Sendinblue Automation: What Actually Works (Not the Marketing Pitch)

I've rebuilt the same onboarding automation in Sendinblue (now rebranded as Brevo) three separate times for three different SaaS products, and every single time the biggest problem wasn't the tool - it was that the team building it had no idea what trigger should fire first. Sendinblue automation is genuinely capable software, but almost nobody uses it at even 30% of its potential, and that's not a knock on the platform. It's a knock on how most teams approach automation: they build a workflow, ship it, and never touch it again.

This article is not a feature tour. You can get that from the Brevo homepage itself. What I want to walk through is what actually happens when you try to run real marketing automation sendinblue-style at scale - the workflows that convert, the ones that quietly rot, and the mistakes I've watched teams make repeatedly.

What Sendinblue Automation Actually Is (And Why the Rebrand Matters)

Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo a few years back, and if you're still searching "sendinblue automation" today, you'll land on Brevo's site - same product, same automation engine, new name. The core idea hasn't changed: you build workflows using a visual, drag-and-drop editor where a trigger (a contact joining a list, clicking a link, abandoning a cart, hitting a custom event) kicks off a sequence of actions - send an email, wait, check a condition, send an SMS, update a contact attribute, or push data to a CRM.

What sets it apart from a pure email tool is that automation sendinblue workflows aren't limited to email. You can branch into SMS marketing sendinblue campaigns from the same workflow canvas - something Mailchimp historically bolted on less elegantly. If you're running a SaaS product with a mobile component, or you need a hard reminder to land (trial expiring in 24 hours, payment failed), SMS inside the same automation logic is a real advantage, not a gimmick.

How to Set Up Email Automation Workflows in Sendinblue (The Part Everyone Skips)

The setup itself is straightforward: pick a trigger, define entry conditions, add your steps, set your exit conditions. Where teams get it wrong is entry conditions. The message is wrong, the offer is wrong, and the contact unsubscribes.

The workflows that actually convert follow a specific pattern:

• Trigger tied to a real behavioral event, not a static list membership (e.g., "completed onboarding step 2" rather than "signed up")
• A condition split within the first 24 hours that checks whether the contact actually opened the previous email - dead branches for non-openers, not just repeats of the same message
• An exit condition tied to the actual goal (activated a feature, upgraded, booked a call) so people don't keep receiving "come back!" emails after they've already converted
• A fallback SMS step for time-sensitive triggers only - trial expiration, failed payment - because SMS marketing sendinblue campaigns have a real cost per send and shouldn't be used for anything that isn't urgent

If you want a deeper breakdown of which email sequences actually move the needle for SaaS onboarding specifically, I've written about this in more depth in our piece on email automation strategies that actually convert - the trigger logic there applies directly inside Sendinblue's workflow builder.

Sendinblue Automation Triggers and Conditions: What I'd Actually Use

Not all triggers are equal in value. Here's how I rank them for SaaS specifically, based on what actually drove retention in the workflows I've built:

The custom event trigger is the one that separates teams doing real marketing automation sendinblue-style from teams just sending scheduled newsletters with extra steps. It requires someone on your team to fire events via the API when a user does something meaningful in-product. Most teams never do this, which is why most of their "automation" is really just a fancier autoresponder.

Sendinblue Automation vs Mailchimp Automation: The Honest Comparison

I've run both platforms for different clients over the years. Here's where I land, without the hedging:

• Contact-based pricing vs email-volume pricing: Sendinblue/Brevo historically prices around email volume sent rather than pure list size, which can be a real advantage if you have a large but low-frequency contact list - you're not paying to "store" contacts you rarely email. Mailchimp's model has shifted over time and tends to penalize large lists more directly. Always check current plan details directly on each vendor's site before committing, since both have changed pricing structures more than once.
• SMS built natively: Brevo's SMS marketing sendinblue capability sits inside the same automation builder as email. Mailchimp requires more workaround or third-party integration for this.
• CRM overlap: Brevo now bundles a lightweight CRM and transactional email, live chat, and automation in one platform - genuinely useful if you're a small SaaS team that doesn't want five separate tools.
• Design polish: Mailchimp's template editor and automation visualizer still feels more refined out of the box. Brevo's is functional, not beautiful - fine for practitioners, less fine if your team cares about drag-and-drop polish.

Neither wins outright. If you're a SaaS founder who needs CRM, SMS, and email automation in a single stack without stitching four tools together, Sendinblue/Brevo's bundling is the more practical choice. If your team lives and dies by beautiful email design and you already have SMS elsewhere, Mailchimp still holds its ground.

Common Mistakes in Sendinblue Marketing Automation

These are the failures I see repeated across nearly every account I've audited:

1. No exit conditions. Workflows keep running long after the goal has been met, annoying converted users with irrelevant nudges.
2. Static segmentation only. Lists built once and never refreshed based on behavior - this is the fastest way to tank deliverability, since inactive contacts drag down engagement rates over time.
3. One automation trying to do everything. A single 15-step workflow that handles onboarding, upsell, and re-engagement all at once, instead of three focused workflows each doing one job well.
4. Ignoring SMS cost discipline. Adding SMS steps to low-urgency messages just because the feature exists, burning budget for marginal lift.
5. Never revisiting workflows after launch. This is the big one. Automations decay. Product changes, pricing changes, your ICP shifts - and the workflow built eighteen months ago is still sending messages tuned to an old positioning.

If you're seeing churn spike a few months into your customer lifecycle, it's worth checking whether your automated lifecycle emails are even still relevant to what you're actually shipping - we go deep on this pattern in why SaaS churn spikes after month 3.

Best Practices for Customer Journey Automation with Sendinblue

Treat every workflow as a hypothesis, not a finished product. The teams that get real value from automation sendinblue tools review their workflow performance monthly, not once at launch. Look at where contacts drop out of a sequence, not just open and click rates in aggregate - that drop-off point tells you exactly where your message stopped being relevant.

As Brevo positions it directly: it's built to be "the most intuitive all-in-one customer engagement platform: email and SMS marketing, automation, CRM, live chat, and transactional email" - the value isn't any single channel, it's how they connect. - Brevo

That connectedness is the real reason to pick this platform over a point solution. But it only pays off if your CRM data feeds the automation logic - which is exactly why integrations matter. If your CRM is separate, look at how tools like the Sidely integration with Sendinblue/Brevo sync contact segmentation directly from your CRM into your email campaigns, rather than managing two disconnected contact databases.

And if your growth stack is starting to sprawl - five tools, three of which overlap - it's worth stepping back and auditing the whole thing rather than adding automation on top of automation. That's the exact conversation we walk through in our guide to optimizing your growth stack ROI.

Where Automation Alone Won't Save You

Automation fixes delivery and timing. It does not fix a weak offer, a confusing onboarding flow, or a product that doesn't retain users past the first month. I've watched teams pour weeks into perfecting a Sendinblue workflow while the actual in-app experience - the thing the emails are trying to nudge users toward - was the real leak. If you're scaling and your automation keeps getting more sophisticated but retention doesn't move, the problem usually isn't the tool. Check our breakdown on scaling SaaS without breaking the user experience before you add another workflow branch.

There's also a content-side parallel worth mentioning here: automation only works if people actually find you in the first place. If your acquisition funnel depends on organic search and you're not showing up, no automation sequence downstream matters. This is where a tool like Forgr comes in from a different angle - it builds a network of niche-focused content sites that link back to your main site, building the kind of topical authority that gets you found by Google and cited by AI answer engines, without you needing deep SEO expertise. It's a different layer of the funnel than email automation, but the two compound: more qualified traffic in, better-triggered automation to convert it.

Sendinblue/Brevo automation is a genuinely solid engine. The gap is almost never the software - it's the discipline to build focused workflows, review them regularly, and kill the ones that stopped working six months ago.