Email service provider (ESP) provides the automated sending of emails. Email service providers offer technical infrastructure and, optionally, a software tool with a graphical user interface to manage the sending of emails quantitatively and qualitatively. These allow addressing the two main needs:
Marketing Email
Marketing emails are sometimes referred to as commercial emails because they contain marketing and promotional content. They aim to get you to take action; e.g. make a purchase, download information. They’re delivered strategically at a pre-configured time to a list of prospects or customers that have opted-in to receive more information. It is oriented to make bulk shipping and to get metrics to improve the marketing performance and ROI.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) like per example: SendPulse Email, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Emma, Constant Contact are specialized in marketing and promotional emails. They provide full solutions for managing subscribers, working with email templates, running bulk email campaigns and reporting.
Transactional Email
Transactional emails contain information that’s unique to each recipient. They’re usually triggered by a user action on a website or an app, and prompt individuals to complete a transaction or process; e.g. password resets, welcome emails, confirmation emails, alerts, password reset, notifications, etc.
It is typically implemented with development tools and APIs such as per example SendPulse Transactional, Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark. These tools are more API-focused, less CMS- and WYSIWYG-based; however, combined with a service such as Sendwithus, they can be made even more powerful.
What functionalities should be considered when choosing an ESP
Choosing the perfect email service provider is critical to your company’s success. Here are some things to consider when choosing an ESP:
Sending Score And Reputation
Your emails have a reputation and score associated with them. This affects how ISPs and mailbox providers deal with your email, whether they accept or reject it and whether they send it to the recipient’s inbox or straight to spam.
Some contributing factors are:
- your IP reputation (check yours with SenderScore),
- your domain name signature (see DKIM and SPF),
- bounce rates and complaint rates.
Templates
Using an email template allows you to produce campaigns faster, since the underlying code is already written. Instead of having to rewrite an entire email from scratch for every send, you can simply add copy, images, and links to an existing template before testing and sending it to your subscribers. The most important Email template benefits are the save time and effort and avoid to check the formatting every time.
Tools:
https://litmus.com/community/templates
https://www.dyspatch.io/sendwithus/
Analytics and reports
It will help you understand how successful your emails are and what you need to do in order to leverage your results.
Below are the basic metrics that should be provided by an ESP:
- open rate — how many emails were opened;
- click-through rate — how many clicks were tracked in an email;
- bounce rate — how many emails didn’t reach subscribers inboxes;
- unsubscribe rate — how many users unsubscribed;
- spam complaint rate — how many users marked an incoming email as spam.
Automation
It’s important to send the most relevant messages to the right people at the right time, and automation helps you do that. Some email service providers offer solid workflows to help you schedule and send automated messages.
Integrations
Email API integration allows you to connect your email service provider to your own platform and your marketing, sales, or CRM tools. In doing so, you can sync data and create hybrid, customized systems that empower your workforce and leverage your technology via a single interface. The integration between ESP and your system can be through a Web Api, SMTP Api or a framework.
Email Services Provider
This is a summary of the ESP services available in the market that best adapt to Infogrup’s needs.
| SENDGRID | MAILCHIMP | MAILGUN | MAILJET | AMAZON SES | SPARKPOST | |
| Marketing Email | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transactional Email | ✓ | ✓ (as an add-on) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Templates Editor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | X | ✓ |
| Import Templates | ✓ | Pro plan | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Analytics & Statistics | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automate recurring emails | Pro Plan | ✓ | ✓ | Pro Plan | ✓ | – |
| Reputation & Delivery Visibility | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dedicated IP | Pro Plan | ✓ | ✓ | Extra cost | Extra cost | Pro Plan |
| Email validation | Pro Plan | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Extra cost |
| Integration SMTP and Api | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
As you might expect, all have a lot of functionality in common. With all five services you can set up a domain to send transactional email with best practices in validation and DMARC compliance.
But each service has a few things that make it stand out from the others.
SendGrid
SendGrid has all the usual features for transactional emails, but also has the added benefit of full email marketing services. This means that you can manage your transactional email service and send out marketing campaigns in the same dashboard. It is very easy to set up. The dashboard included a clean-looking setup guide that will get you up and running, with specific steps for different types of applications.
SendGrid offers a user-friendly drag and drop builder to create and edit responsive email templates. The template builder makes the design process painless and it is available with a free Twilio SendGrid package. Also it offers a full library of free responsive templates.
SendGrid has several plans available, starting with a free plan that offers 40,000 emails for the first 30 days. After that the free plan switches to a relatively low limit of 100 emails per day. If you’re over that 100 per day limit, you’ll need to spring for one of the paid plans, starting at $14.95 per month for up to 100,000 emails. You can add a dedicated IP address for $30 a month, and if you intend to use the email marketing tools then you have to choose the Pro plan starting at 89.95 per month for up to 200,000 emails.
Site: https://sendgrid.com/
MailChimp
Mailchimp offers a fully featured email system but transactional email is available as an add-on to Standard and higher monthly Mailchimp plans. It has nice tools to build or customize templates that no coding skills needed. It provide a big template gallery with more than 100 templates. These can be customized, so there’s no need to start your email from scratch but all pre-built templates are only available on premium plans.
All of this comes at a price, though. It costs quite a bit the bigger your email list becomes. This is because the price of the plan is calculated based on the emails sent and the number of contacts you have. The Essential plan starts from $9.99 and supports 50000 contacts and to use transactional emails. The add-on is starting from $20 per month for up to 25,000 emails.
Site: https://mailchimp.com/
Mailgun
Mailgun specializes in transactional emails, it’s easier to set up and the documentation is all relevant and to the point, and does a good job of explaining everything you need to know to get started.
Mailgun has many tools allowing you to design your own templates or build off of a pre-existing template. Mailgun provides the option to start using their drag and drop editors or template builders and also allow you to render the HTML as they design to give them more control over the final product.
They strongly adhere to and comply with ESP guidelines and help to manage your reputation to ensure emails are not being bounced back, all these tools/features are available from the base plan.
Mailgun has both a pay-as-you-go plan and tiered pricing. The pay-as-you-go plan charges $0.80 per 1,000 emails. The tiered pricing starts at $35 per month, and includes a dedicated IP address and 100,000 emails.
Site: https://www.mailgun.com/
Mailjet
Mailjet has advanced email capabilities, for creating and designing emails using their drag and drop features. It has the ability to provide analytics and data insights about your email campaign.
Mailjet has several plans available, starting with a free plan that offers 6000 emails per month and 200 emails per day. After that the next plan starts at $9.65 per month for up to 30,000 emails. Dedicated IP is included upon request with our 150.000 emails/month plan and above. The cost of this plan starts from $68.95
Site: https://www.mailjet.com/
Amazon SES
One of the main benefits to Amazon SES is that it integrates with other services in the AWS platform. You can use it seamlessly on a site hosted by EC2, configure custom notifications with the Simple Notification Service (SNS), and set up custom reporting with Amazon Cloudwatch.
Amazon SES does not provide an email template builder but allows you to work with all templates features. You can create these ones using third party builders and then import them to Amazon.
One area where SES lacks is the dashboard. The AWS console is relatively simple to use, but suffers slightly from overcrowding. The other transactional email providers are built around email as the main service.
Amazon uses a pay-as-you-go approach, costing 10 cents per thousand emails sent. There are no separate tiers to consider, which makes it much easier to estimate your pricing based on your email volume. If your website is hosted on Amazon EC2, the first 62,000 emails per month are completely free.
You can add a dedicated IP address for $24.95 per month, which came out the cheapest of the three services in this comparison.
Site: https://aws.amazon.com/es/ses/
SparkPost
Sparkpost provides the facility for tracking email campaigns and provides reports by open rate, click rate, bounce, etc. Also offers a full template creator included. It allows designing HTML templates with variables you can store with email subscribers info.
SparkPost basic plan starts at $20.00 per month for up to 50,000 emails. Dedicated IP is included on full plans ($75 per month) and email validations has an extra cost of $0.010 per email. The basic plan is also limited to 10 templates.
Site: https://www.sparkpost.com/
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is designed to be a reliable email service for developers. Not only does it deliver your emails, but also includes email validation features to check and make sure you’re sending messages to valid email addresses.
It provides the user an easy way to manage all his email lists separately or manage client emails along with their own. There is a batch sending feature which allows the user to personalize emails, gives a detailed analysis and mentions logs.
Highlights
- Track your email status and know what happened to them after you hit send.
- Validate your emails before sending.
- Filter out all the spam emails.
- Powerful APIs that enable you to send, receive and track email effortlessly.
- Mobile-friendly email designer, Email template library, Email & SMS personalization, SMS marketing
Constant Contact
Constant Contact makes email marketing easier by simplifying the process of creating a customized email that matches your branding with their easy to use email editor and customizable templates. Easily import your pre existing list or build one using their sign up forms. Create and schedule your emails so they are automatically sent to people who join your lists and meet your custom triggers.
Highlights
- Easier email creation and editing
- Automated email marketing campaigns
- Hassle-free integration with eCommerce
- Social media marketing made easy
- Robust contact management features
- Real-time tracking for emails and ads
- More interactive marketing campaigns
- 24/7 customer support
Pepipost
Pepipost is a very well known transactional email service provider and is extremely easy to integrate. They provide an API that you can utilize or you can use the tried-and-true method of sending your email through SMTP.
The interface they provide to manage your account is very easy to use and effective. All the information you need to get started is readily available to you.
Highlights
- Easy configuration with major website creation tools.
- Highly optimized inbox delivery.
- Best delivery protocols and guidelines to fight spam.
- It is easily scalable.
- It has a powerful trigger ware rule engine.
Price Comparison
| Emails per month | Contacts | Dedicated IP | Price | |
| SENDGRID | 50000 | Unlimited | Only Pro plans ($89.95) | $14.95 |
| MAILCHIMP | 50000 | 5000 | Yes | 49.99 + $20 |
| MAILGUN | 50000 | Unlimited | Yes | $35 |
| MAILJET | 60000 | Unlimited | Only Pro plans ($41.95) | $18.95 |
| AMAZON SES | 50000 | Unlimited | $24.95 per month | $5 |
| SPARKPOST | 50000 | Unlimited | Only Pro plans ($75) | $20 |
Conclusion ESP
All ESP provide very similar services, and have several similar prices.
It is important to detect which is the main problem with the actual custom implementation. If it is only to administrate the templates, maybe a solution is add some template administration section in Bart, that allows the admin user to change or create new templates.
But to integrate a new ESP it should be easy too.
Self Hosted Services
Sendy
Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This makes it possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.
Highlights
- The cost is very low and we can send 10,000 emails easily.
- Auto responder emails facilities with custom reporting options.
- Easily import and delete email subscribe list of multiple email campaigns.
- Nice template design and custom fields option to create awesome templates.
- Setup your custom business domain to send mass emails.
MailWizz
MailWizz is one of the complete self-hosted email marketing systems available today. Written in modern PHP and using MySQL as it’s a database, it can run in any web hosting account.
MailWizz makes email marketing accessible to everyone, as simple as possible. It is suitable for both experts and beginners.
Highlights
- Add as many accounts as you need in a single install
- Create regular campaigns, autoresponders or recurring campaigns
- Send campaigns based on external RSS or JSON feeds
- Get detailed reports related to your campaigns and share these reports with anyone
- Send your emails with any SMTP server or a well-known solution such as Amazon SES, SendGrid, MailGun, SparkPost, PepiPost, ElasticEmail, etc.
- Import your subscribers from CSV, text or external database
- Create as many custom fields as you need for your subscribers
- Segment your list based on custom fields and target only the right segments
Octeth
Octeth is a feature-packed email marketing software from the founders of Sendloop, which has over 4000 clients in around 80 countries.
Highlights
- You can log activities for your subscribers, use their data such as their name, age, address, etc. and even set-up autoresponders.
- You can seamlessly generate forms using their form designer
- With Octeth, you get subscription and unsubscription alerts through emails as well as ping
- You can use their wizard to design your email as well as save it as a template
- Octeth lets you set up autoresponders for sending regular emails to your subscribers
- After integrating Octeth with PreviewMyEmail, you can test your email design on more than 4o email clients
Open Source Services
Cuttlefish
Cuttlefish is in beta. It’s been used in production on three of OpenAustralia Foundation‘s projects for over a year and has sent well over 2 million emails.
Highlights
- Send email from your application using smtp in the usual way and get all sorts of added benefits for no effort
- A lovely web UI to browse what’s happening
- Monitor in real time which emails arrive at their destination and which bounce
- Works with any web framework and language
- Automatically not send emails to destinations that have hard bounced in the past
- Track which emails are opened and which links are clicked
- Statistics on emails sent, soft/hard bounced and held back
- View the full email content for recently sent emails
- Multiple applications can each have their own SMTP authentication
- Check your IP reputation with one click
- Easy to install and get going quickly
- Built in, super easy to set up, automatic DKIM signing
- Postfix, which you know and trust, handles email delivery
- Open source, so no vendor lock in.
Mailtrain
Mailtrain is a newsletter application and mail listing app built on top of Nodemailer, Node.js & MySQL under a GPL v3 license.
It is a great tool that offers automation along with analytics and works well for large mailing lists, typically of millions of subscribers.
Highlights
- You can add mail addresses of your subscribers manually or import them from CSV
- Through merge tags, you can add various tools like custom fields, including text fields, numbers, drop downs & checkboxes.
- You can even filter the subscriber list and send emails to specific subscribers that match the segmentation rules predefined by you
- It allows you to create landing pages for actions like unsubscribing from the list
- Apart from self-hosting, you can also use various services like Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), SparkPost, SendGrid, Mailgun that support SMTP protocol
Mautic
Mautic is available in two flavors – self-hosted and cloud-based.
Mautic is an open source marketing community which believes in equality. We demonstrate this belief through powerful free open source marketing automation.
Highlights
- It is open-source and has an active community
- It is quite easy to install and has minimum server requirements
- You can create contacts and segment them
- Apart from creating email campaigns, you can also create landing pages and forms
- Since it is open-source, new features and enhancements are regularly introduced
Thunder Mail
Thunder Mail is an open source, easy to use platform for sending emails at low cost, send thousands of emails at $0.10 per 1000 emails.
We’ve used Thunder Mail to send transactional emails to hundreds of thousands of customers per week.
Highlights
- Integrate and deliver via API in 5 minutes or less. Our APIs provide a customizable integration approach for your transactional email.
- Robust and reliable delivery. Gain peace of mind using the power of Amazon SES to send your emails reliably.
- Real-Time monitoring. With each click and open tracked alongside the bounces and unsubscribes, you’ll be able to monitor the performance of each and every email.
- Transactional email templates. Send highly targeted emails without worrying about dangerous deploys or bloated code. With native support for Handlebars syntax dynamic templating, you can send multiple templates using our APIs.
Postal
Postal is a complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers. Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers. Postal was developed by aTech Media to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community.
Highlights
- Support for multiple organizations with mail servers & users within.
- Graphs and stats showing volume of incoming & outgoing mail.
- Access to view historical messages.
- Access to view the full outgoing & incoming message queue.
- Set up webhooks to receive live information about delivery information in real time. Full access to the last 7 days of webhook requests are also stored for debugging purposes.
- Built-in DNS checking & monitoring to ensure domains you send mail from are configured correctly for maximum deliverability.
- Per server retention configuration to set how long messages should be kept in the database and the maximum size to keep on disk.
- Complete logging so delivery issues can easily be identified.
- Mail server wide search tools to find messages that need investigation.
Outgoing emails
- Send messages to the SMTP server or using the HTTP API.
- Manage multiple credentials per server.
- Support for DKIM signing of outbound messages.
- Enable development to hold messages in Postal without actually delivering them to recipients (message can be viewed in the Postal interface).
- Built-in suppression list to avoid sending mail to recipients that don’t exist or can’t accept e-mail.
- Click and open tracking to keep track of when recipients open your emails and click links within them.
- Configure per-server send limits to avoid abuse on mail servers.
- Management of multiple pools of sending IP addresses.
- Configure different senders or recipients to have mail delivered from certain IP addresses.
- Mail tagging so certain emails can be given a tag to allow them to be grouped when needed. For example, you may tag receipts or password-reset emails as such.
Incoming emails
- Ability to forward incoming e-mail to HTTP endpoints.
- Ability to forward incoming e-mail to other SMTP servers.
- Ability to forward incoming e-mail to other email addresses.
- Spam & thread checking with SpamAssassin and ClamAV with configurable thresholds and different methods for dealing with spam messages.
References
https://aws.amazon.com/es/ses/
Some online comparison links:
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