Brevo: The honest guide to getting your first email campaign out without getting suspended, banned, or wasting a weekend.
Looking for a Brevo review? If you run an ecommerce business and you have never done a mass email campaign before, this article is for you. Not a sanitised AI slop version. A real one, including the part where we got suspended mid-send, the part where 6% of our list turned out to be dead, and the part where we had to start over with a cleaner dataset and got it right the second time.
We are a small ecommerce supply and homewares website (in fact, buy your packing tape here) with around a decade of trading history. We chose Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) as our email service provider. We had a legitimate reason to email our customers and we had a list of genuine past buyers to contact. What we did not have was any experience of modern email marketing platforms. This article documents what we learned.
Why Brevo? And Why Not Just Use Your Platform’s Built-In Newsletter Tool?
Most ecommerce platforms have a built-in mass mail function. OpenCart, for example, sends in batches of ten, driven by your browser, with no throttling, no bounce handling, no unsubscribe management and no statistics worth having. If you close the tab, it stops. If your mail server chokes, you have no idea. If someone marks you as spam, nothing happens. It is, in short, useless for anything beyond a handful of emails.
Brevo offers a proper sending infrastructure, bounce handling, automatic unsubscribe compliance, open and click tracking, and a free tier that gets you started without commitment. The paid Starter plan, at the time of writing, costs about £30 per month for 40,000 emails and 500,000 contacts. That is one month’s subscription for what could be a very significant campaign. Pay for a month, send your campaign, cancel if you do not need it ongoing.
There are alternatives including Mailchimp, Klaviyo and MailerLite, but Brevo’s pricing structure suits occasional bulk senders like us well.
How to Export Your Customer Email List for a Brevo Campaign
Your customer data is in your database. The built-in customer export tools on most platforms are limited. The right approach is a direct SQL query via phpMyAdmin, which you access through cPanel.
To get every email address from every order placed on your store, including guest checkouts, the query follows this pattern:
SELECT DISTINCT o.email, o.firstname, o.lastname
FROM oc_order o
WHERE o.order_status_id > 0
AND o.email != ''
ORDER BY o.emailIf you can access your cPanel, this is not difficult. Unless you are comfortable with SQL, use Claude or ChatGPT to help you adapt queries for your platform. WordPress/WooCommerce is different to OpenCart. Run the query, export the results as CSV or text, and you have your raw list.
What we had: approximately 31,000 email addresses from orders across years of trading. I’d also included abandoned carts.
Why Your Old Customer List Will Get Your Brevo Account Suspended
Email lists decay at roughly 20–30% per year. Inboxes get abandoned. Domains expire. Businesses close. People change jobs. What was valid in 2021 can be a hard bounce in 2026. Add to that simple typos such as gmial instead of gmail.
We uploaded our full 31,000 contact list to Brevo, built the campaign, and started sending. Brevo sent 917 emails before suspending the account. Of those, 56 hard bounced, a 6.1% rate. Brevo’s threshold for new accounts is around 2%. We were nowhere near acceptable.
You have to jump through a few small hoops and tick a load of stuff on their site to get it unsuspended, but two of those suspensions and they blow you out altogether.
Their support team was polite but clear: the list was too dirty.
The lesson we learned here: a large, old list is not an asset until it is cleaned. It is a liability.
How to Clean Your Email List Before Sending on Brevo
The single most effective step is to filter to more recent customers.
We rebuilt the export using a two-year window:
SELECT DISTINCT o.email, o.firstname, o.lastname
FROM oc_order o
WHERE o.date_added >= DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 2 YEAR)
AND o.order_status_id > 0
AND o.email != ''
ORDER BY o.emailThis reduced the list from 31,000 to 8,814. Smaller, but usable.
Second campaign results 24 hours later:
- Delivered: 8,602
- Open rate: 46.37%
- Clicks: 390 (4.53%)
- Unsubscribes: 188 (2.19%)
- Orders: around 40
- Revenue: just under £4,000
Within Brevo’s thresholds, with hard bounces comfortably under the 2% limit. Campaign completed without suspension.
Use AI to Clean Your Email List Before Importing to Brevo
Before uploading, run your list through Claude or ChatGPT. Remove obvious typos, malformed addresses and duplicates. Common examples include gamil.com, hotnail.co.uk, yahooo.com and outlook.con. Email providers such as easy.com no longer exist, ask your electronic assistant to remove known dead domains too.
This is not a replacement for proper verification, but it will reduce your bounce rate significantly at zero cost.
What to Do With an Old Email List That Fails
All platforms enforce similar bounce thresholds. This is not unique to Brevo.
Use an email verification service. Tools such as ZeroBounce or NeverBounce will identify valid and invalid addresses. Expect to recover 60–75% of a five-year-old list.
Focus on recent buyers. They are the people most likely to convert anyway.
How to Authenticate Your Domain Before Sending
Brevo requires domain authentication via DNS records. Without this, emails look untrustworthy and deliverability suffers.
Use Brevo’s automated setup tool. Wait for DNS propagation and ensure all checks show as verified before sending.
If you are using Cloudflare, this is typically near-instant.
Building Your First Campaign: What Works
Use a simple layout. Avoid templates that look like marketing spam.
Keep formatting minimal. Write like a person, not a brochure.
Use contrast for buttons. A simple orange works well.
Set preview text manually. It matters as much as the subject line.
Test properly. Always check on real devices before sending.
Use a real email address. Not noreply.
Why Brevo Suspends New Accounts
New accounts sending to large lists are reviewed automatically.
If your bounce rate is too high, sending stops. That is what happened to us on the first attempt.
Once we confirmed the list source and cleaned it, the account was reinstated and the second campaign ran without issue.
Understanding the Stats
Opens are unreliable. Apple Mail inflates them.
Clicks are real. Track these.
Hard bounces matter most. Stay under 2%.
Unsubscribes are normal. Expect around 1% on a first send.
What We Would Do Differently
Clean the list before importing.
Start with recent customers.
Allow time for DNS setup.
Only pay when ready to send.
Is Brevo Worth It?
Yes, if you understand the rules.
Keep bounce rates low, use recent data, authenticate your domain, and do not dump a decade of contacts into a fresh account.
Do that and it works exactly as it should. It allowed us to pull £4000 in overnight from existing customers. And those numbers will improve over the next few days as not everyone reads email immediately. It’s basically free money! I think I am a mailing list convert. I am now going down that rabbit hole.
Fancy doing some more learning on the subject? You might want to go and listen to the Hammersley Brothers podcasts. They talk a lot about this stuff. They also have an eBook that is well worth the money ($30 or something) that will teach you all kinds of things that are wrong with your site too. I’m not connected to, or affiliated with them, but it was they who woke me up to email marketing so I thought I’d give them a shout.
If you have any thoughts or opinuions, feel free to use the comment box below.
This article is based on a real campaign run in March 2026. All figures are genuine.