Whom To Entrust Your Emails

We have developed web application for the offline club of young entrepreneurs. That is a kind of closed social network where they communicate, share experience via webinars, invite new members. A lot of activities are followed by notifications through emails. Weekly, monthly newsletters, facebook digests, different reminders, all that stuff should be delivered correctly and in time. That’s why we need not just a good email service provider, but a great one. The main requirements include reliability, ease of integration and administration, nice interface and of course an adequate price. Our choice fell on the SendGrid.

SendGrid is an awesome email delivery and transactional email service that helps you to send large amounts of emails without spending large amounts of money. Transactional emails are the ones that are sent based on your actions in the application. For example you send an invitation via the app — you get the notification email, your invitation was not accepted during N days — you get the notification and so on. They are also called “triggered” or “automatic” emails. As you wish. SendGrid’s functional was exactly what we needed. What is more, sending up to 400 emails a day (12,000 emails a month) is free of charge.

We send weekly facebook digests via Sendgrid. This tool gives us the ability to control the list of users and the status of their subscriptions within our application. That makes the administration simple and clear.

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SMOOTH AND EASY INTEGRATION IS A THING

The huge advantage of SendGrid is well-organised, comprehensive API documentation. It also has ruby gem which allows painless integration between our application and service. All what is required is to add a few lines in the application settings and voila — everything is ready for mailing.

Without gem you need to do something like this for each email:

This gem also allows to configure options for outgoing email, setting categories, filters and so on.

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POWER OF USABILITY

When we came to marketing emails (weekly and monthly newsletters) we discover that one of the most important features which our client wanted to see was the ease of creating beautiful and responsive templates. At this stage SendGrid didn’t satisfy us with its marketing email application, it was not so easy to create a nice email template there.

We were considering two of the most popular services — AWeber and Mailchimp. Despite the fact that both are very popular and provide an excellent opportunity for mailing yet there are some differences between them. Mailchimp offers clear interface to design emails which has a lot of modern and stylish templates to choose. It has a great API with comprehensive in-depth documentation that makes integration smooth. When comparing pricing, Mailchimp is free up to 2000 subscribers (up to 12000 emails per month). If you consider unlimited quantity of emails both services will cost you approximately the same amount of money. For example, 5000 subscribers — $50 monthly, 25000 — $150.

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THE CLIENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT

Our client, however, prefered Aweber as he already had an experience in working with this email service, it was convenient for him and easy to use.

AWeber has a built-in email template editor with rich set of functions for email creating and designing. Several clicks there make miracle. You can drag pictures, match color schemes and forms that look good on any devices.

Another benefit of AWeber is convenient and user-friendly email tracking capabilities. With AWeber you can tell exactly who has opened your email, which links they have clicked on and when have the recipients done that.

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NOTHING IS PERFECT

What is not so good with AWeber is its documentation which is poor and not always you can find the examples of how to implement some features you need. For example if you just want to get access to your account you will need to get 5!!! access keys and what is the most important, they have nothing to do with your account credentials. That is very difficult to find some information about these keys in API without the help of google. It requires some digging to understand how to setup application to work with API.

Also this service has a lot of restrictions. You can’t simply add subscriber to the list. He has to confirm subscription via email. Only in this case he will be added to the list. Regarding other restrictions, currently the only data we can update via the API is status of users subscription. Everything else (account data, lists) are read only for the time being.

Despite all these obstacles we have successfully integrated Aweber with our application and use that to conduct effective marketing campaigns. If you are looking for the user-friendly tool to create marketing emails which are appreciated by recipients and make them forget the button “unsubscribe”, Aweber is definitely the one you need.

Regarding transactional emails, we choose the Sendgrid because of its stability and possibility to edit layout templates for emails from its interface. If your requirements are the same we recommend you to try out this tool and share with us your experience in using that!