If you’re in business or sales and have an email marketing strategy, transactional emails should be an elemental part of it. They’re useful when you need to send to thousands or millions of recipients each day as automated, real-time messages get sent to your users via email, after they perform specific actions within your app or website.

To send such bulk emails, though, you’ll need to pick a good service provider.

In the following list some of the best transactional email service providers around are highlighted.

The service is designed to help you send marketing emails and transactional emails like order confirmations, special offers, and other correspondence like newsletters to stay in contact with your customers.

You can integrate it directly to your existing apps through the SMTP interface or integrate its email-sending capabilities into your already existing software, like email clients and ticketing systems.

What we like

What we don’t like

  • Lacks error recovery
  • No template hosting, analytics, design tools

2. SendGrid

SendGrid is one of the largest email service providers that lets you send transactional emails and marketing campaigns simultaneously. It is easy to integrate with your app and offers several different APIs and supported client libraries.

Other features include built-in support for reputation scoring and email authentication for your IP address so your emails get through, plus online documentation and video guides.

Its marketing platform features a drag/drop email template editor and online list management, so you can create your templates in SendGrid and still manage your list. You can also send data through SendGrid’s API or interface or do it yourself in your apps.

If customers reply to your emails, SendGrid parses them plus any attachments they may have, and then sends them through APIs and webhooks.

  • Amazing analytics and reports

  • Excellent support through videos and guides

  • Doubles as a transactional and marketing platform

  • Free tier – 12,000 free emails monthly

  • Easy-to-use and intuitive API

  • Doesn’t capture sent emails

  • No sandbox or test mode

  • Only allows unencrypted messages via port 2525

  • Missing features like sign-up forms and follow-up messages

3. Mandrill

Mandrill is an add-on by MailChimp, designed to send transactional emails with your subscriber details to get your app’s emails delivered. You can use Mandrill to send emails automatically to customers with a better template that combines with your MailChimp mailing lists. Thus, you can share contact data from email newsletters with transactional emails for better notification emails from your own app, while maintaining contact details in MailChimp.

A drag-and-drop editor is available for when you want to customize the emails to your brand identity and an automation feature to send different types of transactional emails.

  • Easy to set up SMTP and HTTP APIs

  • Clean and good-looking user interface

  • Pay-as-you-go pricing

  • Sandbox mode for testing

  • Clear documentation

  • Companion apps for Android and iOS

  • Customizable templates

  • Webhook reporting

  • User-friendly rules engine

  • Integrates with MailChimp

  • Free sent messages log for 24 hours

  • No free plan

  • Templates render doesn’t support handlebars

4. Mailgun

Mailgun is a reliable transactional email service provider that ensures you send messages to valid email addresses. But that’s not where it stops. It also includes email validation tools that let you check and ensures you don’t waste money trying to send to emails that bounce.

Emails can be sent with isolated sub-accounts for every domain added, so you can easily manage all your email lists or manage client emails and your own.

It features batch-sending tools that personalize emails, detailed logs and analytics, and its parsing engine is powerful enough to turn incoming emails into JSON, routing them to wherever you want.

Also included is a managed service that caters to other transactional services such as delivery rates or email reputation and other solutions. This allows you to focus on your code without worrying about email, even when millions of messages are going out each month.

  • RESTful API with code examples and libraries so it’s developer-focused

  • Included and configured in Meteor.js by default

  • Supports testing mode

  • There are several reports that Mailgun support isn’t excellent. (They take time to respond to queries.)

5. Postmark

Postmark can send transactional emails fast and deliver detailed stats with a focus on email sending and more features that improve emails. Additionally, a sent emails log with forty-ive days of searchable history is available so you can see the contents of sent emails and why they bounced, if they did.

It also allows you to see your recipients’ full profiles, complete with information on the emails they open, location, and more.

If you want to know how your emails are performing, Postmark pulls stats into a simple, easy-to-read sentence. It also stores email templates, so all your app does is send the content. Postmark merges them with the templates, to send automatically.

  • Supports domain-based message authentication

  • 5 server locations across the globe, hence faster sending of emails

  • Reduced likelihood of emails being marked as spam

  • Detailed analytics

  • Expensive

Do you have a transactional email service provider that you use every day? Tell us about it in the comments below.

My passion has always been to share every bit of useful information I find on tech, with the ultimate goal of helping people solve a problem.

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