SendGrid Transactional Emails Frequently Asked Questions
In this article, we discuss some questions regarding why you may use SendGrid for your transactional email service and what are the key features of SendGrid. We will provide you with prompt answers regarding questions about why we use SendGrid for sending emails.
In this article, we cover the following questions.
- What is SendGrid
- Key Features
- How to a create SendGrid account
- What is a Transaction Email
- Why use SendGrid for Transactional emails
- Is SendGrid free
- Pricing SendGrid
- How does SendGrid avoid Spam Email
- What is SMTP Relay
- Does SendGrid offer an SMTP Relay
- Alternatives to SendGrid
Dig Deeper with Our Email in PHP Examples and Guides
- Using an Email Marketing API
- Comparing Transactional Email Services
- How to Send Email with PHP
- Send Email Using Sendgrid in PHP
- Looking into the MailGun Service
- Send Emails using AWS SES
- MailChimp Email API Service
- Using ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Service
What is SendGrid?
SendGrid was found by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009. The SendGrid company was bought by Twilio in 2018 of worth $2 billion. SendGrid( also called Twilio SendGrid) is a reliable and cloud-based email delivery service. Sending an email using a SendGrid cloud-based SMTP server has numerous benefits for growing businesses, saving time, and streamlining costs. It manages to send transactional and marketing emails and handle the heavy lifting of sending and receiving emails.
What are the Key Features of SendGrid?
The key features of using SendGrid are following
- Predefined templates: SendGrid provides a variety of options when it comes to creating your promotional emails. You can use SendGrid’s built-in email template library to begin writing your draft.
SendGrid offers an HTML and drag-and-drop editor to build your emails from scratch.
These editors can help you with various details regarding your emails or email campaigns, including:
- Intended audiences
- A/B testing
- The content and media included in the email
- Robust Reporting: How would you know how well your emails are performing?
The only way to know how well an email campaign performs is through actual replies and conversions. However, these metrics aren’t enough to give you a detailed understanding of your email performance.
SendGrid lets you track your email performance in real-time across several key metrics, such as:
- Emails delivered
- Unique opens and clicks
- Bounce rate and spam reports
- Unsubscribes
- And more
This data can help you make sense of your marketing email statistics and improve your email marketing efforts.
- Mailing List Management: The campaign management feature lets marketing teams segment contacts based on engagement metrics and customer data
Furthermore, the SendGrid includes domain authentication, compliance and ISP outreach to optimize email delivery. SendGrid also comes with web and SMTP APIs and connects with cloud-based email service providers. We highly recommend you send an email using SendGrid in PHP.
Read our article on how to send emails using Sendgrid.
How to create a SendGrid account?
To use SendGrid, first, we need to sign up for it. Creating a SendGrid account is very easy. Just follow the steps provided on the link.
What is a transactional email?
A transactional email is an automated email which is sent from a business to a customer. These emails are triggered by certain predetermined events — such as making a transaction.
Most of the transactional mail contains information about:
- Account confirmation and registration.
- Payment confirmation and receipts.
- Updates to the user’s account, such as password resets or changes to personal details.
- Delivery and shipping notifications, etc.
As we know, transactional mail is an email response to an action, and customers usually expect these automated emails. This ensures that they typically have very high open rates, especially when compared to cold emails.
Why would you use SendGrid for Transactional Emails?
Tiliwo SendGrid is one of the most powerful email solutions and allows you to easily set up a transactional email for your online products or eCommerce sites. We use SendGrid because it allows us to automate our transactional email easily via SendGrid’s API or SMTP service.
You may choose SendGrid over server host or Mailgun email services because of the following reasons.
- SendGrid sends a high-volume email marketing campaign with ease.
- Set up automated transactional mail.
- Generate reports to monitor your email performance and deliverability.
- Build powerful custom solutions with SendGrid API integrations.
- Design responsive promotional emails on a mobile app and a desktop browser.
Is SendGrid free?
Yes, SendGrid is free, but it provides a limited free Email Marketing plan that supports a limited number of features. It offers 40,000 emails for the first month, then 100 emails per day.
Pricing SendGrid
The detailed SendGrid’s free and paid plans list:
Email API Plans (Pricing is an estimate before taxes and overages)
| Free plan: | You can send upto 40,000 emails for the first month, then 100 emails/day + API key, SMTP relay, webhooks + delivery optimization + dynamic template editor. | ||||
| Essentials plan | includes all “Free” features + live chat customer support. | 40K: $14.95/month — 40,000 emails/month. | 100K: $29.95/month — 100,000 emails/month. | ||
| Pro plan | includes all “Essentials” features + Email validation + dedicated IP + subuser management + phone customer service from SendGrid support. | 100K: $89.95/month — 100,000 emails/month | 300K: $249/month — 300,000 emails/month | 700K: $449/month — 700,000 emails/month | 1.5M: $749/month — 1,500,000 emails/month |
| Premier | Custom pricing (get in touch with the sales support team) — includes all “Pro” features + customer success manager + prioritized customer support. |
Learn more about Pricing SendGrid.
How does SendGrid avoid Spam Emails
When we send emails from the host server, they often go into the spam folder. We can avoid them going into the folder using the following SendGrid’s methods.
- SendGrid Provides Dedicate a Sending Service
A dedicated sending service stops emails from going to the spam folder and offers greater control over your domain reputation.
SendGrid’s dedicated sending service also offers the advantage of volume: you can send more emails at a time. So if you have hundreds or thousands of customers to communicate with, a dedicated sending service can get these messages to them—and stop those emails from ending up in spam folders.
- SendGrid Checks emails before Sending for Spam Scores
- SendGrid Removes any user who Actively Violate spam Rules
SendGrid blacklists user emails with repeated violations of spam rules defined by SendGrid. This way, using SendGrid can help you avoid sending emails to spam folders.(SendGrid violations of spam rules)
Note: Remember to perform best email practices
There are several best practices you can perform to reduce the risk of your email ending up in spam folders before sending an email with SendGrid. For example, you should carefully cultivate your lists and avoid scraping, buying, renting, or sharing recipient lists. And the list should also consist only of customers who expressed interest in your brand and have opted to receive your communications.
Regarding the emails, there are other best practices to keep in mind. First, send only high-quality emails. If your email is full of typos, grammatical errors, or poorly formatted, the ISPs are more likely to send them to spam folders. And the content is also key, so avoid sending irrelevant messages that irritate recipients.
Lastly, before you send emails, perform a test to ensure your email looks good, with all links functional and all images properly rendered. This is also the time for a final proofread. That’s where you want to think about taking out excessive links and attachments that could potentially lead inbox providers.
What is SMTP Relay?
When servers are located on different domains, an SMTP relay is used to send emails between SMTP servers.
An email SMTP relay service is used every time you send an email to someone outside your address’s domain. SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, does the heavy lifting of sending the message. The relay service sends the message from your email server to the recipient’s email server.
Does SendGrid offer an SMTP Relay?
Yes, SendGrid offers SMTP relay services for both transactional emails and marketing emails because SendGrid handles approximately billions of emails per month.
The SMTP relay becomes very important when sending a large volume of emails. If you’re sending marketing emails like newsletters or transactional emails from your applications, you want to ensure that other servers trust that your server is sending good emails. An email SMTP relay service is a trusted third party that adheres to sending best practices to help emails get delivered.
To reduce spam, many internet providers will limit the number of SMTP relays they will conduct each day. So it means that a business that sends large amounts of emails may get their legitimate emails categorized as spam. The SMTP relay service provider can help prevent this deliverability problem and ensure your emails get to the inbox.
Are there any alternatives to SendGrid transactional emails?
There are several numbers of alternatives to SendGrid.
AWS SES: Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a top-rated cloud-based service offered by AWS. It is one of the alternatives to Sendgrid. It allows for sending and receiving emails and is mostly suitable for transactional emails. Its users often use it alongside other AWS services, such as SQS or EC2, and take advantage of seamless integrations. It also works perfectly fine as a standalone offering.
SendGrid is more like an all-inclusive tool, suitable for sending all kinds of emails, while Amazon SES mainly does transactional emails. SES works with pay-as-you-go pricing, while SendGrid offers pre-designed plans. The rates also differ, of course.
With AWS SES, a user gets to send 5 emails per second. This number can go up to 50000 emails per day. However, numbers can further go up if the users happen to maintain an excellent email-sending reputation.
SendGrid differs a little bit from Amazon. Here, a user needs to buy a huge quantity of emails with which they can slowly increase their email limitation. This limitation entirely depends on the email-sending reputation.
MailGun: Mailgun is a great cloud-based email service for developers. You can still use it for transactional and mass emails, but it doesn’t offer independent functionality for marketers, like templates and a media library.
Mailgun website offers you lots of information and enough space to get confused. Here is a list of the main options. You won’t find the obvious splitting for different types of emails.
turbSMTP: The turboSMTP outgoing mail server provides secure SMTP relays and is ideal for sending transactional emails. It also provides an amazing SMTP API and free SMTP server service.
SendGrid Transactional Email Service for Sending Emails
From this article, we conclude that SendGrid enhances sending email experience and provides customers with an extended, comprehensive view of email activity. In this article, we answered the top 10 SendGrid questions for 2022. On the basis of the answers, you can decide whether you should use SendGrid or not. We hope this article helps you in taking the decision to use SendGrid for emailing purposes.
This article focuses on frequently asked questions about the SendGrid email service, and we hope you find this article helpful.
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