Best Transactional Email Service: Sendgrid Competitor & Alternative

A transactional email or triggered Email is an email sent to a recipient after a specific action. Common types of transactional emails include account creation notifications, password resets, purchase receipts, confirmation emails, welcome emails, and other account notifications. This kind of Email differs from marketing emails, which are typically sent to sell certain products or features.

Following is a handpicked list of Top Transactional email services with popular features and website links. The list contains both open source (free) and commercial (paid) software.

Best Transactional Email Service

Name Dedicated IP Integration Link
Elastic Email Yes Joomla, Zapier, Drupal, Sender, Cloudways. Learn More
Sendinblue Yes Easy integrations with C#, Go, Java, Node JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Typescript-node. Learn More
Sendpulse Yes WooCommerce, Opencart, Prestashop, X-cart, Drupal, Lander, WordPress. Learn More
Smtpgo Yes PHP Learn More
GetResponse Yes Easy Integration with Magento, Cs.cart, Amz Promoter, etc. Learn More

1.Elastic Email

Elastic Email is one of the best transactional email providers for email marketing. This tool helps you by automatically avoiding duplicate addresses. It has an advanced algorithm that allows you to find invalid emails.

Features:

Pricing plans: Two pricing plans


2.Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a SaaS solution for email marketing automation. This transactional email service helps you to manage your customer using your current CRM. You can use this tool to set up the design, engagement, and delivery of transactional messages.

Features:

Pricing plans: Three pricing plans


3.Sendpulse

SendPulse is one of the best transactional email service provider that enables you to send messages through SMTP API. It helps you to easily improve your mail marketing ROI and performance. This tool offers a dedicated IP address that prevents your IP from being blacklisted.

Features:

Pricing plans: Three pricing plans:


4.smtp2go

SMTP2GO is a transactional email service provider that allows you to easily track your emails. It offers instant alerts for potential problems in your account.

Features:

Pricing plans: Three pricing plans:


5.GetResponse

GetResponse is all in one online email marketing software for landing page creation, webinars hosting, and much more. It is a powerful and simplified tool to send emails, create pages, and automate your Email marketing. This transactional email service offers many features that are mostly expected from an email marketing service provider. It also provides features that allow you to engage with your contacts through live Webinars.

Features:


6.Mailify

Mailify is a transactional email service provider that helps you to build a winning marketing strategy with the best email marketing solution. It helps you to create email and SMS campaigns, landing pages, automatic workflows, and more.

Features:

Link: https://www.mailify.com/transactional-email


7.Mailjet

Mailjet is a global email service provider that enables you to track transactional and marketing emails via SMTP, API, etc. It allows you to create responsive emails using email builders.

Features:

Link: https://www.mailjet.com/transactional-email/


8.Sendgrid

Sendgrid is an email marketing tool that provides workflows and automation facilities to send transactional emails. You can send your automated mail just using a simple trigger. It helps you to create Email using HTML and drag-and-drop editing facilities.

Features:

Link: https://sendgrid.com/use-cases/transactional-email/


9.Mandrill

Mandrill is a transactional email API specifically developed for Mailchimp users. You can use it to send data-driven emails, including personalized and e-commerce messages. It helps you to write your own custom solution using API. This tool automatically converts HTML into a text version.

Features:

Link: https://mailchimp.com/features/transactional-email/


10.Amazon Simple Email Service

Amazon SES is a cloud-based email sending service designed to send bulk emails. You can integrate it directly into your existing applications. It enables you to keep customers updated by sending automated transactional emails from this tool.

Features:

Link:https://aws.amazon.com/ses/


11.Postmark

Postmark is a tool that helps you to deliver and track transactional emails. This tool provides 45 days of full content history and statistics. You can get a detailed report for mail open and clicks.

Features:

Link: https://postmarkapp.com/transactional-email


12.Customer.io

Customer.io helps you to send targeted one-to-one messages broadcast to a group of people. You can send personalized transactional messages to each individual user. It offers the flexibility to apply your existing layouts and styles.

Features:

Link:https://customer.io/features/


13.Mailgun

Mailgun is an email marketing software that helps you to send Emails without using your email server. It provides real-time tracking and advanced analytics for your emails. It enables you to send transactional or bulk Emails effortlessly.

Features:

Link: https://www.mailgun.com/transactional-email/


14.Sparkpost

SparkPost is a predictive email intelligence platform. It helps you to optimize email performance with unprecedented data visibility. You can use this tool to monitor Email and manage the response easily.

Features:

Link: https://www.sparkpost.com/use-cases/transactional-email/


15. SMTP Transactional Emails

SMTP platform provides transactional emails for your email marketing needs like account creation emails, payment or purchase confirmation emails and notification emails with a fast and reliable delivery. Transactional emails can be sent in a form of confirmation, notification, warning and acknowledgment.

Features:

Link:https://www.smtp.com/transactional-email/

FAQS:

❓ What is Transactional Email?

A transactional email or triggered Email is an email sent to a recipient after a specific action. Common types of transactional emails include account creation notifications, password resets, purchase receipts, confirmation emails, welcome emails, and other account notifications.

⚡ How transactional Emails work?

Transactional emails are most commonly generated by e-commerce or other software applications called an email API to create and send messages. Sophisticated product teams typically configure their product or application to trigger an email API after the user has performed a certain action. Thus, messages are sent instantaneously and delivered straight to the user's inbox at the transaction moment.

One of the fundamental components of executing successful transactional emails is the principle of immediate delivery. These types of messages often fulfill the expectations of a user after they have engaged with a business feature. Ensuring top-notch email deliverability is critical to the success of transactional messages. Understanding the functionality of transactional email can open doors of opportunity for product and customer experience programs.

✔️ What is Email API Service?

An Email API gives applications access to the functionality available in an email platform, like generating and sending transactional emails, manipulating templates, and accessing email metrics.

💻 Why use Transactional Email Software?

Here are some important reasons for using transactional Email Software:

  • It helps you to boost Customer Engagement
  • Helps you to increase additional Sales
  • It gives a powerful opportunity to make a long lasting Brand impression on your customers.
  • It helps in basic account administration like password reset, order confirmation, payment notification,etc.

❓ What is the Can-Spam Act?

The CAN-SPAM Act is a cyber law that sets the rules for commercial emails that give recipients the right to stop emailing them and spells out tough penalties for violations.

However, it does not only apply to bulk Email but also includes commercial messages, which the law defines as "any email message". The primary purpose is regulate the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.

It also includes Email, which promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for B2B Emails. For example, a message to former customers announcing new service or product lines must comply with the law.

⚡ What is Send Time Optimization?

Send Time Optimization is a method that uses data science to determine when your contacts are likely to engage and send your email marketing message at that time.

Here are important things that you should know before starting this process:

  • Based on your plan, you may not have access to Send Time Optimization. First, you should know what features are included with your plan.
  • For example, you can use Send Time Optimization on Mailchimp's regular, plain-text, A/B testing, and multivariate email types. However, this feature is not available in automated emails.
  • You should use this method only when five hours left in the day in the time zone set for the account.

✔️ What is Stale addresses?

Stale addresses are the old or invalid emails that haven't been sent messages in a long time. Audiences having many stale addresses may lead to high rates of bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.

Therefore, it is advisable to delete or reconfirm stale email addresses. A cleaner email audience list helps to improve your deliverability and engagement with the subscribers who want to hear from you.

❓ What is email deliverability, and why is it important?

Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to subscribers' inboxes. It is important because some email marketers gauge their email campaigns' likelihood of reaching their subscribers' inboxes.

For example, if you send 100 emails and 50 of those emails do not reach to subscribers' inbox due to IP reputation, catch all, stale emails, high bounces, etc. reasons, so your open rate is already down by 50%.

Email deliverability can be determined by the email delivery parameters like ISPs, throttling, bounces, spam issues, and bulking.

💻 How to select a transactional email service provider?

Here is the top selection criteria to check how to select an email provider:

  • Reputation: Your business email service provider should have a good reputation. A business email address is one of the first aspects that your clients see.
  • Security: You should look for strong security measures while choosing a business email provider. It helps you to keep your message safe and protects you from unauthorized access to an email account.
  • Integration: Some email services work fine with other business software, like productivity suites and calendars. If your small business depends on such tools, you should go for the email package that integrates with them.
  • Reliability: Your business email service provider should be running continuously and anytime you need it. The downtime of Email service can result in unhappy or lost customers.
  • Ease of Use: If you need to create and use email account for your staff as your business grows. You have to look for a business email service provider, which is easy to use, which reduces staff training time.
  • Advanced Features: It should provide advanced features like the ability to schedule tasks or recall messages depending on your unique business need.

⚡ What are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records?

  • SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a protocol for validating email, which is designed to find and block email spoofing.
  • DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is a method for authenticating email. It enables a receiver to know that the email was sent and authorized by the domain author.
  • DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is a protocol for email authentication. It is specifically designed to give email owners the ability to safeguard their domain from unauthorized use.
  • It is important to set SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your email accounts to avoid spoofing and spam.

❓ How can you achieve a subject line that is spam-free?

You can achieve a subject line that is spam free by considering the following points:

  • Avoid overused words.
  • Include localization and personalization when possible. For example, first name, city, etc.
  • Write a short subject line below 50 characters.
  • Avoid exclamation marks, all caps, and other special characters like @, #, and %.

✔️ What is a good way to structure a professional email signature?

Your email structure includes the basic elements like first and last name, title, email address, phone number, company, and a link to your website.

⚡ What is IMAP, POP3, SMTP?

IMAP: IMAP or Internet Message Access Protocol is a mail protocol that is used to access email on the web server from the local PC. It stores messages on a server and synchronizes the mails across multiple devices.

POP3: POP3 or Post Office Protocol version 3 is a mail protocol used to receive emails from the server to the local email client. It downloads mail messages on your computer and deletes them from the server.

SMTP: SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an application to send messages to the mail server for relaying.

When you send emails, the webserver processes your mails and decides which server to send messages. The mail service provider downloads the mails and places them in the inbox of the recipient.

 

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