Brevo Marketing Automation: Complete Guide to Workflows

Last Updated: August 2026

Marketing automation has evolved from simple autoresponders into sophisticated systems that can coordinate email, customer data, transactional messaging, and multiple communication channels. For small and mid-sized businesses, however, the challenge is finding automation software that is powerful enough to handle real customer journeys without becoming unnecessarily expensive or difficult to manage.

Brevo is positioned in this space as an all-in-one customer engagement platform combining email marketing, automation, CRM, transactional messaging, SMS, WhatsApp, and other communication tools.

This guide examines Brevo’s marketing automation capabilities, including workflow triggers, segmentation, behavioral automation, CRM integration, transactional messaging, pricing, and practical setup considerations.

Quick verdict: Brevo is particularly suitable for small and mid-sized businesses, ecommerce companies, and growing brands that want email automation combined with CRM and multichannel communication. Its main appeal is the breadth of functionality available from one platform. Businesses requiring highly specialized enterprise-level automation, extremely advanced customer-data orchestration, or a particular ecosystem integration may find alternatives such as ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, or Klaviyo better aligned with their needs.

Brevo Marketing Automation: Quick Scorecard

Category	Rating
Ease of Use	4.3/5
Marketing Automation	4.4/5
Deliverability Tools	4.5/5
Multi-Channel Features	4.4/5
CRM Integration	4.2/5
Value for Money	4.6/5

These ratings are editorial assessments based on feature breadth, usability, pricing structure, and suitability for typical SMB and ecommerce use cases rather than laboratory benchmarks.

What Is Brevo Marketing Automation?

Brevo marketing automation allows businesses to create automated customer journeys based on events, contact attributes, campaign activity, and other behavioral signals.

Instead of manually sending every follow-up email, marketers can create workflows that perform actions automatically.

For example:

Website visitor → Sign-up → Welcome email → Wait → Engagement check → Follow-up → Customer segment

An ecommerce workflow could look like:

Product viewed → Add to cart → Cart abandoned → Reminder → Purchase → Post-purchase email

The advantage is consistency. Once the workflow has been properly configured, the system can execute repetitive communication without requiring someone to manually monitor every contact.

Brevo’s current automation capabilities include workflow-based marketing automation, segmentation, contact management, and event-driven actions. Automation quotas vary by plan; for example, Brevo currently lists a 2,000-contact automation limit on Free and Starter plans, while Standard provides unlimited contacts in active automations.

Core Brevo Features

1. Email Marketing and Drag-and-Drop Editor

Email remains the foundation of most marketing automation strategies, and Brevo provides a visual drag-and-drop editor for creating campaigns and templates.

The editor is designed for users who do not necessarily want to write HTML manually. Businesses can build emails using content blocks, images, buttons, text, and other elements, then reuse templates for future campaigns.

Brevo also provides responsive email templates and reusable sections, making it easier to maintain consistent branding across campaigns.

Dynamic Personalization

Personalization can be used to make automated messages more relevant.

Depending on the data available in the account, marketers can use contact information, attributes, segmentation, and behavioral data to tailor communications.

For example:

Welcome messages can use a subscriber’s name.
Ecommerce emails can reference products or customer activity.
Different segments can receive different offers.
Re-engagement workflows can target inactive subscribers.

The important distinction is that personalization should support relevance rather than simply inserting a first name into an email.

2. Multi-Channel Campaigns

One of Brevo’s differentiating characteristics is that it extends beyond traditional email marketing.

The platform supports multiple customer communication channels, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, and web push, although availability varies by plan and feature.

SMS Marketing

SMS can be useful for time-sensitive communication such as:

Promotions
Appointment reminders
Order updates
Limited-time campaigns
Customer notifications

SMS pricing is generally separate from standard email pricing and depends on message volume and destination.

WhatsApp can be valuable for businesses whose customers already use the messaging platform for communication.

Brevo’s current Professional offering includes WhatsApp campaigns and transactional messaging.

Web Push

Web push notifications provide another way to reach subscribers who may not be actively checking email.

Brevo currently includes web push capabilities beginning with Starter, with different subscriber limits depending on the plan.

Live Chat

Businesses can also use chat functionality as part of the broader customer engagement strategy. This can be useful when automated marketing needs to transition into human assistance.

The broader benefit is having several customer communication functions within one ecosystem instead of maintaining a completely separate platform for every channel.

3. Marketing Automation and Workflows

This is where Brevo becomes particularly useful for businesses that want to move beyond one-off newsletters.

A workflow generally consists of three components:

Trigger → Conditions → Actions

Common Automation Triggers

Depending on the configuration and available integrations, workflows can respond to events such as:

A contact subscribing to a list
An email being opened
A link being clicked
A contact entering a segment
A website or ecommerce event
A purchase
Cart activity
Contact attribute changes

Example: Welcome Workflow

A simple welcome workflow might be:

Contact subscribes.
Send welcome email.
Wait two days.
Check engagement.
Send educational content.
Move engaged contacts into a marketing segment.
Send a promotional message later.

This approach is generally more useful than sending the same sequence to every subscriber because the journey can adapt to customer behavior.

Abandoned Cart Automation

For ecommerce businesses, abandoned-cart workflows are one of the most practical applications.

A typical sequence could be:

Cart abandoned → Wait 1 hour → Reminder → Wait 24 hours → Incentive or product reminder

The objective is not simply to send more emails. It is to send the right message at a useful point in the customer’s journey.

Lead Scoring and Behavioral Segmentation

Lead scoring can help sales and marketing teams prioritize contacts based on engagement or other criteria.

For example, a business could assign greater importance to contacts who:

Repeatedly open campaigns
Click product links
Visit important pages
Submit forms
Interact with specific campaigns

Businesses should be careful not to confuse engagement with buying intent. A highly active subscriber is not necessarily a qualified sales lead.

4. Sales CRM and Pipeline Management

Brevo also combines marketing capabilities with CRM functionality.

This can be useful for businesses that want marketing activity and sales information in the same environment.

A typical sales process might look like:

New lead → Qualified → Proposal → Negotiation → Won/Lost

CRM functionality can help teams organize contacts, deals, tasks, and sales activities.

The practical benefit is reduced fragmentation. A company may not need one application for newsletters, another for customer records, and a third for basic sales pipeline management.

However, companies with complex enterprise sales operations should evaluate whether Brevo’s CRM capabilities match their specific requirements before replacing a dedicated CRM.

5. Transactional Email and SMTP

Marketing emails and transactional emails serve different purposes.

Marketing emails are promotional or informational campaigns, while transactional emails are generally triggered by customer actions.

Examples include:

Password resets
Order confirmations
Shipping notifications
Account verification
Payment confirmations
System notifications

Brevo provides SMTP relay functionality for websites and applications. It can also incorporate external data, such as order information, into transactional messages.

Developers can configure SMTP credentials or use Brevo’s API capabilities to connect applications to the platform. Brevo advises securely storing SMTP keys because newly created keys are not fully displayed after creation.

Deliverability Considerations

No email platform can guarantee inbox placement.

Deliverability depends on multiple factors, including:

Domain reputation
Sending behavior
Subscriber engagement
List quality
Authentication
Content
Bounce and complaint rates

Brevo supports domain authentication using mechanisms including DKIM and DMARC. Its current authentication documentation also uses a Brevo verification record to establish domain ownership.

Brevo Pricing Model Explained

One commonly repeated description of Brevo is that it charges primarily according to email volume rather than simply charging more because a company stores more contacts.

There is an important nuance in the current pricing structure.

Brevo’s paid plans are organized around monthly email volume, but the selected email volume can also determine the contact-storage tier. Therefore, it is more accurate to describe Brevo as email-volume-oriented pricing with contact limits that vary by plan and volume tier, rather than saying every paid plan has unlimited contacts.

Free

Brevo currently offers a free plan with:

$0 monthly cost
Up to 300 email sends per day
Up to 100,000 stored contacts
Email and SMS campaigns
Transactional email and SMS
Drag-and-drop editor
Basic reporting
Limited marketing automation

The Free plan is useful for testing the platform, but the daily sending limit can become restrictive for an active marketing program.

Starter

The Starter plan currently starts from $9/month and removes the daily sending limit. Email-volume and contact-storage tiers apply, while features such as web push are also available.

Standard

Standard currently starts from $18/month and adds features such as unlimited marketing automation contacts, A/B testing, advanced reporting, AI send-time optimization, and landing-page functionality.

Professional

Professional is designed for higher-volume marketing teams and currently starts from $499/month, with significantly larger sending and contact-storage allowances plus advanced capabilities such as AI segmentation, contact scoring, additional push functionality, WhatsApp campaigns, analytics tools, and other features.

Enterprise

Enterprise uses custom pricing and is designed for organizations with more advanced requirements, higher-scale operations, and enterprise-level controls.

Pricing changes over time, so businesses should verify current pricing before making a purchasing decision.

Pros and Cons

Pros

1. Broad Customer Engagement Toolkit

Brevo combines email, automation, CRM, transactional messaging, SMS, and additional channels in one ecosystem.

2. Strong Value for Growing Businesses

The platform can be attractive to SMBs that want several marketing functions without immediately adopting multiple specialized products.

3. Useful Transactional Email Infrastructure

SMTP and API options make Brevo relevant not only to marketers but also to developers building websites and applications.

4. Practical Automation

Visual workflows can automate repetitive customer journeys such as welcome sequences, engagement follow-ups, and ecommerce communications.

5. Flexible Entry Point

A free plan allows businesses to test core functionality before committing to a paid subscription.

Cons

1. Free Sending Limit

The Free plan’s 300-email-per-day limit can become restrictive for businesses with larger campaigns.

2. Advanced Features Require Higher Plans

Some capabilities, including advanced automation, analytics, landing pages, and certain multichannel functionality, are tied to higher tiers.

3. Pricing Requires Careful Evaluation

Because contact limits and available features vary by plan and email-volume tier, businesses should evaluate both their monthly sending requirements and database size rather than comparing headline subscription prices alone.

Brevo vs Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign vs Klaviyo

Feature	Brevo	Mailchimp	ActiveCampaign	Klaviyo
Pricing approach	Primarily email-volume oriented; contact limits vary by tier	Primarily contact/audience-oriented plans	Contact-based pricing	Contact/profile and usage-oriented pricing
Free option	Yes	Availability/features vary	Trial/limited offers vary	Limited free tier
Contact storage	Depends on plan; Free currently supports up to 100,000	Plan dependent	Plan dependent	Plan dependent
Email automation	Strong	Strong	Very strong	Very strong
SMS	Yes	Yes, availability varies	Yes, depending on plan/region	Yes
WhatsApp	Available on selected Brevo plans	Limited/market dependent	Available through integrations/features	Available through supported capabilities
Built-in CRM	Yes	Limited CRM functionality	Sales CRM available	Primarily marketing/customer-data focused
Ecommerce focus	Good	Good	Good	Excellent
Transactional email	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Best suited for	SMBs and multichannel users	General marketing	Advanced automation	Ecommerce and customer-data-heavy brands

The best choice depends on the business model. A Shopify-focused ecommerce company with sophisticated customer segmentation may prioritize Klaviyo, while a company seeking broader CRM and automation capabilities may prefer ActiveCampaign. Brevo is particularly compelling for businesses looking for a broad set of communication tools in a single platform.

How to Set Up Brevo Marketing Automation

Step 1: Create Your Account and Sender Identity

Create a Brevo account and configure your business information.

Before launching campaigns, establish a professional sender address using your business domain rather than relying on a generic personal email address.

Then create and verify the appropriate sender identity.

Step 2: Authenticate Your Domain

Domain authentication is one of the most important technical steps before sending marketing email.

Brevo currently supports authentication through DNS records including DKIM and DMARC, alongside a Brevo verification record.

The process is generally:

Open your Brevo domain settings.
Select the domain you want to authenticate.
Choose automatic authentication if available.
Otherwise copy the DNS records supplied by Brevo.
Add the records through your domain provider.
Return to Brevo and verify the domain.

DNS changes can take time to propagate. Brevo notes that manual authentication may take up to 48 hours to appear as fully authenticated.

A properly configured authentication setup helps receiving providers verify legitimate email and protects against domain spoofing.

Step 3: Import and Segment Contacts

Import your existing contacts using the supported import options.

Do not simply upload every address you have collected. Marketing lists should be based on appropriate permission and lawful collection practices.

After importing, organize contacts into useful segments.

Examples:

New subscribers
Existing customers
High-engagement subscribers
Inactive contacts
Ecommerce customers
Leads
High-value customers

Better segmentation generally produces more relevant automation.

Step 4: Build and Test Your First Workflow

Start with one straightforward automation instead of building a complicated customer journey immediately.

A good beginner workflow is:

Subscription → Welcome Email → Wait → Engagement Check → Follow-Up

Before activating it:

Check every email.
Test links.
Verify personalization fields.
Confirm timing.
Test unsubscribe functionality.
Review mobile formatting.
Confirm sender information.
Check the workflow’s entry and exit conditions.

Once the workflow is live, monitor engagement, bounces, unsubscribes, complaints, and conversions.

Automation should be treated as an ongoing optimization process rather than a set-and-forget feature.

Who Should Use Brevo?

Brevo is a strong candidate for:

Small and medium-sized businesses
Ecommerce businesses
Startups
Agencies
Businesses wanting email plus CRM
Companies needing transactional email
Teams interested in SMS and other channels
Budget-conscious businesses consolidating marketing tools

It may be less suitable for organizations that require extremely specialized enterprise marketing orchestration, highly sophisticated data infrastructure, or a platform optimized almost exclusively around ecommerce lifecycle marketing.

Final Verdict

Brevo’s biggest strength is not a single automation feature. It is the combination of email marketing, workflow automation, CRM, transactional messaging, and multichannel communication in one platform.

For an SMB, that consolidation can simplify the technology stack and reduce the need to purchase several separate tools.

Its pricing structure is also worth considering, particularly for organizations whose database grows faster than their monthly email volume. However, buyers should look beyond the headline “pay per email” message because current plans combine email-volume tiers with contact-storage limits and feature restrictions.

For most growing businesses, the sensible approach is to begin with the simplest plan that supports the required sending volume and automation features, then upgrade when operational requirements justify it.

Overall verdict: 4.4/5

Brevo is a strong all-around option for businesses that want practical marketing automation without assembling a large collection of separate marketing, CRM, and transactional-email tools.

Ready to Explore Brevo?

If Brevo’s combination of automation, email marketing, CRM, and multichannel communication matches your business requirements, you can explore the platform and compare its current plans before making a decision.

[Insert Affiliate Link / CTA Button]

Editorial note: This article is intended to provide independent software analysis. Pricing, features, limits, and plan availability can change, so readers should verify current details directly with Brevo before purchasing.