SendInBlue Tutorial

This SendInBlue tutorial is to demonstrate how local small businesses can use email marketing automation software SendInBlue to discover new opportunities, get new customers and grow revenue.

Email Marketing Automation is the use of software to create workflows (of automated marketing tasks) with predefined conditions.

When a specific condition is met, the trigger that is linked to the condition will let the email marketing tasks to automatically execute.

SendInBlue is an email marketing automation software which is designed and capable to manage and run automated marketing tasks including the segmentation of contacts into different lists, updating information in your contact database (e.g. lead score), and more.

Email marketing automation becomes a very powerful tool to improve the marketing performance of your small business, when it is integrated with a web form on your website or landing page.

Let’s examine how SendInBlue should be set up for email campaigns and automated marketing with the following topics that we will cover in this SendInBlue tutorial:

• SendInBlue Free Plan and Other Plans
• Register a New SendInBlue Account
• Email Campaigns and Automated Marketing Email Campaigns
• Create a New List
• Import New Contacts
• Set Up a New Campaign to Send Emails
• Create a Form
• Set Up Automation
• Add SendInBlue Tracking Code To Website

SendInBlue offers 5 different plans which are affordable by small businesses.

Free plan

• No cost (i.e. free to use)
• Daily sending limit of 300 emails
• Limited to 2,000 automations
• Compulsory to display SendInBlue logo in emails

Lite plan

• USD 25 per month
• Send up to 40,000 emails per month; No daily sending limit
• Limited to 2,000 automations
• Compulsory to display SendInBlue logo in emails

Essential plan

• USD 39 per month
• Send up to 60,000 emails per month; No daily sending limit
• Limited to 2,000 automations
• Advanced reporting statistics
• No SendInBlue logo is displayed

Premium plan

• Two tiers available for Premium plan
• USD 66 per month for sending up to 120,000 emails per month (i.e. Silver), or USD 173 per month for sending up to 350,000 emails per month (i.e. Gold)
• Includes Facebook ads, retargeting ads, send time optimization, landing page builder (x10 pages), no limit to the number of automations, multi-user access
• Advanced reporting statistics
• No SendInBlue logo is displayed
• A free dedicated IP address is included with the USD 173 option.

Enterprise plan

• It is a custom plan usually for very large demand on sending emails.
• You’ll have to speak with SendInBlue customer service to find out what exactly can be included in the Enterprise plan.

In this SendInBlue tutorial, start with signing up a new SendInBlue account for free.

https://app.sendinblue.com/account/register/

When registering the new account, you will create a free plan account by default.

You can use SendInBlue (or any other similar marketing automation software) to send emails under two different scenarios.

Email campaigns

An email campaign is a one-time email that you set up where the email is sent to the list of contacts that you have specified.

Automated marketing email campaigns (with workflows)

An automated marketing email campaign (with workflows) consists of one email or multiple emails where the emails are sent based on pre-defined rules. The rules are triggered by the actions/activities of the email receivers. Once a specific rule is triggered, SendInBlue executes the required actions.

Before sending an email to your contacts, you must first have a list. A list is where you store your contacts.

Go to Contacts tab, and click Lists on the left side menu.

Click the “Add a new list” button at the top right corner.

Enter your new list name and click “Create an empty list”.

Go to Contacts tab. You have four options to add new contacts.

Add a single contact

You may add a single contact one at a time (which is very time consuming when you have multiple contacts).

Copy/Paste

Under “Import options”, you can copy contacts (i.e. email addresses, names, etc) from your spreadsheet files and have them pasted onto the multi-line field in your SendInBlue account.

Upload a file

Upload the file (usually a spreadsheet file in .csv or txt) and have all the contacts in the file imported to your SendInBlue list.

Signup form

All the previous options let you import your existing contacts into SendInBlue lists.

With this “signup form” option, you will first have to create a web form (i.e. signup form) through SendInBlue, and add this signup form to your website and/or landing page to let your website visitors fill in the form. This way you will get new leads (i.e. email addresses) for your small business.

You may click the “Import contacts” button at the top right corner to import multiple contacts all at once.

When you need to send a one-time email to your contacts (or lists), create an email campaign.

Go to Campaigns tab, and click the “Create a New Campaign” button.

You’ll have to go through the 4 steps: Setup, Design, Recipients, Confirmation.

In the Setup step, enter Campaign Name, Subject Line, From Email and From Name for your new email campaign.

For the “From Email” field, you can use the email address that you’ve provided when you registered your SendInBlue account.

Or if you want to use a different email address as the “From Email” field, you will first have to verify a new email address in SendInBlue. You’ll be asked to confirm the ownership of your email address.

In the Design step, choose how you want to create/edit your email:

• Drag & drop editor: Create a mobile-friendly email that looks great on any device or screen size.
• Rich text editor: Use the rich text editor to create simple emails.
• Paste your code: Copy and paste your HTML code.

In the Recipients step, add a list to your campaign.

In the Confirmation step, review your email campaign, and click the Schedule button.

You’re given 3 options.

• Send it now. You can send your email immediately.
• Schedule for a specific time. Select a future time when your email should be sent.
• Send it at the best time. This “Send time optimization” option is only available for the Premium plan and above. SendInBlue will automatically optimize the time to send your email for the best results.

SendInBlue would manually validate all the new accounts that are to launch any new email campaigns. It may take 24 hours for the verification to complete. You may be required to reply to emails that are sent to you from SendInBlue customer support agents. Once your account is verified and approved, you are allowed to start sending emails or start your marketing automation campaigns.

Go to Contacts tab, and select Forms (on the left side menu).

On the Forms screen, click the “Create a new subscription form” button.

Now set up your new form in the setup phase.

Enter a Form name. (e.g. Contact us)

Create the design layout of your form.

You can customize your form by adding title, text, images, dividers, attributes, Captcha, etc, and can change the style of the form with background colors, form’s container height and width, buttons, alerts, spacing, etc.

Assign a list to your form. You can create a new list, or assign a previously created list to your form.

Under settings, select one of the following:

• No confirmation email
• Simple confirmation email
• Double confirmation email

Let’s say you’ve selected Simple confirmation email, you need to select an email template (i.e. confirmation email to send to people who have submitted the form). In this case you may select to use the Default Template Simple confirmation, or create your own confirmation email.

Check “Confirmation page after submitting the form. You can select to use the Default Thank You Page, or enter your own thank you page URL. This means the person who have successfully submitted would be taken to your thank you page.

This is messages that your subscibers would see depending on their actions. You can use the default messages, or create your own. The default messages are:

• Success message: Your subscription has been successful.
• Invalid user information: The information provided is invalid. Please review the field format and try again.
• Error message: Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
• Empty field: This field cannot be left blank.
• User already exists in the system: Email address already exists.

Under the Share section, copy the code of your form, and have it pasted onto your web page (or landing page) i.e. The page on your website that the form should appear.

You can use one of the code versions: Iframe, HTML, or simple HTML,

Now click “Done” and your form is ready.

With SendInBlue automation, you can:

• Welcome users with a series of messages.
• Retarget email clickers or openers.
• Track specific actions your website.

The workflow of a basic automation:

• Entry point: Add an entry point to your automated workflow.
• Condition: Wait for a condition to be met.
• Action: The action done for you, automatically.

How SendInBlue identify the contacts? It’s done in one of the two methods:

Method 1: Cookie identification

SendinBlue drops a cookie to contacts who click a link in your email/emails which takes them to your website.

For the cookie to work, you must add a script to your website to let allows SendinBlue to identify your contacts when they visit.

Method 2: Identify Function

SendinBlue lets you automatically identify your customers/users who have logged in to your website.

By passing a small piece of code, they’ll then be identified in SendinBlue automation.

Let’s start setting up.

Go to the Automation tab, and click the “Create a new workflow” button.

You can select from one of the automation workflow types:

• Custom workflow: Mix and match triggers, conditions, and actions to create a custom workflow.
• Welcome Message: Send a welcome email after a subscriber joins your list.
• Anniversary Date: Send an annual email or series of emails based on a special event or birthday.
• Page Visit: Send emails after a contact visits a specific page on your website.
• Website Event: Send emails after a contact performs a specific action on your website.
• Product Purchase: Send emails when a product is purchased on your website.
• Marketing Activity: Send emails based on whether contacts open or click on an email campaign.
• Transactional Activity: Send an email based on whether contacts open or click on transactional emails.
• Abandoned Cart: Send an email after a contact abandons a cart.

Select the Welcome Message workflow.

Select a list.

Enter a time period (e.g. 2 days) for the workflow to wait before continuing.

For the welcome message, you can use one of the default templates, or create a new email template.

Click “Done” to complete your welcome message automation workflow setup.

For marketing automation to work best, you need SendInBlue to be able to identify your contacts when they visit your website / landing pages. This capability is cookie based.

To enable cookie, you must add the SendInBlue tracking code on to all pages of your website.

Go to the Automation tab, and select Settings on the left side menu.

Click “Tracking code”.

You can install the tracking code using one of the three methods.

• JS Tracker: This is a standard JavaScript code.
• Plugins: This is for websites that are built on website builders e.g. WordPress, etc.
• Google Tag Manager (GTM): You can install through GTM.

In this case, select the JS Tracker. Copy the code.

Add the code in the head section of your pages.

Click the “Verify” button to confirm if the code is working fine.

Regarding SendInBlue email marketing automation tool, I have written a Chinese version of this article.

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