerful segmentation and advanced split testing let you run as many different campaigns as you can think of. Drip’s point-and-click visual email editor might be an inconvenience if you’re used to the drag-and-drop editor offered by Klaviyo and most other email marketing tools.

However, overall, compared to Klaviyo, Drip possibly has a friendlier interface. The pricing of the two is comparable, especially for bigger contact list sizes.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a user-friendly Klaviyo alternative. Its main focus is a drag-and-drop design tool that lets you create beautiful emails and email automation for optimal customer journeys.

Campaign Monitor also connects with your website, apps, and other sources to pull customer data to be used in campaigns. It also provides detailed email analytics to help you improve campaign performance. A nifty little feature Campaign Monitor has is Link Review — it checks your emails for broken links so you can update them. 

It’s worth mentioning that Campaign Monitor offers delivering each email at one and the same local time across geographies. Last but not least, they do have transactional email capabilities.

The Best Klaviyo Alternatives

One of Klaviyo’s biggest downfalls is its price. It surely is a comprehensive tool, but you can find cheaper email marketing services that offer the same features. Even better, why not get started with a free Klaviyo alternative? 

The post Top 7 Klaviyo Alternatives for Small Businesses in 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

Let’s face it; it’s not exactly the most exciting part of running a business. 

But while it might not be as fun as getting new customers, filling out your stock catalog, or creating an eye-catching logo, software can make all the moving parts much easier.

In fact, it can automate and help with all the necessary things you need to do while you focus on growing your business. 

Where to start with small business software

Which small business software is most important and what can you leave out for now? 

To help you out, we’ve put together a list of the best software for small businesses that will help you get your business off the ground and start bringing in revenue. 

Collect and Send Emails 

1. Sendinblue

Sendinblue has all the features you need to run powerful email campaigns, set up transactional sequences, and stay in touch with your growing list of customers. 

Through automation tools and robust segmentation capabilities, it’s easy to send personalized emails that increase engagement and help build a loyal following. 

If you’re the kind of person who loses hours formatting a document (we’ve all been there), don’t panic: a suite of professionally designed landing pages and signup forms attract and collect emails from potential buyers, giving you all the information you need to nurture more sales. 

Best of all, Sendinblue makes it super simple for tech-averse business owners to create professional looking emails that are geared towards growth. 

No code needed at all. No design skills necessary. Just a gateway for opening up conversations with your customers. 

For those starting out, Sendinblue offers a free plan for sending up to 300 emails a day and store unlimited contacts.

2. Optinmonster 

Conversion optimization. Two words that either don’t make any sense to you at all or bring you out in a cold sweat. 

But it’s a simple notion, really: it’s the action of improving your chances of getting people who visit your website to buy something. 

Optinmonster has a catalog of tried and tested opt-in forms that have been specifically designed to grab attention, while nice add-ons like countdown timers and exit popups give shoppers an extra nudge in the right direction. 

Dig deeper into the tool, and you’ll find features that let you send personalized follow-up campaigns triggered by visitor interaction and split messaging to create hyper-targeted email lists. 

A basic Optinmonster account starts at $14 per month, but Sendinblue users get three months free on the Pro plan when they use this link. 

Build a Website

3. WordPress

In 2019, 36% of small businesses didn’t have a website. This percentage is crazy-high, especially when you consider how many offline shoppers have ventured online since the pandemic. 

The truth is, without a website, you could be missing out on a huge chunk of customers. 

Luckily, creating a website doesn’t have to be a headache. With WordPress, you can login to a simple dashboard that walks you through building a professional-looking site. 

There are thousands of themes to choose from and customization tools let you make your site your own. On top of that, the ever-growing list of plugins means you can add extras, like WordPress newsletter signup forms, analytics, and SEO enhancements. 

WordPress is free to get started on, you just need to pay for a domain name and a host. 

4. Shopify

Small businesses that sell products online need the help of a platform like Shopify.

It lets retail owners bring their stores online and reach a wider base of potential customers through premade shop templates, marketing tools, and ecommerce software. Customers can add products to their cart and checkout seamlessly with a range of payment options. 

Shopify is one of the go-to platforms for budding businesses. In a matter of minutes, you can have an online store setup with your own branding and start selling straight away. 

A basic Shopify account starts at $29 per month, but you can try it out for free for 14 days first. 

Accounting

5. Stripe

Online payment processor Stripe makes it quick and easy for online vendors to accept payments, send payouts, and manage their business. Through your personal dashboard, you can send invoices, track revenue, and instantly accept payments. 

Unlike a lot of other accounting software, customers are able to pay invoices immediately with their credit card details. You can also keep a close eye on open invoices to maintain a decent cash flow. 

Using Stripe is free, but it does take a 1.4%-2.9% cut of any payments made depending on the customer’s location. 

6. Wave Accounting

Wave Accounting helps small business owners and entrepreneurs manage their income and expenses. 

If numbers get your head in a spin, this is the tool for you. It lets you track everything going in and out of your business, and makes it easy to run payroll, payments, and invoicing.

The best part is it’s all automated, which means you don’t have to manually do your accounts at the end of each month. For many small businesses, this is a huge time and cost outlay, which makes Wave Accounting a particularly handy tool to have on board. 

Wave Accounting is free to use for businesses just starting out. 

7. Freshbooks

Like Wave Accounting and Stripe, Freshbooks makes managing accounts easy for small businesses. You can send branded invoices, track incomings and outgoings, and keep on top of your revenue.

Automated reminders help you chase overdue payments, while the automation capabilities mean you can spend less time drowning in numbers and more time focusing on your business. 

Freshbooks packages start at £11 per month. 

Project Management

8. Trello

If you wake up every day surrounded by post-its overflowing with things you need to do, stop! Sure, there’s a lot to get your head around when starting a business and there always seems to be an endless list of things that need doing, but a management tool like Trello can really make a difference (like no longer needing to splash out on a new post-it pad every week). 

The “board-based” project management tool lets you create focused lists, color code actions, and seamlessly move around cards to highlight prioritized tasks. You can also add notes to each activity, assign tasks to other people, and archive your lists to come back to at a later date. 

Trello is completely free to use. 

9. Asana 

Like Trello, Asana is a drag-and-drop online to-do list. It specializes in helping small businesses manage remote teams and organize projects through move-able cards and lists. Users can set deadlines for tasks, assign activities to team members, and view the timeline for each specific project. 

Even if you simply need a place to jot down everything you need to do (and that’s likely to be a lot if you’re running things solo), Asana is a great tool to have in your small business software stack. 

There is a free plan for small businesses to use. 

10. Monday.com 

If you’ve ever struggled to keep track of who’s doing what and when, you’re not alone. In fact, running a small business is full of different projects run by different team members on different days. Staying on top of it is hard. 

Monday.com makes it easier by providing a workspace where small businesses can track, plan, and deliver their tasks. It lets you create drag-and-drop to-do cards, populate your timeline with business-building activities, assign tasks to different people, and keep a close eye on all your spinning plates.

Monday.com’s basic package starts at £7 per month per user. 

Team Communication

11. Slack

Avoid the endless scroll of email chains and get yourself a communication tool like Slack. This puts all business-related communication in one place and makes it easy to shoot notes to individual team members. 

You can create “channels” for different topics to make sure important information doesn’t get lost, and set up a place where you can easily communicate with everyone who matters, whether it’s your head of marketing, your new designer, or your fulfillment team. 

Slack is free to use. 

12. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams probably came onto your radar earlier this year when it rose in popularity during the pandemic. 

The free chat and video calling platform makes it easy to communicate with people wherever they are in the world. You can store important documents, share media files, and host meetings with your team to make sure everyone’s on track for success. Even if you simply use it to chat with potential vendors or your in-house team, it can be a great way to spread transparency throughout your business.

Microsoft Teams is free to use. 

13. Zoom

And then we come to Zoom, another video calling platform that has shot to fame in recent months. Host virtual meetings, send media files, and set up breakout rooms to keep communication strong throughout your business. 

It’s the perfect small business software to host team meetings with your staff or to connect with vendors and potential sellers. The screenshare feature makes it easy to present information to possible buyers and you can record meetings and keep a log of them for future reference.

There is a free Zoom package that allows you to host meetings for up to 40 minutes. 

Choose the Right Small Business Software

Choosing the right software for your small business shouldn’t be a headache. Start by figuring out what tasks could be automated or made easier and identify software that can help. Whether you want to build an email list, create an online store, or communicate with your team, there is a software out there for you. 

The post 13 of the Best Small Business Software in 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

Email remains one of the most effective and direct forms of communication for businesses to interact with customers.

Thanks to the help of email marketing service providers like Sendinblue, businesses are able to send bulk email campaigns to large groups of contacts and scale their one-to-one email messages to handle any volume without having to worry about email deliverability issues or setting up their own SMTP server.

While online email marketing applications are great for designing and sending emails, sometimes businesses have more complex use cases for email that require the services of an email marketing platform to be directly integrated into a website or application’s functionality. This requires the use of an email marketing API.

What is an API?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term API, it stands for “Application Programming Interface,” and it simply refers to the set of methods by which developers can access the different functionalities of a software application using code rather than logging into the application.

To illustrate this in a clearer way, let’s use an analogy: think of a software tool like a restaurant. Most people who want to eat at a restaurant go to the establishment, sit down at a table, and order food off the menu from a waiter. These “normal” customers are similar to software users who log into an application and make use of the features in the tool by clicking around in the normal graphical user interface (GUI).

But, what if you want have that food delivered to you rather than going all the way there, sitting down at a table, and ordering it from a waiter? In this case, you’ll probably call into the restaurant and place an order for delivery. This is like using a software tools’ API. You still have access to the items on the menu, but you have to order them through a different process and they are delivered directly to you rather than you having to go to the restaurant.

APIs let a user “log in” to the application by sending a programmatic request using an API key (usually just a random encrypted string of characters) that is unique to their account for authentication. The API requests give developers access to the different features of the platform using the methods and endpoints (request URIs that allow access to different features or data objects offered through the API) that are provided in that particular software’s API documentation.

View the Sendinblue API documentation

Common Email Marketing API Use Cases

Now that you have a better understanding of what and API is, and more particularly what an email marketing API is, let’s discuss how an email API can be used to help businesses grow and develop better customer relationships.

Power application notifications and transactional messages

Probably the most common reason that businesses will use an email marketing API is to programmatically add email notifications and transactional messages to their website or software tool.

Notifications

Many software tools and websites use notifications to inform users when something happens with their account on the platform. In social media tools like Facebook or Instagram, this could be a new comment or “like” on a post that a user made.

It doesn’t always make sense to send an email for each action that occurs in an application. However, if it’s an action that is more important or time-sensitive and requires the user’s attention, sending an email can be a great mechanism to ensure that the user sees the information in a timely manner.

For an excellent example of how email notifications are built into an application, take a look at the email from Airbnb below:

This email is sent automatically by Airbnb’s website using an email marketing API to remind the user of an upcoming reservation that they made on the platform.

Of course, if you only have one or two customers, it would be possible to send this email manually by logging into an email marketing platform. But to achieve any kind of scale, they require an integration using an email API.

Transactional Messages

If you’ve ever shopped online or made in-app purchases, then you’re probably familiar with transactional emails. These are messages that communicate timely information that is usually related to a specific transaction the user makes on a website or application. The most common example would be an order receipt.

Email marketing APIs let you design beautiful transactional emails and integrate them directly into the functionality of your website so you can get the full potential of a well-designed email instead of just including the bare essential information for customers.

LimeBike uses an email marketing API to send transactional email receipts when funds are added, while also including the customer’s referral code and a nice HTML design.

Sometimes email marketing platforms will offer plugins for the most popular eCommerce CMS systems that make it easier to customize transactional messages without needing the API. For example, Sendinblue has powerful integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify, and WordPress. But, if you’re using a less common eCommerce system, or you’re building a software tool from scratch, your transactional messages can still be customized through an email marketing API.

Customize your activation and growth hacking workflows

Emails can also be useful for boosting engagement with your growth hacking or product engagement workflows. For example, you might want to send an email reminding users to leave a review about a specific product that they purchased. This can be done using an email marketing API to send the message at the most opportune moment so you can generate more engagement and give other customers useful product information.

You can see in the example above how Yelp uses an email marketing API to send out an HTML-designed email that contains dynamic information specific that the user in order to encourage more reviews (improving the core value of their app).

If you rely on specific webhooks on your website or in emails to automate your lead nurturing workflows, you can also use an email API to automate this programmatically.

This leads us to our next point on the list:

Connect other software tools to your email marketing

APIs exist so that developers can connect the functionality of one tool to another. So in addition to connecting your email marketing tool to software or websites that you create, you can also use an email marketing API to connect it with other tools that you use.

Two of the most common types of tools that you could connect are CMS and CRM systems:

• CMS: If you use a CMS to publish content on your website, you can use an email marketing API to automatically send your email contacts an email whenever you make a new post on your site.
• CRM: You can use an email marketing API to automatically sync your email contacts with your CRM tool or set up triggers when contacts meet certain criteria in your CRM to automatically send them emails that you designed in your email marketing platform.

These are just two examples, but if you are using a tool that has an API and you can think of a way that email fits with it, you can programmatically connect it to your email marketing just like that through the API.

Create custom dashboards and reporting tools

In addition to sending emails and syncing contact information, email marketing APIs also let you access email performance statistics. This is helpful if you want to create custom email marketing dashboards or automatically integrate email marketing data into your other marketing reports without having to manually export data from your email marketing platform.

Conclusion

There are many different reasons why someone should use and email marketing API, which is why it’s important to understand what the capabilities are for using one. But, one thing you should always keep in mind when choosing between different email marketing API providers is scalability. You never want to left out in the cold when your business achieves rapid growth and the email API solution you used to integrate with your business can’t keep up (or worse, the price scales beyond what you can afford).

If you’re a website owner or developer looking for an email marketing API that will effectively scale to any volume while keeping a reasonable price tag — check out Sendinblue. Our pricing is based exclusively on the volume of emails you send from the platform (rather than number of contacts), so you can quickly scale your business without worrying about a jump in price.

To learn more about the methods and endpoints available through the Sendinblue API, just take a look at our API documentation.

And for more expert advice, consider joining our monthly marketing tips newsletter:

The post What is an Email Marketing API and Why Should You Use One? appeared first on Sendinblue.

WordPress as a CMS comes with it’s own built-in email function. Which means sending email from WordPress should be a walk in the park, right? Well…not always.

More often than not, emails sent through WordPress experience delivery issues. This can lead to lost business opportunities and frustrated customers.

The good news is that there’s a much more reliable way to deliver WordPress emails. And as you’re about to discover, it’s incredibly easy to set up (no coding required).

This guide will help you understand:

• Why the issue of WordPress not sending emails arises
• The role of a dedicated SMTP provider and why you need one for WordPress
• How to set up and ensure the delivery of WordPress emails with Sendinblue SMTP 

How does WordPress send email?

Out of the box, WordPress uses the wp_mail() function to send emails over your web host’s servers. This default setting pushes email notifications to the website owner and other WordPress users. 

Examples of emails sent by a WordPress site include:

• Contact form messages 
• Password resets and other user notifications
• System and plugin updates
• Order confirmations and shipping notifications (if you’re running an ecommerce site, for example)

Time-sensitive messages like these are what’s known as transactional emails. Not to be confused with email marketing campaigns or newsletters (these require separate email marketing software).

Now let’s understand why it’s not a good idea for your business to rely on these default WordPress email settings.

Why is WordPress email not working?

If you’ve noticed WordPress not sending emails or the contact form not working, there are a number of possible reasons for this. 

Firstly, it could be because the web host server isn’t configured to use the WP mail() function. To fix this, you’ll need to contact your hosting provider directly. But even then, there’s no guarantee your emails will make it to the inbox.

Why? Because ISPs treat emails sent via PHP as suspicious (PHP is the programming language upon which WordPress is built). Spammers often use web host servers to send unsollicited bulk email. 

This harms deliverability rates for others on the same server. The result is WordPress emails going to spam or not getting delivered at all. In the worst case scenario, your domain name could end up blacklisted by certain ISPs.

WordPress email not working can mean missing out on potential business opportunities and damaging your brand reputation.

All this can be avoided, however, once you start using a dedicated SMTP service.

What is an SMTP service?

In short, an SMTP service provides its clients with access to dedicated servers over which they can send and receive emails. 

There are two types of SMTP server.

• SMTP servers for sending personal emails. These typically belong to webmail providers like Gmail and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). 
• SMTP relay servers for sending transactional emails and campaigns to large numbers of recipients. Sendinblue is one such company offering this type of service.

The latter is the one we’re most interested in for sending WordPress emails.

Why it’s better to use SMTP to send email from WordPress

Professional SMTP relay services like Sendinblue are designed to ensure the best possible email deliverability, i.e. landing your emails in the inbox. 

Switching your WordPress SMTP settings over to one of these will drastically reduce the amount of WordPress email going to spam.

Delivering to the inbox in real time is crucial if you’re running a membership site that requires password reset emails and account notifications. Same goes if you’re using an ecommerce plugin and need to get order confirmations out to customers.

Why choose Sendinblue as your SMTP provider

Sendinblue has dedicated infrastructure and a team of deliverability experts working round the clock to ensure users’ emails reach the inbox. 

We also have a rigorous validation process to keep spammers out and protect the sender reputation of users on our shared IPs.

Not only will you have a better chance at inbox placement, you’ll also be able to monitor performance statistics like delivery, open, and click rates. 

Our free SMTP server offers a generous 300 free emails a day which is usually plenty for a small business or blogger to send email from WordPress. 

And if, down the line, you want to start a WordPress newsletter, Sendinblue handles marketing emails as well. No need to seek out a separate service.

How to set up email on WordPress site using Sendinblue’s SMTP plugin

The easiest way for non-technical folks to configure WordPress email settings is with a plugin.

There are plenty of SMTP plugins available, WP Mail SMTP being one of the most popular. 

Sendinblue has a custom-developed WordPress SMTP plugin that lets you override the wp_mail() function to automatically use Sendinblue SMTP.

To fix the issue of WordPress not sending email, here’s how you need to set up your Sendinblue account and configure the plugin.

1. Create a free Sendinblue account

Click the link below to open your free Sendinblue account. It’s quick and easy, no credit card required.

You’ll be asked to verify your email address and provide some basic information about your business. Then you’ll be invited to choose a plan. 

Your choice of plan depends on the volume of WordPress emails you need to send. As already mentioned, the free plan offers 300 emails a day.

Good to know: All new Sendinblue users go through an account validation process which is mostly automatic. Chances are you won’t even notice it. However, some accounts need to undergo manual validation. Don’t worry though, the process will be completed within 24 hours (and usually much faster than that).

Once your account’s created and the profile information added, you’ll arrive on the Sendinblue dashboard.

Welcome aboard! Next we’re going to implement two best practices to help WordPress sending emails.

2. Verify your domain on Sendinblue

The next thing you need to do, an important step for your future email deliverability, is verify your domain on Sendinblue.

This way you’ll be able to electronically sign emails with your domain name (highly recommended).

In email terms we refer to this as the DKIM signature. 

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email security protocol that proves to ISPs you’re a trusted sender. Authenticating your top-level/apex domain with Sendinblue will help prevent emails landing in the spam folder.

Open the settings menu in the top right corner and select ‘Senders & IPs‘.

Go to ‘Domains’ and click ‘Add a new domain‘.

A pop-up will appear. Enter your domain name in the format exampledomain.com without the https:// or www. 

Tick the box ‘I would like to use this domain name to sign my emails‘ and then hit ‘Save‘.

Once saved, a new window will appear with a number of TXT files. These need to be added to the DNS records on the cPanel of your web hosting account. 

Popular web hosts include GoDaddy, Bluehost, OVH, Namecheap, and Siteground.

In a separate browser window, log into your hosting account and find where to add TXT records. The process varies among hosting providers but here you’ll find information for the most common ones:

• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• OVH
• Namecheap
• Siteground

Once you’ve uploaded the TXT records to the DNS, go back to Sendinblue and check if they’ve been configured by clicking ‘Record Added. Please verify it.’

A verified TXT record will display the text ‘Configured‘ in green.

If nothing happens, don’t worry. DNS changes can take 24-48 hours to fully propagate. You’ll just need to check again later.

3. Add email sender information

The next step in customizing your email signature is to add your Sender information. This refers to the From Name and From Email that’ll appear in an email recipient’s inbox.

Don’t skip this step—sender name plays an important role in whether your email gets opened or not.

Your email sender name should be easily recognized to instill reader confidence.

Under ‘Senders & IPs‘, select ‘Senders’.

Here you’ll see the email address used to create your Sendinblue account. This can’t be deleted but you can, of course, add multiple custom addresses associated with your domain. 

Select ‘Add a new sender‘. 

Insert the From Name and From Email, then hit ‘Save‘.

You’ll receive a verification email at this address you just added.

And with that, your DKIM signature will be fully set up. This will help avoid the problem of WordPress emails going to spam.

Now let’s head over to WordPress and install the Sendinblue SMTP plugin.

4. Download the Sendinblue SMTP plugin on WordPress

Log into your WordPress admin dashboard. Go to ‘Plugins‘, ‘Add New‘, then search for Sendinblue in the plugin directory. The first option to appear will be ‘Newsletter, SMTP, Email marketing and Subscribe forms by Sendinblue‘.

Install and activate the plugin.

To configure the settings to send WordPress email with Sendinblue SMTP, select ‘Sendinblue‘ on the WordPress dashboard.

On the welcome page there are two options for connecting the plugin to your Sendinblue account.

As you’ve already created a Sendinblue account, you’ll take the Step 2 option. This requires entering an API key.

To find your API key, go back to the Sendinblue dashboard and select SMTP & API from the main menu on the left.

Copy and paste the API key into the entry field and hit ‘Login‘.

On the next page you’ll be presented with options for additional settings.

Under transactional emails, select ‘Yes‘ to send WordPress email over Sendinblue SMTP. This will override the default wp_mail() function to automatically use Sendinblue.

5. Send a test email

Almost there!

Finally, send a test email to make sure everything’s working properly.

For example, submit a new request via your website contact form. The email should arrive promptly at the destination mailbox as configured in your contact form settings.

Start sending WordPress emails with Sendinblue SMTP

And that’s it. Now you know what it takes to solve the issue of WordPress emails not sending.

Once you start sending over Sendinblue SMTP, your WordPress email notifications should reach the inbox without delay.

But it doesn’t end there for the Sendinblue WordPress email plugin. You can use it do a bunch of other stuff, including:

• Grow an email list with custom subscription forms that can be embedded into posts, pages or sidebars
• Manage and segment contact lists
• Create eye-catching emails with Sendinblue’s Drag & Drop email builder
• Activate marketing automation workflows or access existing workflows in Sendinblue
• Get detailed statistics on email campaign performance

Play around with the plugin to explore all the marketing possibilities.

Hope you found this guide useful. Catch us on Twitter for the latest Sendinblue news and updates.

The post WordPress Not Sending Email: How to Fix This Issue Using Sendinblue’s SMTP Plugin appeared first on Sendinblue.

Luckily, as a WordPress user, there are lots of SMTP plugins that let you configure WordPress SMTP settings without touching a single line of code. Pretty neat, huh?

At Sendinblue we’ve developed a custom WordPress email plugin that enables SMTP for transactional emails. It only takes one simple click to automatically override WordPress’ default wp_mail() function.

But for once, we’re not here to talk about our own plugin. Instead, we’ll be looking at one of the most popular third party plugins: WP Mail SMTP. 

WP Mail SMTP by WPForms is installed on over two million websites worldwide. And best of all, it works a treat with Sendinblue SMTP. 

So if you want your WordPress emails (contact form, user notifications, password resets) to actually make it to the inbox, stay tuned. We’ll show you exactly how to configure WP Mail SMTP settings for Sendinblue, sharing some email best practices as we go. 

Ready? Let’s dive on in.

How to set up the WP Mail SMTP plugin for use with Sendinblue 

PLEASE NOTE Sendinblue is unable to provide customer support for WP Mail SMTP as this plugin is developed by a third party. Should you experience issues with the plugin itself, please contact the WP Mail SMTP support team . As always, we remain available for questions related to the Sendinblue platform.

1. Create a free Sendinblue account

First things first, let’s get you up and running on Sendinblue. Start by creating a free account using the link below. It’s quick and easy, no credit card required.

You’ll be asked to verify your email address and provide some basic information about your business. Then you’ll be invited to choose a plan. 

Our free plan allows for 300 emails a day which is usually plenty for a small business or blogger starting out on WordPress.

Good to know: All new Sendinblue users go through an account validation process which is mostly automatic. Chances are you won’t even notice it. However, some accounts need to undergo manual validation. Don’t worry though, the process will be completed within 24 hours (and usually much faster than that).

Once your account’s created and the profile information added, you’ll arrive on the Sendinblue dashboard.

Welcome!

2. Verify your domain on Sendinblue

The next thing you need to do is verify your domain on Sendinblue. This way you’ll be able to electronically sign emails with your domain name (highly recommended, by the way). In email terms we refer to this as the DKIM signature. 

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email security protocol that proves to ISPs you’re a trusted sender. Authenticating your top-level/apex domain with Sendinblue will help prevent emails landing in the spam folder.

Open the settings menu in the top right corner and select ‘Senders & IPs‘.

Go to ‘Domains’ and click ‘Add a new domain‘.

A pop-up will appear. Enter your domain name in the format exampledomain.com without the https:// or www. 

Tick the box ‘I would like to use this domain name to sign my emails‘ and then hit ‘Save‘.

Once saved, a new window will appear with a number of TXT files. These need to be added to the DNS records on the cPanel of your web hosting account. 

Popular web hosts include GoDaddy, Bluehost, OVH, Namecheap, and Siteground.

In a separate browser window, log into your hosting account and find where to add TXT records. This process varies among hosting providers but here’s links to information for the most common ones.

• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• OVH
• Namecheap
• Siteground

Once you’ve uploaded the TXT records to the DNS, go back to Sendinblue and check if they’ve been configured by clicking ‘Record Added. Please verify it.’

A verified TXT record will display the text ‘Configured‘ in green.

If nothing happens, don’t worry. DNS changes can take 24-48 hours to fully propagate. You’ll just need to check again later.

3. Add your ‘Sender’ information

The next step in customizing your email signature is to add your Sender information. This refers to the From Name and From Email your email recipients will be able to see.

Don’t skip this step—sender name plays an important role in whether your email gets opened or not.

It should be something that’s easily recognized in the inbox (for pointers be sure to check out our article on sender name best practices).  

In the ‘Senders & IPs‘ section once again, select ‘Senders’.

Here you’ll see the email address used to create your Sendinblue account. This can’t be deleted but you can, of course, add multiple custom addresses associated with your domain. 

Select ‘Add a new sender‘. 

Insert the From Name and From Email, then hit ‘Save‘.

We’ll send a verification email to the address you specified. 

And with that, your DKIM signature will be fully set up for best results.

Now let’s head on over to WordPress and set up the WP Mail SMTP plugin. 

4. Download the WP Mail SMTP plugin on WordPress

Log into your WordPress admin dashboard. Go to ‘Plugins‘, ‘Add New‘, then search for WP Mail SMTP in the plugin directory. 

Install and activate the WP Mail SMTP plugin. 

To configure the settings to send email with Sendinblue, go to WP Mail SMTP on the WordPress dashboard.

Enter the email address and sender name your site’s emails will be sent from (i.e. the sender you added to Sendinblue in step 3).

You may choose to force emails to use this From Email and From Name. This allows WP Mail SMTP to override settings from other plugins like WPForms.

Check the box to set the return-path to match the From Email. This way your non-delivery notifications will have a place to go. 

The next step is choosing a Mailer. Select Sendinblue.

You’ll then be required to enter an API key and Sending Domain (i.e. the domain you just authenticated on Sendinblue). 

To grab your API key, pop back over to the Sendinblue dashboard and go to SMTP & API.

Copy and paste the API key into the WP Mail SMTP settings and click ‘Save Settings‘.

5. Send a test email

Almost there!

Finally, send a test email to make sure everything’s working properly.

Select ‘Email Test‘ on the WP Mail SMTP dashboard, enter the recipient email address, and click ‘Send Test‘.

If the email is sent successfully, you’ll receive the following confirmation email.

Start sending WordPress emails with WP Mail SMTP and Sendinblue

You’re all set! Now you can send WordPress contact form emails, user notifications, and other transactional emails over Sendinblue’s SMTP relay. 

No more worrying about legitimate emails ending up in the spam folder. Plus, Sendinblue’s analytics provide detailed statistics on email performance, including delivery rates, opens, and clicks. 

Thinking about launching a newsletter or email marketing campaigns? As a user of both WordPress and Sendinblue, our WordPress email plugin is the best way to get the most out of all our platform features. 

You’ll be able to install WordPress email subscription forms, sync lists and campaigns through your WordPress dashboard, and more. Be sure to check it out.

In the meantime, happy sending!

The post How to Set Up WP Mail SMTP with Sendinblue (+ Tips for Best Results) appeared first on Sendinblue.

Getting website users to sign up for your emails allows you to take the relationship further, from newsletters that keep your brand top of mind to campaigns promoting your latest offering.

This guide will walk you through how to create email subscription forms in WordPress so that you can turn your casual visitors into loyal fans.

Why You Should Collect Email Subscriptions on WordPress

If you’re not asking your WordPress visitors to sign up to your email list, you’re missing a trick. Whatever your business, email marketing can help you build an engaged audience and loyal customer base. 

Growing an email list aids lead generation as it allows you to build on people’s initial interest through targeted campaigns. Setting up a WordPress newsletter is also a way of keeping in touch with your existing audience. For example, bloggers might let readers know about their latest content, while companies can share new products and promotions.

However you plan to use your WordPress email list, the channel offers some serious benefits: 

• People have actively opted in to hear from you

Email subscribers are more than casual site visitors — they were interested enough to want to stay in touch. So, with the right communication strategy, there’s a good chance they’ll bring value for your business. 

• You’re reaching each contact directly

Unlike other channels such as social media, email offers a direct line of communication with the individuals making up your audience. This means they’re not only more likely to see your message but it will also feel more personal. 

• You can be more targeted with your campaigns

When you build an email list, you’re in control of the data. You’ll know how someone signed up, giving an idea of what first attracted them. And you can gather more insights based on how they interact with your emails going forward. This helps you tailor content to your audience and be selective about what you send to which contacts. 

Luckily, launching email marketing for your WordPress site isn’t as complicated as you might think. There are lots of free plugins that make it easy to add email subscription to your website — read on for all the information you’ll need!

Choosing a WordPress Email Subscription Plugin

To collect email signups on your website you first need to find a plugin for creating your opt-in forms and capturing subscriber details. 

The best WordPress email subscription plugin for your site will depend on the functionality you’re looking for. Some focus solely on list building, meaning you’ll still need an email marketing service for sending your campaigns and managing subscribers. 

Sendinblue offers an all-in-one solution for your WordPress email marketing. 

Our WordPress plugin includes a tool for creating subscription forms that you can then easily add to your site. It also has useful features like:

• Captcha protection for forms
• Multi-list subscription so contacts can choose what emails they want to receive
• Customizable success and error messages on forms
• Automated confirmation and double opt-in emails for subscribers

The plugin is free to use and lets you create unlimited forms and store as many subscribers as you need at no extra cost. 

On top of this, you’ll have access to Sendinblue’s email marketing software, including tools for:

• Email creation: Design beautiful emails with the drag-and-drop editor or use one of our 40+ templates. 
• Contact segmentation: Target the right people with your campaigns by dividing up your lists based on subscriber details.
• Automation: Set up emails triggered by specific conditions, including notifications when you publish a new blog post. 
• Campaign analytics: Track performance including open and click rates to understand how subscribers interact with your emails. 

All this is available with the free version, which allows you to send up to 300 emails per day.

Once you’ve set up your Sendinblue account, the steps below will show you how to use the plugin to create an email subscription form in WordPress and start growing your list.

How to Add Email Subscription to WordPress Using the Sendinblue Plugin

With Sendinblue’s plugin, you can set up WordPress email subscribe forms in five simple steps:

1. Install Sendinblue’s plugin on your WordPress site.
2. Create your contact list.
3. Design your form.
4. Complete the form setup, including confirmation messages for subscriptions.
5. Add your form to different areas of your website.

All you need is a free Sendinblue account and you’re ready to get started!

1. Set up the Sendinblue WordPress plugin

Your first task is to install Sendinblue’s free WordPress email subscription plugin on your website. This will allow you to create signup forms directly from your dashboard and integrate them into your site content.   

To install the plugin:

• Log into your WordPress dashboard as an administrator.
• Go to “Plugins” in the sidebar menu, then “Add New”.  
• Search “Sendinblue” to find the plugin “Newsletter, SMTP, Email marketing and Subscribe forms by Sendinblue”.
• Click “Install Now”, then “Activate”.

To finish the setup, click on the Sendinblue plugin tab that will now have appeared in the sidebar menu of your WordPress dashboard. 

Here you can click the button to create a free account with Sendinblue. Or, if you already have one, go straight to the second step — “Activate your account with your API key v3”. Follow these instructions to find your API key, then enter the key and click “Login”.

Now you’ve connected the plugin to your Sendinblue account, subscriber details collected via your forms will sync with your chosen Sendinblue contact lists.

2. Create your contact list in Sendinblue

Before you can start collecting email subscriptions on your WordPress site, you need to create the list you want to add contacts to.

To do this, go to the “Contacts” tab in your Sendinblue account, select “Lists” from the sidebar and click the “Add a new list” button.

Next, give your list a name and click the button to create your list.

Your lists will automatically have columns, called contact attributes, for data like the contact name and email. If you plan to collect other information from subscribers when they sign up, you can add more attributes of your choice. For example, you might add an attribute for “Country” if you want to know a subscriber’s location. 

Any attributes you set up will then be available to use as fields in your WordPress email signup forms. 

This video explains how to add new attributes for your Sendinblue lists:

3. Create your email subscription form in WordPress

Now for the most important step — creating an effective form that will convert your website visitors into subscribers.

Sendinblue’s plugin offers an easy-to-use tool for building your own custom forms directly from your WordPress dashboard. To get started, go to “Forms” and click “Add New Form”.

This will take you to the form builder where you can give your form a name before editing the setup and design. 

The builder includes a HTML editor for customizing your form. But, if you’re not familiar with code, you can easily add elements using the options below the HTML editor. The preview box then lets you see any edits in real time.

For the look of your form you have two options — either use the default styling that depends on your WordPress theme or use custom CSS. Select your preferred method in the “Form Style” section.

Adding fields to your form

When creating your form content, you need to decide what fields you want to use for collecting subscriber details.

By default your form will include fields for name and email but you might want to add more depending on your needs. For example, collecting data like gender or location can help you personalize your email campaigns for subscribers. 

However, your priority should be to keep your form as simple as possible. Avoid asking for too much from the outset, otherwise you risk putting people off signing up at all. It’s also a good idea to only make essential information like email address mandatory. 

To add a field to your form, select the relevant contact attribute from the dropdown in the “Add a new field” section. Options will then appear for editing the field text, as well as choosing if a field should be required. Once you’ve completed the field information, click the “Add to form” button. 

Other customization options

Aside from the form fields, you’ll also find sections for adding other elements including:

• Multi-list subscription

This lets subscribers select their interests or preferences and be added to a corresponding email list.

• Captcha

This will add captcha protection to your form to prevent spambot signups. For more detail, see our tutorial on setting up captcha for your forms. 

• Compliance note and term acceptance

This lets you include details of your privacy policy and a checkbox for subscribers to agree to your terms.

4. Complete the form setup

Once you’re happy with the form design, you need to decide what happens after a signup occurs. 

First, select one or more lists you want to add subscriber details to. You can choose from your available lists in the “Linked lists” section under “Sign up process”.

Next, you have the option to customize what happens on the user side after subscription. 

Setting up the post-signup journey 

Creating a smooth experience for new subscribers will help make a good first impression. And Sendinblue’s WordPress forms tool offers ways to improve the process. 

The options available are under “Sign up process” and include:

• Send a confirmation email

This will trigger an email to each subscriber letting them know they’re signed up to your list. Sendinblue provides a default template for this message, or you can create your own in the “Templates” section of your Sendinblue account. By customizing your confirmation email, you can introduce subscribers to your brand before they start receiving your regular emails.

• Double opt-in

This adds an extra step to the signup process where subscribers must click a link in your confirmation email to complete their subscription. Double opt-in gives contacts the chance to confirm they wanted to sign up, while also preventing invalid addresses. As with the standard confirmation email, Sendinblue offers a default template or you can use your own. For more detail, check out our guide to double opt-in emails. 

• Redirect to URL

As well as sending a confirmation email, you can also take subscribers to a webpage after they fill out your form. To set this up, simply paste the URL of your chosen page, such as a dedicated success or thank you page you’ve created.

You can also edit the text for success and error messages on the form itself in the “Confirmation message” settings.

5. Add your email subscription form to your WordPress site

After putting time into creating your form you’ll want to make sure as many of your website visitors as possible see it. Here are some effective places for maximum visibility:

• Your Homepage
• Your site’s header or footer
• Blog posts, either within articles or as a sidebar 
• The Contact and About pages
• A dedicated landing page

With Sendinblue’s WordPress email subscription plugin, it’s quick and easy to add your form in different places across your website. Below you’ll find instructions for the two possible methods. 

Add your form using a shortcode

If you want to add your form to individual pages or posts on your site, you can use its shortcode.

To find the shortcode for your form, go to the “Forms” tab of the Sendinblue plugin. There you’ll see a list of all your created forms along with their shortcodes. Copy the relevant code then paste it into the WordPress editor for your chosen post or page where you want the form to appear.

Add your form as a widget

To place your form in areas like your site’s sidebar, footer, or header, add it as a widget. 

To do this, go to “Appearance” then “Widgets” in the WordPress menu. There you’ll see the “Sendinblue Widget” in the list of available widgets. To activate it, either drag it to your desired location on the right-hand side or click on the widget to select a location then click “Add widget”.

Once added, give the widget a title and select the form you want to appear. Then, click “Save” to confirm the widget settings.

Tips to Get More Email Signups From Your WordPress Form

Now you know the basics on how to create an email subscription form in WordPress, here’s some ways you can boost its conversion rates. 

Keep it simple

While it’s tempting to use your form to get as much information as possible from subscribers, this can hurt your signup numbers. In most cases you’re better off sticking to the essentials. You can always ask for extra information once the relationship is more established.

Get your pitch right

For someone to hand over their email address, they need to know what’s in it for them. Avoid generic descriptions and instead give concrete examples of the value in your emails, whether that’s being the first to hear your latest updates or getting access to exclusive content. 

Being clear about what subscribers should expect — and sticking to your promise — will also help avoid unsubscribes and complaints further down the line. 

Offer something in return

While in an ideal world people would sign up to your emails purely because they want to hear from you, adding an incentive can help sweeten the deal. Depending on your business, you could give subscribers a piece of downloadable content or a one-off coupon. For more examples, check out these other lead magnet ideas. 

One word of warning though — offering freebies will help build your list faster but you may not get the best engagement from these signups. To make sure you’re attracting the right people to your list, your offer must be relevant to the content you’ll be sending. 

Place your form strategically

Earlier you saw some examples for where you might put your WordPress email signup form. However, the best placement will depend on your website. 

You want to make sure visitors see your form when they’re most likely to sign up. So, avoid pages already focusing on other calls to action that might distract the user. Instead, choose places where your ask is relevant to the content they’re looking at. For example, if someone is reading an educational blog post, they’ll probably be interested in signing up for emails sharing similar tips. 

Learn more about what makes an effective email signup form in the following video:

Start Reaping the Benefits of Your WordPress Email List

By following the steps in this guide, you’ll have your WordPress email subscription form set up in no time. Then, it’s up to you to make the most of it! 

To help you on your way, here’s some more resources to get stuck into:

• 16 Email List-Building Tactics That Work
• 9 Welcome Email Examples to Engage New Users
• Launching Your Small Business Email Marketing Strategy & Tips For Success

The post How to Add Email Subscription to Your WordPress Site in 5 Easy Steps appeared first on Sendinblue.

If you have more than one website you know the struggle I’m about to describe already. Not only do you have to keep content up-to-date on each of these websites, you also have to manage site updates and upgrades, approve updates to plugins and themes, perform security updates, and more.

All that on top of keeping track of passwords for each site and building out the actual functions of your business(es).

All of this is to say that if you’re managing more than one website, you need a tool to keep tabs on everything in one place. 

Setting Up a Multisite Dashboard 

First thing, you need the right tools on hand. One of the best ways to manage multiple websites from one spot is with The Hub.

This WordPress site management tool takes the guesswork out of handling more than one website at a time by offering up a cohesive dashboard with all the things you need in one spot. 

What is The Hub? 

The Hub is a WordPress site management platform that you can use to manage multiple websites. It consists of a set of tools that work together for maximum effect. Some of these tools include: 

Automation

The “Automate” feature makes it so your site’s core files, themes, and plugins can be updated automatically on either a schedule you determine or as they become available. 

Security & site monitoring

Having your site update automatically also means increased security as you won’t be running outdated themes or plugins, which can leave your site open to malware and brute force attacks.

However, The Hub also includes a robust site monitoring feature which scans your site on a regular basis for hacks, blacklists, malware, and other nefarious actions. It can also be used to scan user activity. And should you discover an issue, you can address it immediately with a security fix, bumping a user who misuses permissions, and so forth. 

Uptime monitoring

Along with regular site scans, you can keep tabs on how your sites are performing. The Hub monitors uptime for each of your sites constantly and will send you a message if they go down at any point. You can also view graphs of site speed over time, which gives you a better idea if you need to optimize further. 

Backups

As you might imagine, managing backups for multiple websites can be a pain as well. So if the process is automated, all the better. The Hub comes with 10GB of secure managed backup storage. And if this isn’t enough space, you can upgrade. 

Support

Finally, you can count on robust support from this management tool. So whether you’re having an issue with The Hub itself or with WordPress in general, you can reach out and get the help you need. If you’re really stumped, you can even grant WPMU DEV developers temporary access to the site with the issue so they can fix it for you. 

Best of all, you can manage an unlimited number of sites. And if you’re managing websites for clients, you can use the white labeling features to customize the look of reports regarding security, uptime, performance, updates, and more so everything is always branded and professional.

How to Set up The Hub 

Should you decide to manage your WordPress sites with The Hub, you’ll need to sign up for a WPMU DEV account. Once you do that, you can install the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin. You can do this by logging into your WPMU DEV account, clicking Plugins and then downloading the dashboard plugin. 

Once you’ve uploaded this .zip file to one of your WordPress sites, you can set up the plugin from the plugin installation menu. Once this is installed and activated, you can then connect your website to The Hub. Login normally and click Connect. 

Repeat this process for each of your websites and you’ll then be able to access and manage updates, backups, and security for all of your WordPress sites from within The Hub.

Add in Your Email Marketing Platform 

Users of Sendinblue will be able to easily adapt to using The Hub as a part of their website workflow. After all, Sendinblue encapsulates a variety of marketing tasks including email marketing, SMS marketing, chat support, and CRM.

Depending on the plan you choose, you’ll gain access to many different features including unlimited contacts, A/B testing, white labeling, statistics, Facebook ads, marketing automation, and more. And each of these features can be adjusted, monitored, and controlled all from within the Sendinblue dashboard. 

This is actually similar to other email marketing platforms but has the added (significant) bonus of covering wider territory like FB ads and such.

So, if you’re already signed up here and manage your email marketing in this way, adding in a full spectrum plan for managing your websites is a no-brainer.

Email marketing is so often an integrated part of a website maintenance strategy. And sometimes you can even manage the details within your CMS. Regardless, it’s vital that you’re able to manage each of your email campaigns in one place as well. 

Multiple Site and Multiple Campaign Management Made Easy

Combining the power and versatility of Sendinblue with The Hub means a robust approach to maintain your web presences, online stores, and outreach. It’s a pairing worth celebrating.

Otherwise, you stand to waste a lot of time on website maintenance when you could be spending it on building out your content strategy, reaching out to customers, or planning your next big marketing push. 

Streamline your workflow in any ways you can. From websites to emails to social media, the right tools will prepare you to tackle the strategy parts of your business rather than the in-the-trenches day-to-day management tasks. And that is ultimately the ticket to success.

The post How To Manage Multiple Sites at Once in WordPress appeared first on Sendinblue.

In January 2018, PieSync announced that Sendinblue users could keep in sync their favorite marketing app with other 90 applications. Two years later, the service has evolved greatly. 

Now you can connect Sendinblue with more than 200 business applications:

Plus, new features have been added to the solution: 

• Custom fields mapping: to choose which contact fields should be in sync between the applications. 
• If-this-then-that rules: to decide which contacts to sync and how according to their particular attributes (tags, lists, labels, etc.)
• Health Dashboard: a detailed dashboard of your sync activity

Here you’ll learn more about the benefits of synchronization, how other Sendinblue users are boosting their productivity with PieSync and easy steps to set it up. 

The benefits of synchronization 

Sendinblue is a toolbox with all the elements you need to communicate with your customers through personalized messages and ultimately, convert them into customers and brand ambassadors. 

But as your business grows, you need to add new applications to your software stack. Next to Sendinblue, you might be using Google Contacts, an e-commerce platform, a lead generation app, an accounting tool, and many others.

Every application you use gathers valuable customer insight. What happens when you keep them all together? Here are some immediate benefits: 

No more importing & exporting 

Manually importing and exporting lists of contacts is not only time consuming, it’s also inefficient. Your contacts are never really up-to-date and you leave room for manual mistakes in data. 

PieSync is constantly scanning Sendinblue’s database and your other connected app for changes. If you choose to sync two-way, whenever there’s an update in either application, that change will be available in the other one in real time. 

Maintain your segmentation across tools 

The backbone of segmentation is data. Grouping your contacts according to their interests, lifecycle stage, type of customer or personas, it’s only possible if you have the right data available. 

But going through the manual process of collecting the pieces of data that might be relevant for segmentation, it’s not always easy. Having your marketing tool in sync with your other business applications is a way to automate your segmentation and maintain it across tools. 

Using if-this-then-that rules, you can establish a workflow between Sendinblue and your connected apps to make sure the right contacts endup in the right list. 

Enrich your customer data 

You are using different apps across the customer’s journey and each one of them gathers little fragments of data. But if that data is isolated, it won’t show you a complete picture of your client. Synchronization helps you put all those little fragments together to have rich databases. 

Let’s say you collected a customer’s email address in Sendinblue, their phone number in Google Contacts and their billing address in your accounting app. By having these three apps in sync, you are enriching each database. Plus, you could access that complete view of the client from any app. 

Have your teams aligned towards the same goal 

When your teams are working from separate business tools and managing different data, communication between them can get pretty difficult. If internally your teams are not aligned, the customer will feel it. 

As a customer, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to repeat your story every time another person from a company contacts you. It’s also pretty frustrating receiving communications that are not made for you. 

Data integration is a solution for isolated data and disconnected teams. Having a single source of truth, can be a way to have your teams aligned towards the same goals and help them offer a better experience across the customer’s journey. 

You can easily add your entire team to your PieSync account so they can all access up-to-date and rich contact data whenever they need it. 

How to sync? 

You don’t need to download PieSync or have a team of engineers to set it up. It’s all cloud-based and very easy to set up. Here are the basic steps:

1. Sign up for a free trial with PieSync.
2. Authorize Sendinblue and your other apps 
3. Set your If-this-then-that rules if it’s necessary 
4. Check the contact fields that were mapped by default 
5. Add whichever custom field you need to have in sync. 
6. Forget about import/export ever again!  

Learn more about it in PieSync’s help center. 

Use cases for Sendinblue users 

• Sync Sendinblue and your lead generation tool: to detect hot leads on time and convert them into clients with awesome marketing. 
• Sync Sendinblue and your phone’s address book (Google Contacts, iCloud, etc.): to access up-to-date contact info from wherever you are.
• Sync Sendinblue and your customer support tool: to have a complete view of your client. 
• Sync Sendinblue and your CRM (if you are not using Sendinblue’s CRM yet): To align your sales and marketing teams.
• Sync Sendinblue to any other tool: Because there are hundreds of options! 

In sum 

Sendinblue and PieSync are working together to keep your entire software stack together. Customer data integration will help you get the most out of Sendinblue and the rest of your tools. 

Data integration is one of the biggest challenges companies are currently facing, but it doesn’t have to be a hassle. PieSync offers a simple solution to keep your tools together, according to your needs. It is powered by an intuitive dashboard that you can set up yourself in about 5-minutes.

The post PieSync’s 2-way Sync Between Sendinblue & 200+ Other Apps appeared first on Sendinblue.

The concept of a webhook explained

A webhook is set up to send ‘push’ notifications to a designated URL when activity occurs related to a specific event.

As an example, let’s take ourselves back in time to before the existence of online banking. It’s payday and you want to check if the money has arrived in your account. You call the bank and ask them directly.

Now let’s jump back to the modern day. It’s payday, the money arrives, and the bank server sends a notification to your online account. You didn’t have to call anybody – the information you wanted was sent to you at a specific destination the moment the event occurred.

This pretty much sums up the concept of a webhook. 

How does a webhook work exactly?

Webhooks are a great way to receive real-time updates about web activity that’s important to your business.

The webhook waits for an event to occur in one system or application and subsequently transfers data to another application or system using an HTTP “POST” callback to a destination URL once the specified activity is detected .

This URL has to be public and belong to the receiving system or application. Additionally, it has been specially configured to act as a webhook endpoint so that the system can receive the notification.

What’s the difference between a webhook and an API?

One of the main differences between webhooks and APIs is that APIs work by ‘polling’ – a process by which your server makes a request to the API server to check for new data. Inversely, a webhook sends the data automatically. This is why it’s sometimes called a ‘reverse API’.

This method is far more efficient than constantly checking an application to see if there has been a change – and therein lies the major advantage of a webhook.

Using a webhook to track email marketing activity

Let’s say you’re already using an email marketing service like Sendinblue to manage your email campaigns and subscribers.

Now you’re probably wondering why you’d need webhooks when using an email marketing service that has a comprehensive analytics dashboard. I mean, you can just log in to see how your campaign is doing, right?

True, but consider this scenario: You send an important email campaign and then you leave the application to do other work. In the meantime, it turns out that a large portion of your emails are either bouncing or failing to deliver. By the time you discover the issue, several hours pass and the campaign is beyond saving.

Where the webhook comes in useful here is that it will send you notifications in real-time about your campaign’s progress. 

In this case, if an issue were to arise, you would 1) know about it quickly and 2) be able to jump in immediately to investigate and resolve.

What specific email activity can I track with a webhook?

On the Sendinblue email marketing platform you can set up webhooks to receive real-time updates about the following events:

• Marked as spam
• Opened
• Clicked
• Hard Bounced
• Soft Bounced
• Delivered
• Unsubscribed
• Contact added to a list
• Contact updated
• Contact deleted

You can activate as many of these webhook events as you need.

When an event takes place, the notification is sent with POST to the target URL in JSON format.

Here’s what the notification will look like (taking the ‘Clicked’ event as an example):

{“id”:139911, “Camp_id”:253, “email”:”abc@example.com”, “campaign name”:”Campaign ABC”, “date_sent”:”2019-07-30 11:30:50″, “date_event”:”2019-07-30 11:39:15″, “Event”:”clicked”, “Tag”:”abc”,”ts_sent”:1564479050,” Ts_event”:1564479555, “URL”:”www.example.com”, “ts”:1564466956}

How to set up webhook with a Sendinblue

Setting up a webhook with Sendinblue is easy. Let’s run through the process.

If you haven’t configured a destination URL yet, you can generate a test URL with RequestBin.

1. Once logged in to Sendinblue, navigate to either the Campaigns or Contacts page (depending on whether it’s campaign or contact activity you want to track)”
2. Once on either page click Settings 
3. Select the Webhooks option by clicking Configure 
4. Select +Add a New Webhook 
5. Insert the destination URL and select the events for which you wish to be notified

What can I do with the webhook data after that?

With all these webhook notifications coming at you, you might be wondering what else you can do with the data. 

Quite a lot, actually! You can create reports, synchronize two systems, or use it to trigger automated workflows (like sending a series of lead-nurturing emails to a prospect who clicked on a link).

Imagine your email got a hard bounce due to an invalid recipient address and the webhook endpoint was your company’s CRM application. You could synchronize the two systems so that the email address is automatically deleted from both (luckily, Sendinblue automatically blacklists hard-bounced contacts for you, but you get the idea ;)).

It’s important to remember though that webhooks can only notify you of a change. If you want to take action based on the notification, then you need an API (Application Programming Interface).

For a detailed explanation of how an API works, read our dedicated article.

Wrap up

More and more companies are discovering the benefits of using webhooks to save time and improve customer experience.

Webhooks are great way to get real-time updates on your email campaigns – or any kind of web event for that matter. 

Open a Sendinblue account and try out using webhooks. Not to mention you’ll get 9000 emails per month (or 300 per day) at zero cost. ?

Test-drive Sendinblue’s all-in-one marketing toolbox >>

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The post What is a Webhook & How to use it to Track Email Marketing Activity appeared first on Sendinblue.

How lead scoring works

Building a lead score often happens in marketing automation apps such as Sendinblue. The systems register ebook downloads, email clicks and much more to determine how interested a prospect is in your product or service.

Most leads enter your database as a ‘cold’ lead. This means you have no information about them. The more they interact with you, the higher their score will become. A ‘warm’ or ‘hot’ lead, has a very high chance to become a paying customer. Lead scoring doesn’t always need to go up. If a prospect hasn’t been opening your emails for some time or your sales reps don’t see a lot of opportunities here, a lead score can decrease.

Lead scores are often indicated by a number, although some CRMs use lead stages to score prospects.

In this article, we’ll show you how to connect Pipedrive contact lists in Sendinblue to improve lead scoring. For this product tutorial, you’ll need a PieSync account. Not yet a user? You can try it here for free.

Using Pipedrive contact lists to improve lead scoring

In this quick demo, I’ll show you how to have your Pipedrive CRM & Sendinblue synchronized, bidirectionally. With lead scores being exchanged on top of contact’s data being exchanged.

Setting up your lead scoring

Sendinblue doesn’t provide lead scoring functionality out of the box but rather takes a very straightforward approach where you can set up your own scoring process. I actually prefer this over some magically defined score that other software may come up with. Sure, it takes a little bit of setup, but you are rewarded with full transparency & understanding on how you are qualifying your leads scores.

In my CRM I hold contacts which I can give labels to indicate how I qualify them. Cold lead, warm lead, customer,… You can change the names of these labels if you use different tactics for your business.

For this example, Sendinblue will act as the complete marketing engine with some automated lead scoring happening on the backend of it. When a contact opens an email, or they click on a link inside the campaign, or they visit my webpage, I have this automation tally up a lead score. Based on the lead score going over a certain threshold, the contact moves into a certain list of qualified contacts. This helps me to send them different email campaigns and target them more specifically with interesting offers.

But wouldn’t it be great to have that lead qualification showing up in your CRM? This is where PieSync comes in.

Using PieSync to connect Pipedrive with Sendinblue

If you haven’t yet set up your connection between Pipedrive and Sendinblue, click here.

Take a quick look at the PieSync screenshot above.

The first rule gets my Pipedrive contacts into Sendinblue… or matches up to existing ones.  The second one does the opposite. Move anyone who is a contact in Sendinblue into the CRM.

You may want it to behave differently, but I prefer to have some control over which contacts get created inside my CRM, so I’m turning of that second rule with the small switch on the right.

To sync my lead scores, I can do any number of things. I can point to the list “qualified” since I have the Sendinblue automation drop my contacts in this list as soon as their lead score goes over a certain number. Once they are in that list, I want the right label to be applied in my CRM so my sales reps can spot those prospects easily.

The bottom ‘undo’ toggle will keep the label in sync.

The ‘Other way around’ toggle is quite interesting: anybody labeled as a ‘Warm lead’ in Pipedrive will be put in the ‘Qualified’ leads list in Sendinblue, REGARDLESS of the automation being run.

At the bottom of the PieSync setup, you’ll want to complete the field mapping with things like a full name, or a birthday if that’s something you’re capturing on either end.

If you think about it, there’s much more information you can send back from your CRM into Sendinblue. Are you actively working on a prospect in your CRM? You are logging tasks, calls, emails, … you are opening opportunities? That should be information to incorporate into a Sendinblue automation path. Contact attributes like industry and location can probably also help in lead scoring.

The post Improve lead scoring by connecting Pipedrive contact lists to Sendinblue appeared first on Sendinblue.

Ecommerce tools like WooCommerce make life easier by automating these transactional emails. However, while the generic WooCommerce transactional email templates are functional, they leave much to be desired in terms of design and they don’t add any extra value to your business.

It may be easier to stick with out of box WooCommerce transactional emails, but you miss out on great opportunities in the process. By customizing these messages, you can give your customers a better experience and reinforce your brand at the same time!

But it doesn’t stop there — you should also be using your ecommerce activity to grow your email list with buying customers. Gaining subscribers from ecommerce checkout is a perfect way to sustainably grow your business and send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails. When customers subscribe to your newsletter and email marketing list, you can offer even more value through promotions or educational content. This ensures that they will continue to use your business as an information resource, which ultimately drives sales.

If you want to get the most out of your WooCommerce site, you need to take advantage of one of the WooCommerce plugins for emailing and SMS. These plugins connect your email marketing platform with your ecommerce activity. In doing this, you can strengthen customer relationships and increase ROI on your WooCommerce email marketing campaigns. But how do you know which of these plugins give you the most bang for your buck?

In this article, we will discuss the top 5 WooCommerce plugins for transactional email and SMS. We will help you decide which plugin enables you to make the most out of your e-commerce activity and email marketing efforts.

WooCommerce Plugin Ranking Evaluation Criteria

Before we take a look at the specific plugins, let’s go over the areas that these plugins can help with your business:

…
New Subscriber Acquisition at Checkout
Syncs Purchase Data
Customizable Email Templates
SMS Functionality
Free Plugin Download
Free Transactional Email Functionality

• New Subscriber Acquisition at Checkout: Can customers subscribe to your email list at checkout? The main point of connecting your ecommerce and email marketing is to grow your list of subscribers. Checkout is one of the best times to get new subscribers because they are already engaging with your business by purchasing a product. This guarantees that they have an interest in what you’re offering.
• Syncs Order Data: Can you synchronize your customers’ order data with your email marketing platform? Creating targeted segments allows you to provide the most relevant information to your customers. Using WooCommerce order data to segment contacts is a great way to create these lists. You can use them to offer specific promotions for products that are similar to purchases they have made in the past. You can also recommend new products based on their past behavior.
• Customizable Email Templates: Can you customize your transactional messages in WooCommerce? Sending customized messages is a powerful way to further engage customers. It also provides them an experience that is more consistent with your brand. With customizable templates, you can create more engaging emails that actually add value to your business. You can use them to direct customers to landing pages for feedback surveys, encourage them to refer your business to friends, or even showing them other offerings that they might find interesting.

• SMS Functionality: Can you send SMS transactional messages and campaigns with the plugin? With an average open rate of 98%, SMS is the most effective way to ensure that your customers are receiving the information that you want to send them.
• Price: How much does it cost to use this plugin (including the cost of an account with the associated email marketing platform)? I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this matters, but it’s always good to understand how each tool you use affects your bottom line.

The Top 5 WooCommerce Plugins for Transactional Emails and SMS

Now that you understand the criteria, let’s take a look at the plugins offered by 5 different email marketing companies to help you determine option is best for your WooCommerce site:

#5: AWeber

The WooCommerce plugin for AWeber is the most limited of all the options on this list. The plugin allows for subscriptions on the cart checkout page. But, it doesn’t synchronize order data to make targeted contact lists in your account. Also, you can’t use AWeber email templates in WooCommerce, and there is no SMS support.

The WooCommerce plugin for AWeber costs $29.00 per year (for one site). This makes it the most expensive plugin on the list. AWeber accounts start at $19.00 per month for users with 500 contacts or less.

#4: MailChimp

MailChimp’s WooCommerce plugin is slightly more robust. It includes both email subscription at checkout and order data synchronization. However, you can’t use MailChimp email templates from WooCommerce. So, there is no easy way to personalize the generic WooCommerce emails. Additionally, there is no support for SMS with MailChimp.

Read more: Comparing Mailchimp and Sendinblue

The WooCommerce plugin is free to download. MailChimp also offers a free account for users with up to 2,000 contacts sending less than 12,000 emails per month. But, the free plan does not offer transactional (SMTP) emails or marketing automation functionality. Customer support is not included after the first month for free users either. If you want these features, you need a subscription starting at $10.00 for users with 500 contacts or less.

#3: GetResponse

Like MailChimp, GetResponse’s WooCommerce plugin includes functionality for cart checkout subscriptions. It also synchronizes order data with a GetResponse account for better contact segmentation. But, GetResponse email templates for customization aren’t accessible in WooCommerce. Also, the service does not offer SMS capability.

While the plugin for GetResponse is free to download, GetResponse accounts start at $15.00 per month for users with 1,000 contacts or less.

#2: Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor’s WooCommerce plugin has checkout subscription functionality. The platform also synchronizes the order data from WooCommerce. The platform automatically creates 6 contact lists in your account based on customer buying behavior. The plugin does not include the ability to use custom templates to brand transactional messages, and you aren’t able to send SMS messages.

The WooCommerce plugin for Campaign Monitor is free to download. But, accounts start at $9.00 per month with a limit of 500 contacts and 2,500 emails per month.

#1: Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers the best solution at the lowest price for businesses looking to improve their customer experience. It also supports all the features you expect from a WooCommerce plugin. These include SMS messages (transactional and promotional), email subscription at checkout, and the synchronization of order data with your account.

You can also customize templates in the Sendinblue platform for each of your transactional emails. You can further personalize them with WooCommerce variable placeholders. These automatically pull specific customer and order information into your email from WooCommerce. Once you create your templates, you can choose which messages you want to use them for in WooCommerce.

Common email metrics (deliverability rate, open rate, and click rate) are available in the WooCommerce interface. This makes it easy to track engagement with your transactional messages without leaving your site.

The Sendinblue WooCommerce plugin is free to download. Sendinblue also offers a free account with 9,000 emails per month (300 per day) and no limit on the number of contacts. Additionally, free accounts include SMTP functionality and direct customer service by phone (US and France). Customer service by email is available for all markets and account levels.

Are you ready?

Now that you know more about the tools and features available in the best email marketing plugins for WooCommerce, it’s time to take your business to the next level! Download a WooCommerce plugin to grow your email marketing list, improve your transactional messaging, and give your customers the best possible experience when interacting with your business.

Don’t have a free email marketing account yet? Sign up today.

Happy Sending!

The post Which WooCommerce Plugin is Best for Improving Your Customer Relationships? appeared first on Sendinblue.