Our review of Sarbacane

Sarbacane is a Made in France tool that has been present on the emailing software market since the 2000s, and enjoys a good reputation. A few years ago, they acquired the Datananasprospecting tool.

The cost of Sarbacane is substantial, but the tool provides access to an important layer of services, as well as webinars in French, and educational content. If you’re just starting out in email marketing and you’re looking for tips on how to get started in the right direction, this could be a tool to shortlist.

In this article, we tell you everything you need to know about Sarbacane!

My opinion of Sarbacane in a nutshell

The benefits of Sarbacane

• Excellent user experience (UX): easy to get to grips with and use the tool, thanks to personalized support right from the start of your free trial, and a helpcenter rich in educational content (webinars and thematic sheets).
• Really satisfying features: very good reputation, especially for its good deliverability rate (thanks to the spam filter and NPAI lists), particularly for transactional emails. We also appreciate the ability to run email AND SMS campaigns (not offered by all software), and the advanced automation features.

Sarbacane’s drawbacks

• The service comes at a price: even though all our offers include an unlimited number of contacts (which is rare on the market), prices are still very high (1st plan at 69 euros per month…). If you have a light marketing email flow, it’s still affordable, but once you’re looking at 3 or 4 emails per month per contact, it quickly becomes expensive.

Sarbacane: Features at a glance

Email campaign creation

Sarbacane offers several options for creating your email campaigns:

• Choose an email template from over 70 responsive templates in the template library.
• Import templates in HTML format.
• Create your own template from an empty structure.

Once you’ve chosen your template, the second step is to personalize your message. Sarbacane’s template editor is very comprehensive and easy to learn, thanks to its efficient drag-and-drop system.

Sarbacane offers a high degree of customization thanks to a range of pre-configured layouts and themes. The mail editor also lets you add all kinds of blocks (text, images, videos, banners, social networking buttons, etc.).

All blocks can be modified to customize the alignment mode, borders, width, line spacing, spaces between blocks or font.

Email campaign automation

Marketing automation is quick and easy to get to grips with. And what’s more, you can integrate email AND SMS triggers into the same automated series to multiply your prospects’ open rates.

You can choose between creating a brand new campaign or starting from an existing one. The A/B test extension lets you try out different versions of your email on different samples of contacts to identify which performs best.

Differences between the two versions may concern the email subject, the sender’s name, or the content of the email (layout, position of call-to-actions, etc.).

Sarbacane can even determine the “winning” version according to your criteria and automatically send it to the rest of your contacts after a defined test period.

Once you’ve set up your campaign, Sarbacane offers a checklist to ensure that everything is ready and configured correctly. You can also test the delivery of your email campaign.

Contact management

Contact lists and segmentation

You can create as many contact lists as you like, and for each list import your contacts from an Excel file, a MySQL database or by copying and pasting an e-mail list.

The tool detects duplicates and corrects syntax errors and unknown domain names in your contact list (e.g. transforming “.yaoo.com” into “.yahoo.com”).

To segment your lists, create attributes: gender, age, department, etc. Sarbacane lets you create as many columns of information as you like, and if you have the first names of your contacts, Sarbacane will automatically determine their gender.

Sarbacane systematically displays all NPAI, unsubscriptions and complaints in your interface (in the Blacklists category). It’s a great way to maintain your reputation and clean up your contact lists on an ongoing basis.

Lead generation tools

Sarbacane landing pages can be easily edited and customized using drag and drop. They can be integrated into your email and SMS campaigns, or dedicated exclusively to SMS promotions.

Sarbacane also provides a form editor. Everything is integrated to create simple, attractive registration forms. Once edited, you can integrate these forms into your website to obtain e-mail subscribers.

Sarbacane can also update your existing databases, create questionnaires for your subscribers, and double opt-in to qualify your contacts.

Reporting

Sarbacane’s reporting functions enable you to measure the results of your campaigns and fine-tune your communication strategy.

In the Statistics section, you will find various key indicators for decision-making:

• Results, with key performance indicators (open, click, bounce, complaint and unsubscribe rates) and performance comparisons between computer and mobile openings.
• Behavior tracking with a table containing the recipients’ mailing list and several columns with their actions or behaviors.
• Geolocation and its interactive map, with users’ origins and links to the URLs of the sources from which they accessed it.

Sarbacane’s little plus: SMS marketing

The development of an SMS marketing campaign follows the same guidelines as an email campaign: importing contacts, selecting recipients, developing the message and testing/sending.

Sarbacane allows you to create two types of SMS campaigns:

• Marketing campaigns (promotions, event invitations, etc.)
• Notification campaigns (appointment reminders, order confirmations, etc.)

Sarbacane also enables you to create web pages adapted to mobile reading, which you can redirect SMS recipients to.

The Sarbacane integration marketplace

Sarbacane offers a limited catalog of integrations, with just 22 extensions available (where Sendinblue or ActiveCampaign offer dozens more). But the few integrations available are very qualitative.

You can access :

• Tools to synchronize your contacts: CRM(Hubspot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics) and Ecommerce (Magento, Prestashop, Shopify)
• Tools to enhance your campaigns: Youtube (video insertion), Google Maps (sky view map insertion)
• Tools to ensure deliverability: SpamAssassin

What’s more, Sarbacane offers Zapier integration to connect the tool to hundreds of other tools.

Customer reviews of Sarbacane

Many users appreciate Sarbacane’s functionalities, intuitive ergonomics, service and customer support. But some customers have complained about the presence of numerous bugs, especially in view of its high price.

Customer support at Sarbacane

Sarbacane offers a wealth of customer services. The Help Center search bar lets you search through all the resources available. Sarbacane offers numerous articles on a wide range of subjects to help its customers.

Sarbacane offers video tutorials on its website, and the Sarbacane Youtube channel features a large number of instructional videos.

Sarbacane even offers its customers the chance to attend live webinars hosted by the company’s training coaches, on a variety of subjects. On certain subjects, Sarbacane organizes up to 2 webinars a week.

And if all these resources aren’t enough to solve your problem, or if you have any questions about using the emailing software, customer service can be reached by contact form, telephone, chat and email (Monday to Friday, 9am to 12:30pm and 2pm to 6pm).

More generally, Sarbacane’s entire offering is geared towards providing personalized customer support. In particular, the company offers appointments with its coach-trainers to assess customers’ entire emailing strategy.

Sarbacane: prices

We regret that Sarbacane’s price list is not publicly available. To access it, you need to create an account with a professional email address.

Sarbacane offers 3 different plans:

• The Essential plan starts at 89€ / month to send up to 5000 emails / month. It provides access to the essential functions of the tool, in their basic version. Advanced A/B testing, advanced automated campaigns, landing pages and popups, and collaboration tools are not available. By way of context, with an equivalent functional scope, a solution like Sendinblue would enable you to send up to 20,000 emails for €20/month.
• The Premium plan starts at €189/month to send the same volume of emails (5000 emails/month). Premium gives access to advanced features, popups and landing pages. If you want to send up to 25,000 emails/month, you’ll still need to pay €269/month. This would be roughly equivalent to the Sendinblue premium (€49/month).
• The Exclusive plan starts at €309/month for 5,000 emails/month. Essentially, it gives access to a dedicated Sarbacane coach, more users (up to 10), and several domains and dedicated IPs. It’s worth noting, however, that for such a low volume of shipments, these features are of little interest. The real rates start a little higher: €449 / month for 50,000 emails, for example.

Sarbacane offers a 30-day free trial, during which our teams will get in touch with you to show you the software and its possibilities, and guide you towards your first campaign.

You can also benefit from a 20% discount on the rates shown below by committing to an annual subscription. Overall, it’s expensive. But the support and guidance we offer will save you precious months of learning if you’re just starting out.

The main alternatives to Sarbacane

Sendinblue: for those who want similar functional depth, a quality customer experience and attentive customer service… for 2 to 3 times less. Please note, however, that Sendinblue’s support team is always on hand to help you with any technical problems you may have, but it’s not their job to help you design your campaigns.

Active Campaign: for small businesses looking for an all-in-one marketing & sales software package, and who don’t have too high a contact volume.

Zoho Campaigns: if you’re willing to put aside the need for personal training and support, have simple email campaign needs and want value for money.