Repositioning itself as an all-in-one sales and marketing platform, European email campaign leader Sendinblue hopes to supercharge SMB growth around the world.

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June 6th, 2019

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In early June, Sendinblue unveiled what is probably the biggest update to its product and brand since the company was founded in 2012. From the very beginning, Sendinblue has always aimed to help SMBs grow. Now, the French scale-up has added a collection of new marketing and sales features to help new businesses get off the ground, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, Facebook ads, retargeting display ads, live chat, and collaborative mailboxes for teams.

- 50% OF SMBS HAVE NO MARKETING STRATEGY -

The goal is clear: with more than three million SMBs and 30 million online consumers in France alone, digital channels present a huge opportunity for business development. The only issue is that small businesses don’t always have the human and financial resources to seize these opportunities. While building digital visibility is now vital for SMBs, 50% still don’t have a clear digital strategy in 2019. “Business and marketing demands have seen a real shake-up recently, especially because big players and web giants (such as Amazon) have begun to dominate the market in the last five years, raising customers’ expectations along the way. We’ve kept a close eye on these shifts, which inspired us to develop a suite of tools to help companies boost their growth and close the gap (Armand Thiberge, CEO of Sendinblue).” This gap is quite large considering more than 48% of global GDP is achieved by SMBs.

- NO MORE STRESS TRYING TO CONNECT DIFFERENT TOOLS -

Another thorny issue is when a company wants to manage all of these digital interactions with their customers, but they’re forced to manage them across a jumble of complicated software that doesn’t fit together. With the development of these new features, Sendinblue intends to become the platform of choice for SMBs looking to manage all their customer relationships across every digital channel (Facebook, their website, email, display or through commercial interactions, etc.). “Many of our customers would ask us how to connect their tools to our product, especially their various customer databases (CRM, chat, etc.)” Sendinblue is now making their lives much easier by bringing all these tools under one roof. Email is still a core feature of the product, but it’s now even more powerful because it fits into a larger overall communication strategy, and backed up with complementary marketing and commercial actions. “For example, after generating a list of prospects who have registered for your newsletter through a Sendinblue form on your website, you can reach out to them via email, then target them with display advertising. You can then use this contact information to reach a larger audience on Facebook by creating a list of potential customers whose profile is similar to your list of prospects. And after that, why not follow up with leads stored in your Sendinblue CRM using automated messages or assigning different team members directly in the tool so they can call them individually?”

- GOING HEAD-TO-HEAD WITH AMERICAN GIANTS SALESFORCE AND HUBSPOT WITH AMBITIOUS POSITIONING -

With this new brand identity, Sendinblue is sending a clear message on where they’re headed. After acquiring its largest German competitor last January, the European leader is now targeting a wider market beyond email marketing. They’re going up against strong competitors in the form of Hubspot, Salesforce and, as mentioned before, Mailchimp. This comes directly after the latter, the world’s leading email marketing provider, announced their repositioning as an all-in-one marketing platform. “We know that we’re facing an ambitious challenge, but we feel confident and the initial signs are very positive. Alongside Mailchimp, we are the first to offer such a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for small and medium-sized businesses. But, unlike our competitor, our pricing strategy is still affordable and tailored to the means of small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve already seen a positive impact in our business following the steep hike in their prices.”

- RECONCILING FAST GROWTH WITH PROFITABILITY -

Despite trends over the last few years, the history of scale-ups has shown that it’s possible to achieve both fast growth and profitability. With more than 20 million in revenue for 2018, more than 30,000 accounts created every month, 80,000 customers spanning 150 countries, and over 250 employees across three continents (US, Europe, Asia), Sendinblue’s performance indicators are looking very positive indeed. But what really makes this French business so special is its constant desire to seek profitability, while still maintaining high-speed growth. This stands in stark contrast to the frantic race for funding so common in the startup ecosystem, especially among companies in the B2B software market. Sendinblue raised 30 million in a single fundraising round back in 2017, which was earmarked for the preparation of this new positioning (as well as for product development and growing the teams internally.) The French scale-up has never strayed from its original principles: by using only a small portion of its funds, Sendinblue expects to return to profitability by the third quarter of 2019. As a master of scalability and profitability, this new European leader will definitely be shaking up the SaaS landscape, posing a new challenge to the historic dominance of American companies in Europe.

New features:

CRM: https://www.sendinblue.com/features/crm/
Facebook Ads: https://sendinblue.com/features/facebook-ads/
Retargeting: a tool that targets visitors to a site or web page with a display advertising campaign. This targeted advertising helps convert website visitors into customers.
Shared Inbox: a collaborative inbox that teams can use to manage and assign interactions with customers. Colleagues manage emails, text messages, and chat together on a single platform.
Live Chat: https://www.sendinblue.com/features/chat/

About Sendinblue

Sendinblue was founded by Armand Thiberge in 2012. A graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, Thiberge met his business partner while volunteering for an internship program in India. Seeking to encourage entrepreneurship, he launched Sendinblue to provide new businesses with effective, yet affordable marketing tools. After much initial success, Sendinblue raised 30 million euros in September 2017 to accelerate R&D and reinforce its teams, which now include more than 250 employees based in global offices located in New Delhi, Seattle, Paris, and Berlin.

Press contacts

Jean-François Kitten

+33 (0)6 11 29 30 28 Email: jf@licencek.com

Clarisse Lazerges

+33 (0)9 72 33 47 63 Email: c.lazerges@licencek.com

Ilinca Spita

+33 (0)6 64 75 12 99 Email: i.spita@licencek.com

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