What is PostMark used for
Postmark is used for sending transactional emails. You can use its API or SMTP option to send your emails to your customers. With the Postmark API, you can create a system that can send transactions automatically or on demand.
In this article, we will learn what PostMark is, its pricing plans, and its features. We will discuss the pros, cons, and alternatives to the PostMark email service. We will also discuss when to use this email service.
Table of Contents
In this article, we will cover the following topics.
- What is PostMark?
- PostMark Pricing Plans.
- What are the Features of Using the PostMark Email Service?
- The Pros and Cons of the PostMark Email Service.
- What are the Alternatives to PostMark Email Service?
- When to use the PostMark Email Service?
- Using PostMark for Sending Emails Explored
What is PostMark?
There are several email delivery providers, but PostMark is what people like the most because it is very easy to use.
Postmark is a SaaS email service provider that can help you deliver your application emails. It offers SMTP services, an email API, and other transactional email services to businesses of all sizes.
Postmark’s SMTP service provider focuses on improving your deliverability rates. With an email API, detailed analytics, pre-made templates, and much more, the Postmark email service can appeal to businesses of all sizes.
Postmark maintains the best delivery reputation in the industry by routing transactional and promotional messages through parallel but separate sending infrastructure. It also protects the deliverability of your crucial transactional emails and ensures they arrive lightning-fast.
The Promotional and transactional emails never get mixed when using the PostMark email service. Because its API and SMTP service help you easily send your emails, whether that’s a password reset emails, notifications, newsletters, or anything in between.
Some of the best features of the PostMark email service are:
- It is easy to set up
- Deliver, and parse transactional emails at scale.
- It comes with ready-to-use responsive email templates.
- It provides troubleshooting and analytics tools.
PostMark Pricing Plans
PostMark’s monthly plans are very simple.
| Emails Per Month | Monthly Price | Additional Emails |
| 10,000 | $15 | +$1.80 per 1000 emails |
| 50,000 | $55 | +$1.3 per 1000 emails |
| 125,000 | $115 | +$1.10 per 1000 emails |
| 300,000 | $245 | +$1.00 per 1000 emails |
| 700,000 | $455 | +$0.80 per 1000 emails |
| 1,500,000 | $775 | +$0.60 per 1000 emails |
| 3,000,000 | $995 | +$0.40 per 1000 emails |
| 5,000,000 | $1295 | +$0.30 per 1000 emails |
What are the Features of Using the PostMark Email Service?
Following are the key features that PostMark provides to users.
Email API.
Postmark offers powerful APIs to send emails and manage servers, templates, and domains. Using PostMark, integrating email is fast and easy, whether you are sending transactional or bulk email.
Websites, web apps or other applications use Postmark’s marketing capabilities through the email API to send notifications about order confirmations, shipping details, etc.
Integrating the Postmark email API into your service is easy, whether you send transactional or bulk emails. Because Postmark contains powerful client libraries and supports all popular languages, including Node.js, PHP, Python, Java, and more.
Once the integration is complete, you can easily split application emails into logical groups based on which application or environment is sending them. For example, you can sort emails sent from your website and web app separately.
With PostMark flexible email APIs, you can manage domains and templates, retrieve stats, process inbound emails, and so much more.
Transactional Mail Service.
You can count on PostMark’s transactional email service because it delivers your transactional emails on time, every time. Postmark helps you set up transactional mail systems for your business with ease.
Transactional emails are personalized, unique messages sent from a business to its customer. The password resets, transaction evidence, welcome emails, and shipping details are all examples of transactional emails.
You can send the following types of transactional emails using the PostMark email service.
- Account detail changes
- Password reset emails
- Purchase confirmation and receipt logs
- Shipping and delivery information
- Comment notifications and trial expiration emails
As transactional emails are one of the most important application emails, the Postmark service maintains competitive deliverability rates for them.
PostMark sends your transactional emails up to 4x faster than the competition. But they just don’t claim great delivery service. You can also see your real-time delivery metrics right on the status page.
Keeping transactional emails a priority, Postmark helps to improve your sender’s reputation and prevent such emails from being marked as spam.
Email Delivery Service.
Unlike marketing emails, your transactional emails should reach your customers instantly. PostMark offers you a fast email delivery service that you can rely on.
The transactional email contains important information that customers expect to receive as soon as you send them. But the delays in this process can frustrate and confuse your customers and could cost your business in the long run.
To help you keep up with these expectations, the Postmark email service ensures that your emails go directly into client’s inboxes instead of going to spam folders and are delivered as fast as possible.
For example, websites running on WordPress can use plugins like the Postmark for WordPress plugin to generate and send transactional emails directly from the website. This can avoid any delay that can result from manually running a separate computer software or cloud-based application.
Also, the Postmark email service only allows dedicated IPs to high-volume senders. On the other hand, low and mid-volume senders are given shared IPs with established sender reputations.
This allows lower-volume senders to obtain optimum delivery from the get-go instead of warming up a dedicated IP address and building their sender reputation from scratch.
Your customers don’t need to frantically refresh their inboxes when you send them emails via PostMark.
Email Analytics
One of the best features of PostMarlk is email analytics. PostMark email service provides you with unparalleled insight into each and every single email and recipient.
To optimize your email performance, you need detailed stats and reports to understand what’s working or what needs to be improved in future campaigns.
The Postmark email service provides powerful email analytics and gives you a detailed insight into your emails.
Postmark tracks the following metrics:
- Bounce rates: The percentage of subscribers on your mailing list who couldn’t receive your message because the recipient’s email server returned it
- Open rates: The percentage of subscribers on your mailing list who opened the email
- Click rate: The percentage of subscribers on your mailing list who clicked on at least one link within the email
Postmark also gives you access to check a detailed 45-day history of all email logs. These can easily be searched through and filtered depending on the data your business needs.
Large Library of Email Templates
PostMark offers responsive, highly compatible, and nicely integrated email templates. Building, testing, and managing email templates are tedious and time-consuming, but PostMark makes it easy for you.
In PostMark, you can use the available pre-made email templates to quickly organize application emails, such as password resets, comment notifications, welcome emails, etc. As you’re filing through these templates, you will find that they are completely customizable, helping you easily to edit and use them according to your needs.
Transactional Email Features
PostMark offers the following transactional email features.
- Email Suppression
- Custom Spam Filter
- Email Tag
- Custom Reverse DNS
- Email History
- Automated IP Warmup
- Custom Metadata
- Real-time Reporting
- Email Personalization
- Webhooks
- SMTP
- Predesigned Email Templates
- Multi-factor Authentication
- A/B Testing
- Template Management
Email Marketing Features
PostMark offers the following email marketing features.
- Predesigned Email Templates
- List Segmentation
- A/B Testing
- Template Management
- Spam Check
- Mailing List Management
- Event Triggered Email
- Drip Campaigns
- Click-through Tracking
- Contact Management
The Pros and Cons of the PostMark Email Service
Following are the pros and cons of the PostMark email service.
Pros
- It is easy to set up.
- It delivers and parses transactional emails at scale.
- It offers email analytics that can enhance the performance of your emails.
- It comes with ready-to-use responsive email templates.
- It provides troubleshooting and analytics tools.
Cons
- It has limited Email Marketing Features.
- It has a 45-day access limit to email history.
- It does not offer yearly pricing, only monthly.
- There is no support for lists and visual template builders.
- It has no SMS Support.
What are the Alternatives to PostMark?
The following are the most popular alternatives to using Sparkpost:
PostMark vs SparkPost Email Service
Sparkpost is a cloud-based email service provider. It offers reliable, scalable, and best email delivery solutions for businesses of all sizes. The company’s core product is its cloud-based SMTP service that enables companies to send bulk emails with deliverability rates comparable to those of the most popular consumer mail clients.
The SparkPost email service offers an API platform, which allows developers to build custom applications for sending and tracking emails via this service.
It is the world’s largest and most reliable email sender, delivering nearly 40% of all commercial emails, that’s over 6 trillion sends annually. It has the world’s most significant email data footprint to help enterprise-level brands make data-driven decisions to improve their email performance.
Features:
- Email Analytics & Performance Data.
- Email Deliverability.
- Reliability & Security.
- Email Templates.
- Email API & Integrations.
- Real-Time Alerts.
PostMark vs SendGrid Email Service
SendGrid is one of the top transactional email service providers available on the market. It is owned by Twilio, is heavily documented, and provides an excellent freemium plan.
We’ve written extensively about SendGrid in the past. Click here to read all of our SendGrid reviews, guides, tutorials and more.
Features:
- Predefined templates.
- Robust Reporting.
- Mailing List Management.
- Dedicated IPs.
PostMark vs Mailgun Transactional Email Service
Mailgun is a great cloud-based email service for developers. You can use it for transactional and mass emails, but it doesn’t offer independent functionality for marketers, like templates and a media library.
We’ve written a full series on Mailgun. Click here to read our reviews, insights & tips on Mailgun
Mailgun is an email service that allows us to use the SMTP protocol or API to send emails. It also provides us with reports to track the number of emails sent and also allows us to check addresses for typos or spam problems. It has an email validation service that provides accurate validation results on the market.
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.
Transactional Email API
Mailgun is one of the most helpful email APIs that developers use. We can easily send transactional or bulk emails using Mailgun’s SMTP and HTTP API in PHP. Mailgun allows you to choose how you want to send your emails through API or SMTP.
Mailgun also allows you to create eye-catching emails in minutes. You can create a personalized email targeted at a specific audience. And the Email analytics, based on performance data of your sent emails, lets you know the best time to send your messages.
In Mailgun, you can have the option to choose how you want to send your emails using Mailgun’s API (A popular method of sending emails that can integrate with languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, and more.) or using the SMTP method (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is an easy way to transfer your emails.)
Features:
- Easy SMTP integration and flexible HTTP API.
- Personalize and schedule emails.
- Automatic Email Parsing.
- Improved Email Deliverability.
- Email analytics.
PostMark vs AWS Simple Email Service (SES) Transactional Emails
Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a top-rated cloud-based service offered by Amazon. It is one of the alternatives to PostMark. 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.
It also provides a variety of deployments, including dedicated, shared, or owned IP addresses. And also, reports on sender statistics and a deliverability dashboard help businesses make every email count.
One of the best features of Amazon SES is its low cost. The AWS SES service is chosen and used by companies such as Netflix, Reddit, and Duolingo.
AWS Service Integration
Another important feature is the integration, through the console itself, API, or SMTP, it is possible to configure the sending of emails. In addition, Amazon SES not only allows sending of emails but also receiving them.
PostMark 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 PostMark offers pre-designed(monthly) 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, the numbers can further go up if the users happen to maintain an excellent email-sending reputation.
PostMark differs a little bit from Amazon. Here, users need 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.
Features:
- Build customized email marketing campaigns
- Content filtering
- Dedicated IP addresses
- Integrate easily with other applications
When to use the PostMark Email Service?
Postmark is an email app that allows developers to create transactional emails. It is a full-service email API that helps companies reach their audience. Postmark email service also allows its customers to send transactional emails by providing an API that is easy to use on top of its web interface. With the Postmark API, you can create a system that can send transactions automatically or on demand.
Postmark is a great email delivery platform for agencies, enterprises, startups, and even your side projects. It is an excellent choice if you want to use servers to separate your email stream. Postmark is also a perfect choice if you want a complete self-serve option.
Using PostMark for Sending Emails Explored
The Postmark email service is an excellent choice for sending transactional emails. Its high-performing deliverability rates, detailed analytics, powerful APIs, and large template library make it a valuable tool for any type of business.
However, when it comes to email marketing campaigns, Postmark offers only limited email marketing features, which will limit your campaign engagement.
This article explains what PostMark is, its pricing plans, and its features. It also describes the pros and cons and when to use the PostMark email service, and we hope you find this article helpful.
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