Disclosure: The author of this post is a Sendinblue affiliate, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

Store and organize your contacts while protecting user privacy on Sendinblue, the leading CRM & email marketing platform in Europe. Sendinblue offers unlimited contacts and advanced marketing features.

1. Connecting to the API
2. Setting up your contact forms
3. Contact attribute–form field mapping
4. Privacy considerations

Connecting to the API

This integration module uses the Sendinblue API (v3). To access the API, you need an account with Sendinblue. If you don’t have one yet, create a free account first. You can upgrade the account any time it becomes necessary.

After creating your account, log in to the Sendinblue dashboard and navigate to the SMTP & API page. You’ll find your v3 API key there. This key is used in the next step, so copy it now.

Then open a new browser tab and log in to your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to Contact > Integration menu page and click Setup integration in the Sendinblue box. You’ll find an input field there. Paste the API key into the field and click Save changes.

Now the Sendinblue API is available through your contact forms. The next step is setting up each contact form.

Setting up your contact forms

After activating the Sendinblue API, you’ll find a newly-created tab in the contact form editor screen. With this Sendinblue tab panel, you can control this integration module’s two major functions: contact lists and welcome email.

If the Contact lists checkbox is selected, the submitter will be added to your contact lists after the contact form is submitted. You can also indicate to which lists the contact will be added.

If the Welcome email checkbox is selected, Contact Form 7 will send a welcome email to new contacts. The welcome email is sent only when the submitter is successfully added to the contact lists.

The welcome email uses Sendinblue’s email template system, which lets you compose a fully-personalized, elegant HTML email. Also, the email is delivered via Sendinblue’s reliable SMTP infrastructure, which allows you to track the status of your email after sending it.

Note: Contact Form 7 only uses Sendinblue’s SMTP for the welcome email for new contacts. Emails other than the welcome email use WordPress’ built-in wp_mail() function. If you want to use Sendinblue’s SMTP for every email on WordPress, install Sendinblue’s official WordPress plugin.

Contact attribute–form field mapping

Sendinblue’s contact data is composed of four basic attributes (EMAIL, FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, and SMS) and user-defined additional attributes. When you create a new contact based on a form submission, those contact attributes are retrieved from user-input values.

For example, the EMAIL attribute is retrieved from the ‘your-email’ field. In the same way, an attribute is retrieved from the form field whose name contains a ‘your-‘ prefix + the lowercased attribute name.

Additionally, FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME have a special mapping rule. For cases where the form doesn’t contain a ‘your-firstname’ or ‘your-lastname’ field but the ‘your-name’ field instead, the first word of the ‘your-name’ field value is used for the FIRSTNAME attribute, and the remainder is used for the LASTNAME attribute. So, for example, if “Vincent van Gogh” was input to the ‘your-name’ field, the FIRSTNAME would be “Vincent”, and the LASTNAME would be “van Gogh”.

Also be aware that the SMS attribute value must be specified as an international telephone number with the proper country code (for example: +91xxxxxxxxxx or 0091xxxxxxxxxx). If you have an input field for SMS and the user input wasn’t in the correct format, the API request to create a contact will fail.

The parameters used in an email template follow the same mapping rules. If you have a {{ params.SIZE }} placeholder in your email template, the ‘your-size’ field value will replace the placeholder in the email.

Lastly, you can customize this entire mapping using the wpcf7_sendinblue_collect_parameters filter hook.

Privacy considerations

You are strongly advised to obtain explicit consent from the form submitter before adding their personal data to your contact list. Not only is it illegal to collect personal data without consent, but a high spam complaint rate may also occur if emails are delivered to unintended receivers.

Contact Form 7 provides the consent_for:sendinblue form-tag option to check the submitter’s consent, an example of which is provided below:

[acceptance your-consent optional consent_for:sendinblue]
It's OK to add me to your contact list.
[/acceptance]

If you have this form-tag (acceptance checkbox) in your contact form, Contact Form 7 sends the contact data to the Sendinblue API only when the submitter has selected the checkbox to confirm their consent.

You can also use double opt-in by activating another WordPress plugin called Double Opt-In Helper.