We are going to show you how to connect your store to Brevo, which is an email sending and marketing service, so you can send transactional emails, build your list, and send professional campaigns. 

Connecting Brevo Email Marketing

There are many email marketing platforms out there that include Brevo, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Mailerlite, etc. We have tested all of them and came to the conclusion that Brevo is the easiest to use and most cost-effective. If you want to use a different mailing provider, then you can create an account with them and install their integration plugin to get started.

But to make your life easier, we are going to use Brevo which we use for all of our clients.

Most email marketing platforms can turn very expensive, and then they only provide the necessities. With Brevo, you can create a free account that will power up your email accounts to send emails to your customers without having to worry about emails landing in the spam folder. 

Brevo gives you up to 300 emails that your store can send per day for free. These include your transactional emails, notification emails, and marketing emails. We have clients who are still to this day using the free version of Brevo.

We will also have to verify your domain name, which unfortunately is something that all online store owners need to do in order to improve the deliverability of their emails. It does not matter if you use Shopify, Wix, Woocommerce, or any other e-commerce platform; you will always have to verify your domain name. We do not recommend using a shared sender domain that some companies use because other online stores use the emails for spam purposes, which reduces the trust and deliverability.

By creating your own sender email address with a verified domain name will allow you to rest easier at night knowing your clients are receiving their emails directly into their inboxes. You can read this article to learn more about email deliverability.

With Brevo, you can also start to grow your email list automatically, which is something most store owners ignore from the beginning. We have already installed Brevo for you, and all you have to do is create a free account on their website and then connect your store with them.

Create and Connect your Brevo Account

Here is how to get started. Under Store emails, click on the link labeled “Brevo Email Marketing,” which will take you to a separate page. This page will tell you exactly what to do and some of the benefits that you will get.

First, click on the green button labeled “Create an account,” which will open the registration form in a new tab. Give your personal email address and type in your password, and then click on the grey “Create an account” button.

Go through this process to create your free account with Brevo and then return to your dashboard once you are finished.

Now that your account is created, you need to add your API key from Brevo on the backend of your store. Go to the top right bar labeled “Private” or that of your business name and then click on “SMTP and API”.

Once the page has loaded, you then need to go to the tab labeled “API Keys” and then click on the grey button labeled “Generate a new API key”. Next, type in the name of your company or website and then click on generate.

Copy the key and store it somewhere safe on your desktop. Once you have copied the key, you then need to go back to the dashboard of your website and go to “Brevo email marketing”. Go to step 2 and paste the key into the input bar, and click login.

You will notice that the page will change once your account is connected and will give you an overview of the most important data, such as the email credits that you have left for that day and where you can sync your email list.

Under transactional emails, you should choose “yes,” and then you will see that you need to choose a sender for the emails. Currently, we can only select a free Gmail account, which is not going to work. We need to be able to select the email that we created for the notifications.

In order to do that, we need to verify your domain name with Brevo to add your email address. To verify your domain, you need to log in to your Brevo dashboard and then click on your account name located in the top right corner. Go to where it says “Senders, domains & dedicated IPs”.

Next, you need to go to the tab labeled Domains to choose from your domains or click on the button labeled “add a domain” if you do not have any domains added yet. You will then have to enter the name of your domain. We will show you how to do that. Remember to remove any prefixes such as www or https and only add the name.

You will then be presented with 2 options to authenticate the domain. You can either do it yourself or ask someone else to do it for you. It is very easy to do, and we will show you how, but if you do not feel comfortable enough to do it, then you can select the option for someone else to do it for you and then click on continue.

You can use the email support@digivalie.com and then click on “Send request”. We will receive an email from Brevo with instructions on how to do it. We usually do it within one or two working days (excluding Saturdays and Sundays), but if you have some free time over the weekend to do it yourself, then we will show you how.

Go back to your domain and click on authenticate. Select the option to do it yourself and click on continue. You will be given 4 records that include the Brevo code, 2 DKIM records, and a DMARC record. Brevo has also written a tutorial on how to verify your domain name.

Open a new tab in your browser and then enter your domain name, and then add /cpanel after it to open your cPanel account. We have already sent you your cPanel username and password within the initial welcome email.

Once you have logged into your cPanel account, you can scroll down to the section labeled “Domains” and then click on the link labeled “Zone Editor”. The next step is to select the domain that you want to verify and then click on the button labeled “manage” (if you cannot find your domain, then you need to connect it to your cPanel account). 

Wait for the screen to load, and then you will see all the records associated with your domain. The first step is to add the Brevo code. To do that click on the “Add record” button to the right of the screen.

Select TXT under the record type. Under the name, we are going to add the domain name because cPanel does not accept an @ key. Under TLL, we are going to leave the value as default. Now we need to add the record itself. Click on “copy Brevo code” and paste the record into the value field. Once all the fields are added, you can click on the “save record” button.

The next step is to add the two DKIM records by following the same process of copying the values over. We will show you how to do it.

Next, you need to delete the current DMARC record. To make it easier to find, we need to select TXT under the filter and type in dmarc into the filter by name field. Scroll down until you see the record that starts with “_dmarc” and your domain name. The DMARC name will also be pointing to the record labeled as “v=DMARC1; p=none;”. You should then delete it once you have found it.

Once you have added all the records, you can go back to your Brevo account and press the “Authenticate this domain” button to start the process. You will see a message that will say that the process can take up to 48 hours.

You can go through the records to see if there are any errors. If everything is OK, then you can go back to the domain, and you will notice that it is labeled as being authenticated. Now that your domain is authenticated, we can add an additional sender to your account.

To do that, go to “senders” and then click on the “Add sender” button. In the from name, add the name of your store. In this case, we are going to add the name “Sonneblomkind” as the name. The customer who will receive this email will see your name.

Under From email, we need to add the email address that is going to send all of the automated emails and customer notifications of your store. We have already created an email account for it, and we called it notifications. Let’s add the email to the field and then click on “add sender”.

You will notice that the sender was added and it is now verified. Next, go back to the dashboard of your website and go to Brevo email marketing. You can now select the sender that you have just added.

To test the email, you can send a test email to one of your personal accounts. If you can find the email inside your inbox, then you know your email is set up correctly.