What is SparkPost used for
The SparkPost is an email delivery platform that is used to help businesses of all sizes predict and monitor ISP responses, email bounce rates and spam traps in real-time. The inbox tracker allows marketers to create and send emails using multiple methods, including subject line prediction, blacklist monitoring and brand impersonation protection.
In this article, we will learn what SparkPost is, its pricing plans, and its features. We will discuss the pros, cons, and alternatives to the SparkPost email service. We will also discuss when to use this email service. At the end of this article, you will know much about this famous email service widely used worldwide.
Table of Contents
In this article, we will discuss the following topics.
- What is SparkPost?
- SparkPost Pricing Plans.
- Key features of using the SparkPost Email Service.
- Pros and Cons of the SparkPost Email Service.
- What are the Alternatives to SparkPost?
- When to use the SparkPost Email Service?
- Using SparPost for Sending Emails Explored
What is SparkPost?
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.
SparkPost Implementation: Learn How to Use SparkPost
This is one of several articles that we will continuously be updating and adding to our SparkPost series. Feel free to follow along below to read more.
SparkPost Pricing Plans
The SparkPost email service pricing is based on the number of emails sent per month. It offers a free Test plan for users to try out SparkPost’s analytics and alerting functionalities.
The following table shows the monthly prices and features of its plans.
| Plans | Features | Price |
| Test | Send with API or SMTP relay Signals predictive analytics Email Health Score alerting Real-time alerting Spam trap monitoring Engagement insights Dynamic AMP emails Searchable email event data 2 custom webhooks Advanced templates and snippets Online support | $0 per Month. |
| Starter | Send with API or SMTP relay Signals predictive analytics Email Health Score alerting Real-time alerting Spam trap monitoring Engagement insights Dynamic AMP emails Searchable email event data 2 custom webhooks Advanced templates and snippets Online support | $20 for 50K emails per month. $30 for 100k emails per month. |
| Premier | Searchable email event data 5 custom webhooks Advanced templates and snippets Inbound email webhooks 15 Subaccounts Scheduled sending AB Testing Dedicated IP included Automated IP warmup Prioritized support | $75 for 100K emails per month. $150 for 250k emails per month. $290 for 500k emails per month. $525 for 1M emails per month. |
| Enterprise | All Premier features, plus: Dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM), in lieu of CSM Deliverability & Analysis Reporting The industry’s best uptime SLAs with service credits Guaranteed burst rates No limit on the number of dedicated IP addresses | To know the price, you need to contact SparkPost. |
Key Features of Using the SparkPost Email Service
Following are some key features of using the SparkPost email service.
SparkPost Signals.
Using the SparkPost email service, you can find and fix email performance issues before they impact your business. The signals analyze your email sending and data from across its industry-leading email network to warn you early about email issues.
Email Analytics & Performance Data.
Using the SparkPost, you can know what happens when you send real-time email analytics and performance data. You can also understand if your product emails are activating users effectively and discover how to improve the customer journey.
Email Deliverability.
SparkPost email service improves your inbox placement and optimizes customer engagement with reliable email deliverability. It also ensures that your most critical emails reach the customer inbox when you need them most.
Reliability & Security.
SparkPost delivers you with 99.99% uptime reliability. You can confidently send as many emails as you need from your product, app, or website and achieve industry-leading inbox placement with secure email delivery.
Email Templates.
Using the SparkPost email service, you can customize your emails and create dynamic personalization with flexible email templates. You can also programmatically tailor each message at the individual recipient or list level.
Support for Email Senders.
SparkPost prioritizes your success as a top priority. Its Customer Success Managers (CSM) work with you at every step to ensure that your product emails are making an impact and improving the customer experience.
Email API & Integrations.
Using this email service, you can easily embed your email into your app, website, or product and effortlessly take control of manipulating templates, generating messages, sending emails, and reporting performance.
Recipient Validation.
SparkPost Protects your sender’s reputation by guarding against bounces, errors, and even fraud. Recipient Validation is an easy, efficient way to verify that addresses are valid before you send.
Real-Time Alerts.
SparkPost provides you with real-time alerts. When sending emails, problems come in many different forms drops in engagement rate, increases in bounces, and even going over your sending limits.
SparkPost lets you receive notifications about changes to the critical metrics that measure your sending performance. With powerful filters and multi-channel support, you can configure alerts about your most essential sending resources and ensure those alerts go to the right teams.
Transactional Email Features
It offers the following transactional email features.
- Email Suppression
- Custom Spam Filter
- Custom Reverse DNS
- Automated IP Warmup
- Custom Metadata
- Real-time Reporting
- Email Personalization
- Webhooks
- SMTP
- Predesigned Email Templates
- Multi-factor Authentication
- A/B Testing
- Template Management
- Dashboard
Email Marketing Features
It offers the following email marketing features.
- Predesigned Email Templates
- Email Scheduling
- Real-time Email Editor
- List Segmentation
- A/B Testing
- Template Management
- Spam Check
- Mailing List Management
- Event Triggered Email
- Drip Campaigns
- Click-through Tracking
- Auto-Responders
Pros and Cons of the SparkPost Email Service
Let’s discuss the pros and cons of the SparkPost email service.
Pros.
- SparkPost is reliable, fast, secure, and privacy-focused.
- It is easy to use and set up.
- It performs predictive and real-time analytics to prevent email delivery problems.
- Provides real-time alerts.
Cons
- SparkPost is designed for developers only.
- It does not support integrations with other systems.
- You need to warm your IP address before sending bulk emails.
- To use the SparkPost email service, you must use a third-party tool.
What are the SparkPost Alternatives
The following are the most popular alternatives to using Sparkpost:
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 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.
Features:
- 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.
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
SparkPost vs Mailchimp Email API
Best for an all-in-one integrated branding solution. Mailchimp is a powerful marketing API service that provides you with intelligent marketing tools. It works with your favorite apps and web services and helps you do more with your email marketing. Mailchimp can also find the tools you use or discover new ways for email marketing.
Mailchimp’s API client libraries and mobile SDKs make it so easy to work with Mailchimp Marketing and Transactional APIs with your language or platform of choice.
Features:
- Drag and Drop Custom Email Builder
- Email Automation
- Store content like images to use later in the campaign.
- Send transactional emails
- Real-time analytics
Sparkpost vs SendinBlue Email Marketing API
Sendinblue is an excellent choice as an email marketing API. It is fast, simple, and accessible to everyone. You can send millions of marketing emails in no time using Sendinblue’s robust Email API. Their email API can accept up to 120k emails per minute, and 99% of emails are processed in less than 2 seconds.
Sendinblue email service also provides digital marketing and sales tools for your business to expand. The features offered by Sendinblue including email designing, marketing automation, launching Facebook ads for a targeted audience, and much more.
The free plan contains 300 emails a day, and the paid ones cost $20 for 20,000 emails a day and $1000 for the business plus plan.
Features:
- Separate dashboard for transactional email configuration
- A/B Testing for emails
- Drag and drop email builder
- Advanced report generation
Sparkpost 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 SparkPost. 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.
SparkPost 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, the 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.
Features:
- Build customized email marketing campaigns
- Content filtering
- Dedicated IP addresses
- Integrate easily with other applications
When to use the SparkPost Email Service?
SparkPost is the world’s largest and most reliable email sender, delivering nearly 40% of all commercial emails, that’s over 6 trillion sends annually.
This email service is an excellent choice for enterprise SaaS, fintech, financial services, and MarTech companies. It is also very suitable for transactional email and multi-channel purposes. This email service would be a great option for companies that need self-hosting options.
Using SparkPost for Sending Emails Explored
We highly recommend you send emails using the SparkPost email service. This email service provides the best deliverability service. That’s why you should choose this product over the competitors when selecting a service for your critical administrative message delivery.
Using this email service, you can choose how you want to send your emails, whether using an API or SMTP. It provides you with real-time alters about your emails, email analytics, and the performance of your data. It also provides you with many features for your transactional and marketing emails. And the best thing about it is that it offers a free tier on par with many best services and features.
This article explains what SparkPost is, its pricing plans, and its features. This article also describes the pros, cons, alternatives, and when to use this email service, and we hope you find this article helpful.
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