Great Alternative to Mailchimp, The Best Newsletter Option for Publishing We've Found
August 28, 2015
Great Alternative to Mailchimp, The Best Newsletter Option for Publishing We've Found
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SendinBlue
We use SendinBlue for our weekly newsletter blasts that go out to our subscriber base. A few people on our team are responsible for the creation of newsletters, updating the subscriber base, etc. We searched for a long time for a email newsletter option that had significant capability for editing layout (important because our readers are very sensitive to design), where it was easy to manage subscribers, and had possibility to integrate into our website for signup. In addition, we wanted to be able to have single opt-in.
- Layout options and editable layouts. Many newsletter options we tried didn't have too much capability for layout, which could be fine for e-commerce but not for publishing.
- Clear reporting on the dashboard, and per newsletter sent out.
- Pricing: the only option we found that charges for emails sent vs. subscriber base. As we do not send emails every day, just once a week, we felt unfairly priced at our send rate with many competitors.
- Would like to have emails sent directly from our server (without extra charge). We noticed recently emails now come from sendinblue.com vs. a server with a series of numbers so this is a definite improvement!
- Would like to see our actual subscriber base number (total minus blacklist)
- Was initially difficult to figure out how to create newsletter signup to match the layout of our website but eventually our developer figured out a workaround.
- Sometimes when you click on the editing box, you end up going out to the hyperlink specified instead of edit box, this is sometimes annoying.
- Our previous mail client didn't sent all the emails within a short time frame which caused issues for us in terms of our advertisers. Switching to SendinBlue was very helpful in this aspect, and the ease of creating and editing newsletters have made us much more timely with our newsletter blasts.
- MailChimp,Reachmail,Mad Mimi
MailChimp was much more expensive with the same or fewer options on the back end as SendinBlue; and requires double opt-in which is not ideal for us. ReachMail is cheaper but is truly non performing in terms of reliability of website, editing capabilities, delivery, etc. You get what you pay for (or don't pay for). Mad Mimi looked nice on the outset but did not have many options to edit layout or create your own.