Email isn't Magic

Did you know that Email doesn’t just happen, even though it appears that way. Behind the send button, your words take part in a fantastic relay race from your computer or mobile phone, through a series of different service providers, scanners, filters and relays to make its way to its final resting place in your recipients mailbox. There are countless e-mail service providers out there and they are geared up for different types of mail sending.

There are differing breeds of email, all sent in the same way, but need different kinds of attention to ensure that they survive the relay race intact without falling foul to the various filters checking to see if your correspondence deserves the attention of the recipient, or perhaps simply a marketing message for a new kind of, ahem, marital performance enhancer.

• Transactional Email is for automated sending upon actions on a website such as shopping online, brochure request or a webform submission.
• Marketing Email such as promotional material sent in bulk to potential and previous customers about great deals or exclusive offers.
• General Correspondence email is the one you’ll be most familiar with when emailing Auntie Jill in Wales asking about the weather usually provided by your ISP or mass provider like Gmail of Hotmail.

Recently Mailchimp which is the biggest provider of transactional and marketing email services changed its pricing scheme and now requires a paid Mailchimp account to send transactional emails. Transactional Email sent through their Mandrill service to be paid for in blocks rather than its previous ‘Very Generous' Free tier. Many business were affected with this change and had to take action, the first decision was to pay for Mailchimp or look for an alternative. The latter would mean a second decision which comes down to which alternative do you use???

At Lupimedia we gave our clients the choice with a few recommendations of what to do, we offered them the choice to stick with Mandrill or choose from a handful of Alternatives we believed provided a good service for no or little costs with the most popular choice, MailGun. Free tiers are useful for businesses as it allows them to start paying for services as their usage increases which usually correlates with increased profits to match so a win win.

Our Transactional email provider round up:

• Mailgun - Free and most likely the next big provider, Great usability and processes, including easy setup.
• Mandrill - Extremely good and worth the costs especially for the bigger companies with higher volume of transactional email.
• SendGrid - One of the original transactional email services, now great for reliability and stability of your business.