Brevo vs Mailchimp: Which One Wins Back Dormant Customers

If you're weighing up Brevo vs Mailchimp, you probably don't need yet another newsletter tool. What you need is to know which of the two will help you pull revenue out of a database that's currently asleep: contacts who bought once and then vanished. Looked at through that lens, the comparison changes quite a bit, because reactivating a dormant contact is nothing like emailing someone who already follows you.

Reactivation has three precise requirements. Win-back automations that fire on their own at the right moment. Direct channels like SMS and WhatsApp, which reach people who no longer open email. And solid deliverability, so you don't torch your domain right when you're trying to reactivate it. On these three fronts, Brevo and Mailchimp are not equal. Let's see where they differ.

The difference that matters: native multichannel vs. email-first

The most important distinction between the two products is almost philosophical, and it has huge practical effects on reactivation.

Mailchimp started life as an email platform and, over the years, built a marketing ecosystem around it (landing pages, social ads, a hint of CRM). SMS exists but is limited to a handful of countries and doesn't cover Italy well; WhatsApp isn't natively integrated. In practice, for reactivation it mainly gives you one channel: email.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) was built multichannel from day one. Email, transactional and marketing SMS, and the WhatsApp Business API all live on the same platform, inside the same automations, on the same contact. For anyone trying to win customers back, this isn't a nice-to-have feature: it's the right architecture, full stop. You don't recover a contact who hasn't opened an email in eight months by sending them another email. You recover them with an SMS that gets opened over 98% of the time, or with a WhatsApp message that reads like it was written by a real person.

Win-back automations: what you can actually build

Both platforms let you build automated sequences. But the level of control and the multichannel logic change the outcome.

In Mailchimp, the "Customer Journey Builder" lets you create paths with behavior-based triggers (last purchase, inactivity, tags). You can set up a classic email win-back sequence along the lines of "We miss you, come back for 15% off." It works, but it stays email-only, and branching is more rigid, especially on the cheaper plans.

In Brevo you build the same journey, but with mixed-channel nodes: an email on day zero, and if it isn't opened within three days an SMS goes out, and if there's no response to the SMS a WhatsApp message with an incentive follows. All orchestrated in a single flow. That's the difference between a single-channel win-back campaign and a multichannel cascade, and in practice it moves the recovery rate by several points.

Here's a figure that holds for both platforms and is worth keeping in mind: automated reactivation sequences can generate up to 320% more revenue than generic broadcasts. The engine matters, sure, but what matters more is ditching "email to everyone" in favor of journeys that trigger on each contact's individual behavior.

SMS and WhatsApp: Brevo wins clearly here

If your reactivation strategy includes direct channels (and it should, given how little dormant contacts open email), the comparison is pretty much settled from the start.

Why does this matter? Because the ROI of direct channels on cold databases is disproportionate. A well-built SMS campaign targeting dormant contacts can exceed 1,000% ROI, simply because the message gets read almost every time, within minutes. And between WhatsApp and SMS the logic changes: SMS is perfect for urgency and a sharp incentive, WhatsApp for conversation (replying, booking an appointment, clearing up a doubt). Having both inside Brevo, on the same contact, lets you pick the right channel for each segment.

With Mailchimp, to do the same thing, you'd need to connect third-party tools for SMS and WhatsApp, manage sync, duplicate lists, and duplicate consent records. Doable, but you're rebuilding piece by piece what Brevo gives you out of the box.

Deliverability: the risk nobody explains when you reactivate

This is the trickiest, and most overlooked, part of the comparison. Reactivating badly isn't just ineffective, it's dangerous. When you send to contacts who've been inactive for months, many addresses are dead, some have turned into spam traps, and the collapsed open rates signal to providers (Gmail, Outlook) that you're sending unwanted mail. The result is that you risk landing in spam even with your active customers, damaging your domain's reputation.

Since 2024, Google and Yahoo have made specific technical requirements mandatory for bulk senders: aligned SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, working one-click unsubscribe, and a spam complaint rate kept under 0.3%. Cross those lines and your delivery gets throttled or blocked.

On this front, the two platforms behave differently:

• Mailchimp has a mature sending infrastructure and strict anti-abuse tooling. The flip side is that it's quick to suspend accounts that upload "cold" or purchased lists, and its policy against mass reactivation campaigns can block you right when you need it most. Great shared reputation, but little tolerance for poorly prepared reactivation campaigns.
• Brevo offers dedicated IPs on higher-tier plans and more granular control over send warm-up, plus list validation tools. More flexible for reactivation projects, as long as you know what you're doing.

The truth is neither platform will save you from a dirty list. Before you hit send on any platform, the list needs cleaning: strip out hard bounces, unsubscribes, generic addresses, and ramp up volume gradually. That holds true regardless of the tool.