SendinBlue is a marketing software company that keeps on growing.
They now offer a free chat functionality and a Shopify eCommerce email plugin worth a look. The email marketing company is especially interested in creating and expanding functionalities for its small and medium-sized business market and eCommerce clients. And these seems to fit right in there.
SendinBlue was founded in 2012 and now has over 80.000 users in more than 160 countries. SendinBlue offers SaaS solutions for email marketing, marketing automation, SMS marketing, landing pages, and other customer engagement solutions. Like now the addition of live chat. For more about Sendinblue, a review, and their pricing, check out our SendinBlue review.
Chat, customer service, and Conversational marketing
By using chat functionality, prospects and customers can be serviced quickly if they have questions. Obviously chat is being used for a lot of customer service. Chat is also used for marketing and sales conversion purposes. Called Conversational marketing, it gives it a place in a marketing product suite.
SendinBlue now adds a live chat functionality for their users for free. Avoiding the need for their customers to add a separate chat tool like for instance intercom to their site or eCommerce shop.
There are different types of chat functionality. Roughly we could identify three types: automated chatbots and live chat and hybrid solutions – where the chatbot has an initial contact that can be taken over by an employee if needed. The chatbot catches the first questions and switches to live chat after. SendinBlue Chat is a live chat variety.
The new SendinBlue free chat feature, how does it work?
With the free live chat functionality, you can chat with your leads and customers as they visit your website.
Live chat is pretty easy to set up and customize to fit your brand. Change colors, add your business name and logo to match the styling and design of your website. It works through a code snippet, paste it in your website code and the chat app is live.
Because the SendinBlue free chat is part of the SendinBlue suite, marketers can make some interesting combinations.
For example, you answer the chat questions directly from the SendinBlue inbox. This is the central platform in SendinBlue for handling all messages.
You get to see additional information about the lead or customer who enters into a chat conversation. You can see which pages the customer visited. This is useful in the conversation. If a visitor opens the chat from a product page, you can approach the conversation commercially and promote specific products. If the question comes from a service page, take a more service-oriented approach. The lead doesn’t have to say which pages they visited, they are serviced more quickly.
One feature that stands out with the SendinBlue free chat is the support of team collaboration. Assign specific calls to different agents in the team and distribute the workload. Customers receive answers to questions and you make better use of the expertise of the team.
The chat feature of SendinBlue is free for all users. Other email service providers like Mailchimp also offer live chat functionality, but in most cases not for free.
eCommerce and Shopify
Statista reports that retail e-commerce sales are to 3.53 trillion US dollars worldwide in 2019. Projections for e-retail revenues in 2020 is over 6.54 trillion US dollars. ECommerce is one of the most popular online activities worldwide (source: Global retail e-commerce sales).
So eCommerce has been booming in recent years and Shopify is along for the ride.
Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms in use today with over 1000.000 customers in 175+ countries. With Shopify, online retailers set up their shop including features to deal with payments, marketing, shipping, and customer engagement.
It is logical that SendinBlue wants to increase it’s Shopify user base. For one the little fall out between MailChimp and Shopify last year that actually resulted in MailChimp removing their Shopify plugin. So a lot to gain and eCommerce is definitely a part of a healthy omnichannel strategy, both in B2B and B2C.
What does the SendinBlue Shopify eCommerce email plugin do and how does it work?
As a lot of Sendinblue users are active in the field of eCommerce, it is a logical step to bring this new Shopify eCommerce email plugin to the market. The plugin fits with the other eCommerce system integrations like WordPress / WooCommerce, Shopware, and the Magento plugin.
There is a growing set of integrations available through the SendinBlue integrations marketplace. With different website CMS, CRM, and Analytics integrations. Alex from SendinBlue wrote a piece on what the best WordPress email marketing tool looks like. One of the most important parts? Full integration.
SendinBlue Supports Shops with Sexy Shopify plugin to Send and Synchronise email and data.
The SendinBlue Shopify plugin provides an integration between the Shopify eCommerce solution and the marketing tool.
Some examples of automated eCommerce emails that are very effective:
- Send Abandoned Basket emails to recover lost revenue
- Automated product recommendations
- Send price drop emails and back in stock emails
For more examples about eCommerce emails read our guide to ecommerce email marketing.
- Use the Shopify eCommerce email plugin to synchronize all the customer data with the email marketing tool. This makes importing and exporting lists a thing of the past.
- Use of integrated signup forms for list building. Another functionality of the SendinBlue Shopify eCommerce email plugin for eCommerce marketers to save time.
- Create segments in SendinBlue for targeted triggered mailings. For example, based on order behavior or the behavior of customers on the website. The email engine can now be used to immediately send transactional and marketing emails to different target groups. This also includes automated campaigns with emails and SMS messages.
Some examples of automated eCommerce emails that are very effective:
- Send Abandoned Basket emails to recover lost revenue
- Automated product recommendations
- Send price drop emails and back in stock emails
For more examples about eCommerce emails read our guide to ecommerce email marketing.
By Marcel Nanning
Marcel is founder of www.b2bmarketeers.nl and a b2b marketing specialist with a passion for content marketing and marketing tooling.
