What Is Brevo and How Does It Work for Email Marketing?
You know that feeling when you’re trying to grow your business, and it feels like you need a dozen different tools just to keep things afloat? One for emails, another for customer lists, maybe a third for a little chat box on your site. It gets overwhelming, and honestly, it gets expensive. You just want something that works, something that connects all the dots without needing a Ph.D. in software engineering.
So, what is Brevo and how does it work for email marketing? In simple terms, Brevo is an all-in-one platform designed to handle most, if not all, of your marketing communication from a single spot. It’s built to help you send emails, manage your contacts, and even talk to customers through channels like chat and SMS. The whole point is to give you a complete toolkit to engage with your audience without needing to juggle multiple subscriptions and logins. It brings everything together so you can focus on building relationships, not just sending messages.
Breaking It Down: What Is Brevo, Really?
Alright, let’s get into it. When you first hear about Brevo, you might think it’s just another email marketing service. And sure, it does that, and it does it really well. But that’s kind of like saying a smartphone is just a device for making calls. The real story is about everything else it can do. You might have known it by its old name, Sendinblue, before it rebranded in 2023. The name change was really about showing that the platform had grown far beyond its original purpose. It’s not just for sending emails anymore; it’s a full marketing suite designed to handle the entire customer journey.
Think about all the ways you talk to your customers. You send them newsletters. You reply to their questions on a chat pop-up. You might send them an SMS notification about their order. Normally, these are all separate systems. Brevo’s goal is to unify them. This centralization of information means you have one view of your customer.
You can see who opened your email, who visited your landing page, and who bought a product, all in the same place. This approach helps you communicate with people in a much smarter way because you have the full picture. It’s about making your marketing less fragmented and more cohesive, which saves you a ton of time and helps you build stronger relationships with your audience. The platform lets you automate, manage, and monitor all these different interactions without losing your mind.
More Than an Email Tool: An All-in-One Marketing Platform
Here’s what we mean by “all-in-one.” Brevo isn’t just a tool; it’s a complete toolbox. At its heart is a Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM. This is where you manage all your contacts. But from there, it branches out. You have your classic email marketing campaigns, but you also get marketing automation, which lets you set up workflows that run on their own. For example, you can automatically send a welcome email when someone new signs up. It doesn’t stop there. The platform also includes tools for sending transactional emails—things like password resets or order confirmations.
But the real power comes from the other channels it brings together. You can design and launch landing pages and signup forms to capture new leads directly into your CRM. You can add a live chat or a chatbot to your website to communicate with visitors in real time. It even handles SMS and WhatsApp campaigns, letting you reach customers on their phones.
The idea is to have one platform that can send multichannel messages. By integrating all these features, from the drag-and-drop editor for emails to the automation of campaigns, Brevo lets you manage the entire customer experience from a single dashboard. And with its ability to connect to external tools like Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, or Salesforce, it truly becomes the central hub for all your marketing efforts.
Who Is Brevo Actually For? A Look at the Ideal User
So, who is this platform built for? Honestly, Brevo is a fantastic fit for small businesses, new marketers, and anyone who wants powerful marketing tools without a huge budget. The reason it works so well for this group comes down to its pricing and structure. Many other email marketing platforms charge you based on how many contacts you have on your list. This can be punishing for a growing business. Your bill goes up every time you get more subscribers, even if you don’t send more emails. Brevo flips that around. For the most part, its plans are based on the number of emails you send, not the number of contacts you store.
This makes a huge difference. It means you can grow your audience without constantly worrying about hitting a new pricing tier. You can sign up for their free plan and have an unlimited number of contacts in your built-in CRM. This is perfect for someone just starting out who needs to build a list from scratch. Because it combines email, CRM, automation, and other channels into one affordable package, it helps small businesses compete without having to pay for five different software tools. If you’re a solopreneur, a small team, or a marketer who needs to do more with less, Brevo is designed to scale with you, not penalize you for your growth.
Understanding the Brevo Free Plan and Its Core Offerings
Let’s talk about one of the best parts: the generous free plan. This isn’t one of those limited trials where you get a few features for a week. The free plan is a genuinely useful, long-term solution for getting your marketing off the ground. When you sign up, you immediately get access to the CRM where you can manage your contacts. And as we just mentioned, you can add as many contacts as you want. You also get access to the intuitive interface and the drag-and-drop email editor, which comes with over 50 templates to help you create professional emails quickly.
The free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day. For a business just starting its email marketing campaigns, this is often more than enough. You can set up your account, capture leads with signup forms, and launch your first newsletter without paying anything. The plan also includes access to basic marketing automation, allowing you to set up simple workflows for a small number of contacts. Of course, some advanced features are reserved for paid plans, but the core tools you need to manage contacts and send newsletters are all there. This makes it incredibly easy to take advantage of the platform and see if it works for you. The ability to get started and build your entire system for free is a major reason why so many beginners find it to be a great starting point.
How Brevo Works for Your Email Marketing Step-by-Step
Getting started with a new platform can sometimes feel like you’re standing at the bottom of a mountain. You see the peak, but the path looks confusing. The good news is that Brevo is designed to feel more like a series of small, manageable hills. The entire workflow is logical and follows a natural progression that even a complete beginner can understand. It’s built around a simple cycle: first, you gather your audience; second, you talk to them; and third, you learn from those conversations to make the next one even better. This process strips away the complexity and lets you focus on what really matters: connecting with people. You don’t need to be a tech wizard to make it work.
The core journey can be boiled down to a few key actions: Create, Segment, Design, Automate, and Track. You start by building your contact list inside the free CRM. Then, you can segment that list into smaller groups based on their interests or actions. From there, you design your actual email using a simple drag-and-drop editor. If you want to get more advanced, you can set up automation workflows that send messages for you based on certain triggers. Finally, you launch your campaign and track its performance with easy-to-read reports. Every step is designed to flow directly into the next, creating a smooth and intuitive process. It’s about taking you from having a simple list of names to running a fully automated marketing system, all within one unified environment.
Step 1: Managing Your Contacts Without Feeling Overwhelmed
Everything in email marketing starts with your audience. If you don’t have anyone to talk to, nothing else matters. This is where Brevo’s built-in CRM really shines, especially for beginners. Instead of needing a separate, complicated system to keep track of your customers, you get a powerful contact management tool right out of the box. The best part? You can add as many contacts as you want, even on the free plan. This is a huge weight off your shoulders. You can import an existing list, add people manually, or connect it to your website to automatically capture new sign-ups. The system is built to grow with you.
But it’s not just about storing contacts; it’s about understanding them. Brevo allows you to segment your audience into smaller, more targeted groups. This is where your marketing gets smart. You can create segments based on all kinds of information—where someone lives, how they signed up, or whether they’ve opened your previous emails. For example, you could create a group of “new subscribers” to send a special welcome series to, or a group of “past customers” for a loyalty offer. This process of segmentation is key to personalizing your messaging. Instead of sending the same generic email to everyone, you can tailor your content to fit the specific interests of each group. This makes your emails feel more relevant and personal, which is exactly what helps you build a real connection and get better results.
Step 2: Creating Your First Email Campaign in Brevo
Once you have your contacts organized, it’s time for the fun part: creating your email. This can be intimidating if you’re not a designer, but Brevo makes it incredibly simple. The platform features a clean, visual drag-and-drop editor. Think of it like building with digital LEGO blocks. You have blocks for text, images, buttons, and social media links. You just drag them over, drop them where you want them, and fill in your content. You don’t need to touch a single line of code to create professional emails that look great on any device, whether it’s a desktop computer or a smartphone.
To make it even easier, Brevo provides more than 50 pre-made templates. You can pick one that fits your brand, swap in your own logo and colors, and you’re halfway there. It’s a huge time-saver. And if you’re ever stuck on what to write, the editor even has an AI content generator that can help you come up with subject lines or body text. Once your design is ready, you can personalize your messaging using the information from your CRM. You can add a subscriber’s first name to the subject line or show different content blocks based on their interests. This level of customization helps your email campaigns feel less like mass advertisements and more like one-on-one conversations, which is crucial for building engagement.
Step 3: A Beginner’s Look at Marketing Automation
If managing contacts is step one and sending emails is step two, then marketing automation is where you put the whole system on autopilot. It sounds complicated, but the idea is simple: you create automated workflows that send the right message to the right person at the right time, without you having to manually press “send” every single time. Brevo uses a visual workflow builder that makes this process easy to understand. You set up a series of “if/then” rules. For example: If a person signs up for your newsletter, then automatically send them your welcome email. You can even add delays, like waiting three days before sending a follow-up.
This is where you can bring your customer journey to life. A common and very effective automation is the “abandoned cart reminder.” You can set up a workflow that automatically sends an email to someone who adds a product to their cart on your site but leaves without buying. Another popular one is a simple welcome series that introduces new subscribers to your brand over a few days. These automated workflows are powerful because they are timely and highly relevant to the customer’s actions. They help you nurture leads, recover lost sales, and engage with your audience consistently, even while you’re focused on other parts of your business. Brevo allows you to build these workflows using triggers like email opens, clicks, or even purchases made on your connected website, giving you the power to automate your marketing across multiple channels.
Exploring Key Brevo Features That Help You Grow
As you get more comfortable with the basics of sending emails and managing your lists, you’ll start to see other opportunities to connect with your audience. A great marketing platform doesn’t just do one thing well; it gives you a whole set of tools that work together to help you grow your business. This is where you can begin to explore some of the other key features Brevo offers. These aren’t just fancy add-ons; they are practical tools designed to solve common problems that every small business faces. How do you get more people to sign up for your list in the first place? How do you handle essential messages like order confirmations? How do you talk to people who are on your website right now?
Each of these questions points to a different aspect of the customer journey, and Brevo has a feature designed to address it. From building your audience with signup forms to ensuring critical transactional emails get delivered instantly, the platform extends far beyond the simple newsletter. It even opens up entirely new communication channels like live chat and SMS marketing. Using these tools allows you to create a more complete and seamless experience for your customers. It shows that you’re there to help them at every stage, whether they’re just discovering your brand or are a long-time loyal customer. Let’s look at a few of these features and how they can make a real difference in your growth.
Using Brevo’s Signup Forms to Build Your Audience
You can have the best email campaign in the world, but it’s useless if you have no one to send it to. Building your email list is one of the most important jobs for any marketer, and Brevo gives you the tools to do it effectively. The platform allows you to design and customize your own signup forms without needing any technical skill. Using the same simple editor you use for emails, you can create forms that match your brand’s look and feel. You can decide what information you want to collect—maybe just an email address, or perhaps a name and birthday as well.
Once your form is designed, you can easily embed it on your website. You can place it in the footer of your blog, create a pop-up that appears after a visitor has been on a page for a certain amount of time, or even have a dedicated landing page for a specific campaign. When a visitor fills out the form, their information is automatically added to your contact list in the Brevo CRM. You can even have it automatically tagged or added to a specific segment. For example, if you have a form to download a free guide, you can tag everyone who fills it out as “interested in guide.” This immediately helps you personalize your follow-up communication. These forms are the bridge between your website traffic and your email list, making them an essential tool for capturing leads and growing your audience from day one.
What Are Transactional Emails and How Do They Work?
You’ve almost certainly received a transactional email today without even thinking about it. These are the essential, automated, one-to-one messages triggered by a specific action a user takes. Think about things like password reset instructions, shipping confirmations, or welcome emails right after you create a new account. These aren’t marketing newsletters sent to a large list; they are functional emails that users expect to receive instantly and reliably. For any online business, getting these right is absolutely critical for building trust. If a customer buys something and doesn’t get a receipt, they’re going to get worried.
Brevo has a powerful system specifically for handling these types of messages. It offers a separate transactional email service that uses a robust SMTP relay and API to ensure your messages get delivered with incredible speed and reliability—we’re talking a 99.98% delivery rate in under 20 seconds. You can design these emails to match your brand, just like your marketing campaigns, so the customer experience feels consistent. The system is built to handle a high volume of these emails and provides detailed analytics so you can be sure they are being sent and received correctly. By separating these from your regular marketing campaigns, you ensure that your most critical communications are prioritized and always reach the inbox.
A Quick Mention of Chat and SMS Marketing Features
Email is a fantastic channel, but it’s not the only way to reach your audience. Sometimes, a quicker, more direct approach is needed. This is where Brevo’s multichannel features, like live chat and SMS marketing, come into play. These tools allow you to communicate with your customers in the format they prefer, right when it matters most. For instance, you can add a chat widget to your website. This allows visitors to ask questions and get answers in real time, which can be a huge help in overcoming hesitation and closing a sale. You can even set up a chatbot to answer common questions automatically when you’re not available.
SMS marketing offers another powerful way to cut through the noise. Since people check their text messages so frequently, it’s a great channel for time-sensitive promotions, event reminders, or important updates. Just like with emails, you can manage your SMS contacts and send campaigns directly from the Brevo platform. You can even integrate SMS into your automation workflows. For example, you could follow up an email offer with a text message a day later if the person hasn’t clicked. By combining email with channels like chat and SMS, you create a truly unified communication strategy. You’re able to meet your customers where they are, engage with them seamlessly, and build a stronger, more resilient business.
