2 email platforms already tested, none fits our needs
Platforms for transactional and marketing emails are quite hard to evaluate without using it. This evaluation also depends on the company phase and its communication strategy.
At Abyssale, we already tested the two biggest products out there, MailChimp(/Mandrill) & Sendgrid.
Company phases:
- No online product. Capturing emails from a landing page.
At that time, we decided to use MailChimp. The product is awesome for basic marketing purposes (automatically sending welcome's email when a user subscribes, sending marketing campaigns, segmenting people...). The free plan allows 2000 contacts, which is largely enough during this phase.
- Free private alpha (invitation list) < 500 users:
Transactional email is now a requirement (Sending an invitation to any individual) and best if free.
Mandrill is the transactional product related to Mailchimp: Not tested: No free plan & very expensive (20$/25000 emails).
Sendgrid, on the other hand, provides an all-in-one product & a free plan is available for both usages (transactional: 100 emails/day & marketing: 2000 contacts).
The switch to Sendgrid took us about 1 day, mainly due to the migration of our API connectors (we faced a lot of issues understanding the product & the API is quite complicated to use). Furthermore, there is no event sent by Sendgrid when a new user is added to a list, as a result, we send manually to slack our new users.
- Today: Free alpha (public) > 500 users
Sending at most 100 emails/day prevented us to invite people on a fast pace. We switched to a paid plan, the transactional Essential 40K plan (40k emails/month = $14.95) (marketing plan is still on the free plan).
Soon, we will monetize our product. Email is a key component of our communication. Hence our needs will be higher:
- Excellent deliverability (buying a dedicated IP seems mandatory), as we discovered that several of our users receive our emails in their spam box.
- Unique pricing model to control/predict expenses (contrary to the mixed pricing model proposed by Sendgrid & MailChimp/mandril, contact-based for marketing & email-based for transactional)
- A comprehensive API (with a good DX, as a bonus)
- Pricing as low as possible
- Basic events (such as new user inserted...) can be listened (via webhooks for instance)
- Complex workflows (Marketing automation)
In Europe, migrating emails from one provider to another is also subject to the GDPR rules, which requires the approval of the user. Hence that kind of migration is not recommended at all.
Do you have any recommendations on any other email platform that could fit those needs?
@antoox My recommendations:
Hope these ideas help!
PS: My product, Pigeon (https://pigeonapp.io), actually helps you easily switch between different providers, and handles several of the concerns you raised. DM me if you'd be interested in trying us out. I'd be more than happy to help :)
Thank you for your answer.
Yes, we are mixing marketing & transactional emails. Our main concern with Amazon SES is the synchronization of data (email sent, opened, received, unsubscription, spam report...) with another tool (marketing), which can be very complex to setup.
Having separate IPs for marketing & transactional emails is also a very good point.
PS: Does your product Pigeon handle the synchronization of data between providers?
Hi @antoox - Yes, it does unify the reports across different providers. Even if you decide to switch later in the future, all your previous data is saved, so your reports won't be affected. :) Would you like a demo?
@antoox what did you decide on?
Have you considered Mailgun? I think it has all of the development aspects you're looking for.
If not that, consider using Amazon SES. It's extremely cheap.
No, we haven't considered Mailgun yet. But from what I see this is only a transactional product (there is no marketing automation).
As I answered to @pradeep, we have a big concern about Amazon SES. To be fully transparent, we are currently considering Sendinblue. Does anyone have any experience/recommendations about this product?
We use Klaviyo. Originally started using it for ecommerce but are now exploring it for our Saas app.
I don't know if it falls within your budget, or if I am fully understanding your needs. But i'd say it's worth checking out!
From my understanding, Klaviyo seems great for marketing purposes. Correct me if I am wrong but there is no transactional capability (meaning sending fully-personalized one-to-one messages).
Ah got it, I see what you mean. It may be possible but yea sounds like the other options suggested above may be a better fit for your needs!
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Thank you for sharing. However, our goal is to use a unified service (marketing+transactional).