The market is full of transactional email software for every taste and budget. In this article, we’re going to look at the pros and cons of each Mandrill alternative.

What Mandrill offers

Mailchimp Transactional Email, formerly Mandrill, is a paid Mailchimp add-on designed specifically to deliver transactional emails.

Mandrill enables you to send event-driven messages via the API or SMTP relay, track email activity, and respond to it. Mandrill’s email API connects your site to the functionality of a transactional email service allowing you to send out automated emails when a predefined event occurs. 

Its Rules Engine offers to define actions that should be taken after an email was sent. You can specify criteria that should be met for an application to send the event to webhook and take additional action, like setting click tracking, adding tags, rejecting messages, etc.

Mind that Mailchimp Transactional Email doesn’t store contacts, and it makes requests to your external database every time an email is triggered. This is a serious drawback for those who want to collect and re-use recipients’ contacts in future email marketing campaigns.

Which is better, Mandrill or Mailchimp? You can’t really compare these two – they’re apples and oranges. Mailchimp is an all-in-one platform for email marketers, and Mandrill is a dedicated transactional email service for tech enthusiasts.

Although the company has already changed the Mandrill name to Mailchimp Transactional Email, the platform is still to be transferred to the Mailchimp interface. Currently, these tools are accessible through different interfaces.

When should you choose Mandrill? Since you can’t purchase Mandrill as a separate tool, it only makes sense to use it for those who need the Mailchimp email marketing platform.

Pros

• Robust transactional API designed for developers
• High delivery speed
• White-labeled click tracking
• Email deliverability
• Ready-to-use email templates
• Dynamic personalization functionality
• Insightful email performance reports
• Automatic Rules Engine for changing sending behavior

Cons

• Coding skills are required
• No contact storage available in Mandrill
• You need a Mailchimp account to use Mandrill
• 30-day log retention isn’t sufficient

Mandrill pricing

Mailchimp Transactional Email is free for new users for up to 500 emails – before you exceed the limit, the demo period will not expire. Paid plans start at $20 per 25,000 emails/month. But to access the add-on, you also need to be a user of Mailchimp’s Standard ($17/month) or Premium plan ($299/month).

As we’ve already stressed, the pricing plans make Mandrill a viable option only for Mailchimp users.

Mandrill Alternatives Compared

Let’s see how Madrill’s features and pricing compare to alternative transactional email providers…

1. Sendinblue

Sendinblue Email API is the best Mandrill alternative for multiple reasons.

Unparalleled deliverability

No need to worry about emails reaching the spam folder. Sendinblue ensures high deliverability and open rates. With a dedicated IP address, you can be sure your emails will reach recipients’ inboxes without any delays. You can monitor the reputation of your IP from your dashboard.

For shared IP addresses, Sendinblue maintains a high sender reputation by detecting and removing fraudulent accounts timely. 

We also offer an extensive library of the best practices for improving the deliverability of your emails.

Trustworthy SMTP tools

You can access SMTP tools to send transactional emails fast and effortlessly. 

No need to run your own mail server. Our user-friendly SMTP relay service is all you need to have great control over your dedicated IP address or a pool of IPs.

The SMTP platform is accessible in all plans – you can start sending large volumes of emails with optimal delivery from $22.50/month. 

Easy WordPress integration

Our SMTP integrates with WordPress allowing you to enjoy the high deliverability of transactional emails from your WordPress website.

Sendinblue’s WordPress email plugin is built for marketers and business owners willing to configure WordPress SMTP settings without coding skills. 

Furthermore, our drag-and-drop editor enables users to build forms for WordPress websites, integrate them effortlessly, and deliver the best UX for site visitors.

Apart from WordPress, the platform integrates with a range of ecommerce platforms, like WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and others.

Unlimited log retention

Limited log retention is a common problem users of transactional email services face. That’s not the case for Sendinblue users.

Whenever you want to review the performance data for a specific SMTP email, you can visit your account Log and view all the necessary information about its status. Your message data is stored for the life of your account, without any limits.

For storing the records outside the Sendinblue interface, log export is available.

Real-time data

Our performance dashboard displays real-time statistics informing you of the status of the emails and how recipients interact with them.

Delivery status, open and click-through reports, click maps  – you’ll access the critical data in real-time. Due to unlimited log retention, you can also follow performance trends over time and identify opportunities for improving transactional sending.

For a top-level overview, the dashboards create graphs visualizing transactional statistics. You can dive as deep into your email performance as you want.

All-in-one tool for business growth

Sendinblue as a Mandrill alternative doesn’t limit its features to transactional email. It’s a comprehensive sales and marketing solution that includes tools for marketing automation, pipeline management, customer relationship management, advertising, SMS marketing, and many more. 

Mailchimp integrates with a tool called SimpleTexting to enable SMS marketing through the platform, which means you need to sign up for three tools to use the integration (first, Mailchimp, then Mandrill, and lastly, SimpleTexting). In contrast, Sendinblue allows you to send targeted SMS notifications through the platform – you can purchase credits alongside your selected Sendinblue plan.

Transactional SMS messages are set up through the platform’s interface, API, or one of the available plugins. 

One interface = many features

At the moment, Mandrill is a separate tool. Although you do have to buy Mailchimp’s plan to have a chance to use Mandrill, the add-on has a separate interface.

Inside Sendinblue, you access all its features from one interface. You don’t need to switch between the tools to launch a newsletter campaign and set up transactional emails.

Sendinblue pricing

One more reason Sendinblue is a better alternative to Mandrill is pricing. 

First of all, Sendinblue has a forever-free plan, and Mandrill doesn’t. In the free plan, users can send up to 300 emails/day and use SMTP service as well as core API features.

Paid plans begin at $25/20,000 emails per month. They include marketing tools, no daily sending limit, and A/B testing functionality atop features available on a free plan. 

Sendinblue’s pricing model is built in a way to allow you to only pay for the features that you need. For instance, you won’t need to buy the most expensive plan to get a dedicated IP address – you can add it to your selected plan.

Sendinblue vs Mandrill

• Lower expenses
• No coding skills required
• All the features accessible from one interface
• SMS marketing features 
• Unlimited log retention
• You pay for the number of emails sent, not for the number of contacts
• Sendinblue is up to 6x cheaper for sending bulk emails 
• Reactive customer support team
• Forever-free plan available
• Live chat 
• Advanced segmentation in cheaper plans

If you want to access advanced transactional email features and avoid overpaying, Sendinblue is the best alternative to Mandrill.

2. Mailgun

Mailgun is a dedicated transactional email automation service. It’s the best Mandrill alternative for users that don’t need email marketing services. 

Mailgun’s robust set of APIs allows developers and tech-savvy marketers to build scalable delivery infrastructure. Alongside SMTP relay service, Mailgun includes functionality for setting up webhooks, inbound email routing, email tracking and analytics, etc. 

Mind that the tool is built for developers and its learning curve is high for non-tech people. The lack of functionality for exporting logs or at least retaining them for more than 30 days also should be taken into account. If you want to keep track of your transactional email performance, Mailgun isn’t the best option. 

Mailgun Pricing

Mailgun offers a 3-month long free trial with access to 5,000 emails per month. Paid plans start at $35/month.

3. Mailjet

Mailjet is an email marketing platform that has been acquired by Mailgun. The product isn’t included in any of Mailgun’s plans, but it combines transactional email and marketing automation features. 

The platform has plugins and integrations with major CRM tools and ecommerce platforms. It also supports different programming frameworks and languages, including PHP, Ruby, Java, and others.

As a full-stack marketing automation platform, Mailjet offers a variety of features for effortless campaign management:

• Transactional email sending
• Drag-and-drop builder
• List segmentation
• Dynamic personalization
• A/B testing
• SMS marketing 

Mailjet Pricing

You can send up to 6,000 emails per month and use APIs, SMTP relay, and webhooks for free. Paid plans start at $15/month. Higher pricing tiers grant access to segmentation, sub-accounts, advanced statistics, and more exclusive features.

4. Pepipost (Netcore Email API)

Netcore Email API, formerly Pepipost, is another suitable alternative to Mandrill.

Its APIs and webhooks allow users to send high volumes of emails, set up real-time email delivery and click tracking, and run spam compliance checks.

Pepipost guarantees lightning-fast email delivery and decent delivery rates. Yet users tend to complain about the platform’s interface and the lack of visual representation of email performance.

Pepipost Pricing

Pepipost is probably the most affordable Mandrill alternative. You can send up to 150,000 emails per month for only $17.5. The first 30,000/month are included in a 30-day free trial.

5. SendGrid

Like Sendinblue, SendGrid is an all-in-one email marketing platform. Transactional email service is only a part of the functionality you’ll access inside the tool.

However, to use both email API and marketing automation features, you need to purchase two separate plans. Sending other types of emails apart from transactional will double the cost of the solution.

Nonetheless, SendGrid is considered the world’s leading transactional and marketing email platform for its robust REST API and SMTP.

Email API package offers insightful analytics, 30 days of email activity history, dedicated IP addresses, delivery optimization tools, and more.

SendGrid pricing

Both Email API and Marketing Campaign Plans are available for free. The paid plans start at $14.95/month. In the Email API plan, you’re granted API access, SMTP relay, webhooks, and top-notch analytics functionality.

6. Amazon SES

Amazon SES stands for Simple Email Service and is considered the simplest solution for sending transactional emails to Amazon customers.

It supports transactional and bulk email sending without the fluff. The tool is designed for developers, and you should know that it doesn’t offer an intuitive interface. Other than SMTP, Amazon offers two more sending options: the Amazon SES console and the Amazon SES API.

Implementing the Amazon SES solution might take time, but the effort is justified by low costs and high deliverability.

Amazon SES Pricing

The prices depend on different factors, like user location and hosting. The pay-as-you-go model means that you don’t have to pay set fees. It’s best to use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the cost of Amazon SES for your specific case.

7. SocketLabs

Last but not least, meet SocketLabs – an SMTP service and marketing automation platform for tech-savvy specialists. Inside the platform, you’ll find an SMTP relay service as well as a transactional email API.

Quick-start code libraries for a variety of frameworks and languages allow developers to integrate SocketLabs with stand-alone applications in no time. 

Top-notch support, unlimited contact storage, high delivery rates, and decent sender reputation – it’s all about SocketLabs. Users say there’s room for improving logging and monitoring functionality though.

SocketLabs pricing

SocketLabs offers a 30-day free trial with up to 40,000 email credits per month. When the trial period expires, you can choose between the Core ($39.95/month), Pro ($79.95/month), and Concierge (starting at $889/month) plans. This isn’t the cheapest Mandrill alternative, but it’s definitely one of the most reliable transactional email services.

Looking for the best Mandrill alternative?

When searching for a transactional email service provider, you’ll find solutions for every taste and wallet. Your choice totally depends on your skills, needs, and business size. If you aren’t willing to invest time or resources in implementing an overcomplicated solution, Sendinblue will be a sufficient option for you and your team.

The post 7 Best Mandrill Alternatives For Transactional Emails in 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

You can’t afford interruptions in transactional email workflows. Issues with deliverability and data safety can cost you customer relationships as well as revenue. Choosing the right transactional email service provider is critical for a thriving business.

Here’s what Mailgun has to offer and how it compares to other email delivery services.

What Mailgun Offers

Mailgun is a transactional email automation service built for developers. 

How does Mailgun work? As an API-first solution, the platform has a simple infrastructure allowing users to advance its functionalities based on their specific needs. 

Aside from email API, Mailgun offers a bunch of products for marketing automation, maximizing deliverability, email parsing, and more. 

What is the difference between Mailgun and Mailjet? Mailjet, email marketing software, isn’t included in any of the Mailgun plans. The product was acquired by Mailgun in 2021 and is now available on separate plans. Without Mailjet, Mailgun alone doesn’t offer email marketing functionality.

Pros

• A robust set of APIs allows users to build a custom delivery strategy
• A scalable delivery infrastructure
• Integrations with a wide range of CMS solutions and frameworks
• Solutions for improving email deliverability rates
• Consistent sender reputation
• Inbound email processing made easier
• A ‘pay-as-you-grow’ option

Cons

• A high learning curve for non-tech professionals
• Logs are retained for a very limited amount of time on any plan
• No functionality for exporting logs
• Slow user interface
• No way to address IP pool blacklisting
• Issues with email delivery to Outlook and Hotmail accounts – email campaigns tend to be marked as spam
• Poor customer support

Mailgun pricing

Mailgun pricing starts at $35/month. The lightest plan includes 50,000 emails, with $0.80 per extra 1000 emails and $1.20 per 100 validations. Dedicated IP pools and SAML authentication are available only in the top-tier plan, starting at $90/month. 

Mailgun isn’t cheap. While there’s a free 3-month trial that users can enjoy before switching to a paid basic plan, the functionalities available on lower pricing tiers are incompatible with midsize companies.

Mailgun Alternatives Compared

Below is an overview of the plan pricing as well as the key features of Mailgun and its best alternatives.

1. Sendinblue

One of the top Mailgun alternatives is Sendinblue. Here’s why.

A range of transactional sending options

SMTP relay, API, webhooks, eCommerce plugins, or simple marketing automation – with Sendinblue, you’re free to choose any sending option for your transactional emails. 

While developers will enjoy fast and scalable email delivery with Sendinblue’s free SMTP server and a powerful email API, marketers will be able to achieve the same results with custom-built integrations.

We integrate with WordPress and a variety of eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Shopware, and Magento.

Email API

Unlimited log retention, 120k emails per minute, and advanced tracking – it’s what Sendinblue’s email API is all about Built for developers, it combines the power of an advanced tech solution and the simplicity of a well-designed API.

If you need to send emails or SMS messages at large volumes, you’ll hardly find a better solution than our email API.

SMS sending

Transactional emails go hand in hand with SMS messages. Sendinblue combines these two.

There are tons of cases where you can’t rely solely on email. SMS messaging allows brands to manage payment data safely with 2-factor authentication, send instant alerts, or just have an additional marketing channel.

Similar to emails, transactional SMS can be set up through API, marketing automation, or one of the available plugins. SMS credits can be purchased separately alongside your selected plan.

Reputation

Users often complain that Mailgun is widely used by spammers. Sendinblue’s rigorous user validation process helps keep spammers out.

To protect all senders on our servers, we’ve introduced a set of criteria Sendinblue users should comply with to have their emails approved.

Anti-spam policies and restrictions protect users of shared IP addresses from reputation damage caused by deceptive practices of accounts in the shared infrastructure. Due to a strict vetting process, we manage to maintain a solid sender reputation for all of our Sendinblue sender IPs.

Complete marketing automation solution

Sendinblue is more than a Mailgun alternative. It’s an all-in-one sales and marketing platform offering a complete toolkit for growing your business in one interface. 

Besides transactional email, Sendinblue offers solutions for marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), SMS marketing, Facebook advertising, live chat, lead generation, and more.

Intuitive interface

As a Mailgun alternative, Sendinblue allows users to configure transactional emails through APIs or SMTP endpoints. 

However, we also offer simple no-code solutions for those who aren’t tech-savvy. Our drag-and-drop email builder allows you to create professional-looking transactional messages.

To set up automated messages, you can use our visual workflow builder. Both transactional email and SMS can be managed through a user-friendly interface. 

Sendinblue pricing

Surprisingly, Sendinblue not only offers more features for streamlining business processes but also has a lower entry threshold. Sendinblue’s free account includes 300 emails/day and gives access to transactional email and SMS, core API features, SMTP service, and templates. 

Paid plans start at $25/20,000 emails/month. They include marketing tools, no daily sending limit, and A/B testing functionality atop features available on a free plan.

Sendinblue vs Mailgun

• Operations that can be run through SMTP relay and email API are also available through the user interface
• No coding skills required
• Transactional email and SMS combined
• No limit to the number of contacts per plan
• Dynamic personalization functionality
• An all-in-one marketing automation solution
• Unlimited log retention with Sendinblue’s email API
• Strict policies maintaining positive IP reputation
• A range of integrations and ecommerce plugins

If you’re looking for a more cost-effective Mailgun alternative, Sendinblue is the right choice.

2. MailerSend

The next best alternative to Mailgun is MailerSend.

It’s a dedicated transactional email service by MailerLite. You can create campaigns by using RESTful API, configuring SMTP settings, or creating integrations inside Zapier or Integromat.

MailerSend’s features include a drag-and-drop email builder, dynamic personalization, bulk email sending, and real-time email status updates.

Similar to Sendinblue, MailerSend uses SPF, DKIM, and DMARC security protocols to protect an email sender’s reputation. Deliverability is one of its key competitive advantages over Mailgun. 

MailerSend pricing

The tool offers a forever free plan with up to 12,000 emails/month. A paid plan starts at $25/month, with 14 days of data retention, unlimited API tokens, and a dedicated IP.

3. SendGrid

SendGrid is an all-in-one email marketing solution. Aside from the typical email marketing suite, the tool provides advanced setup methods, like web API and SMTP relay.

Transactional email delivery is only one part of SendGrid’s offerings. The company also sells packages for email marketing and automation. The drawback is – if you want to use SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns and the Email API products, you’ll need to purchase the plans separately. 

So, if you want to have access to SMTP relay and email API as well as a drag-and-drop editor, you’ll be paying twice.

With that in mind, what’s better, SendGrid or Mailgun?

When you need a flexible solution for developers, Mailgun is a good option. But for a combination of API/SMTP and great email marketing features, you’d better go for SendGrid.

SendGrid pricing

Email API plans start at $14.95/month, and the lightest pricing package for Marketing Campaigns plans begins at $15/month. However, you can access both email API and email marketing features on a forever-free plan.

See also: Best SendGrid alternatives

4. Postmark

For a decade, Postmark had been focusing solely on transactional emails. Since 2020, the company has started to offer functionality for email marketing and bulk email. A new product is called Message Streams.

To use Postmark, you need to be a tech person willing to work with code. If you’re tech-savvy, you’ll enjoy an easy-to-use API and developer-friendly SMTP documentation.

In Postmark, you won’t find SMS support, list segmentation, and marketing automation features. The platform is known for lightning-fast delivery, a bounce rate report, 45-day data retention, and a proactive support team.

Postmark pricing

Postmark starts at $10 per 10,000 emails/month. There’s a free plan allowing you to run 100 test emails per month, but it’s not sufficient.

5. SMTP2GO

SMTP2GO is an email delivery service, having rock-solid reliability as its main advantage.

The tool is good for sending transactional and marketing emails without a very low risk of reaching the spam folder. It provides insightful visual reports so that users are always aware of how exactly recipients interact with their emails.

SMTP2GO pricing

Its Starter plan begins at $15/month, with an opportunity to add extra 1,000 emails for $1. All plans include no more than 30 days of email reporting.

6. SparkPost

Another Mailgun alternative is SparkPost, an email sending and deliverability platform.

Similar to Postmark, SparkPost requires an understanding of coding basics to set up transactional or other mail streams. 

SparkPost is also one of the most affordable transactional email services for developers.

SparkPost pricing

SparkPost starts at $20/month. In the Starter plan, you can send 12,500 emails daily, use API and SMTP relay, access 2 custom webhooks, and receive data on various aspects of your email performance.

7. SocketLabs

SocketLabs is an SMTP service and marketing automation platform for pros. It offers an SMTP relay service as well as a transactional email API.

Even though SocketLabs can’t brag about the most intuitive UI, it’s a robust solution for high-volume senders. Contrary to Mailgun, the tool offers unlimited contact storage and industry-leading deliverability.

With SocketLabs, you can send all kinds of transactional emails, including receipts, confirmations, event-driven notifications, and behavior-triggered messages.

SocketLabs pricing

In the first month, SocketLabs users can use the tool for free and send up to 40,000 emails/month. From the second month, pricing starts at $39.95/month. 

SMTP relay and API are available in all plans.

Mind that low-tier plans don’t include reporting functionality.

What is the Best Mailgun Alternative?

What features are you looking for in your email service provider? If you need a lightning-fast solution for large-scale emails, dedicated tools, like SMTP2GO or SparkPost will work for you. But if your small business needs a platform combining transactional email and email marketing functionality in one interface, an all-in-one tool like Sendinblue is a go-to option.

The post 7 Best Mailgun Alternatives For Transactional Emails appeared first on Sendinblue.

Transactional emails are very different from marketing ones. Not only can any website or application make use of them, but they also need to be personalized with dynamic contact information to deliver registration info, order details, and password resets. That’s why speed, deliverability, and security are top priorities when choosing an email service provider. 

Let’s look at the SendGrid offering and how SendGrid competitors stack up. 

What SendGrid Offers

SendGrid is a large-scale email solution, providing email automation, signup forms, and list management. It’s used by big name clients like Uber and Airbnb. However, it’s best known as a leading transactional email platform offering email Rest API and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). 

SendGrid is developer-oriented and usually integrated into stand-alone applications, rather than used as a SaaS.

Pros

• Email templates with conditional formatting available 
• Advanced testing options (inbox look, links, spam filter risk)
• Email validation API available to check email addresses before emails are sent and bounce.
• Good email delivery rates
• Monitoring and tools for sender reputation management 
• Paying customers get chat, ticket, or phone (on higher plans) support
• Scalable for large-volume operations 

Cons

• They sign you up for ISP feedback so you can remove contacts who complain about your emails from your list. Other solutions save time by automatically removing them for you.
• Only 3 days of transactional messages history included, 30-day email activity history is a paid add-on.
• You need other Twilio add-ons for chat, SMS, and push notifications.
• You need a separate email marketing plan to be able to send other kinds of emails apart from transactional. Charges for it are based on contact list size.
• You also need this other plan to use a drag-and-drop email editor if you don’t want to code your emails.

SendGrid Pricing

There’s a free forever plan, 100 transactional emails a day. Plans start at $14.95/month. Dedicated IPs are available on Pro plan or higher, starting at $89.95/month. Marketing Campaigns plans also offer a free plan (2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails/month) and start from there at $15/month.

Sendgrid Alternatives Compared

Here’s an overview of the prices and main features SendGrid and its competitors offer as transactional email solutions.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is the most cost-effective SendGrid alternative. Let’s explain why.

API, SMTP, and more

As a SendGrid competitor, Sendinblue offers transactional emails via email marketing API, and SMTP relay. But that’s not all.! You can also connect it to all major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop) via plugins. Or set up automations to trigger transactional emails when certain events occur. (Our SMTP server lets you set up webhooks and track events.)

We understand performance is essential for this type of communication. That’s why Sendinblue offers detailed email analytics on all key metrics. Plus, it offers the advantage over other email delivery services of keeping unlimited logs (i.e. the history of individual emails sent to each recipient).

Premium deliverability

We have a dedicated team of email deliverability experts who monitor sender reputations on our shared IPs to make sure your emails reach the inbox. We also have a strict vetting process to keep spammers out and protect your sending and open rates. 99.98% of emails are delivered by Sendinblue in less than 20 seconds.

All-in-one email

Sendinblue covers the full range of email marketing services on one marketing platform and plan. No need to use separate tools, or pay different plans on top.

Grow your list first with signup forms and start sending a newsletter. Then, run a promotional campaign. Confirm each individual order that comes in. After that, automate engagement with tailored offers based on the products purchased. And maybe send a mass email to announce a new product range. Send all your transactional, marketing, and automated emails from one place. 

Sendinblue also works as a bulk email service. You can use the email API or SMTP to send large volume marketing campaigns faster and with better results.

And if that’s not enough, live chat, landing pages, and SMS marketing are also available. Complete with a CRM, you have all customer data and communications on the same platform. 

GDPR

Sendinblue is one SendGrid alternative that takes GDPR very seriously. 

It offers signup forms that make collecting consent legal and managing subscribers preferences easy. If someone one accepts transactional but not promotional emails, you won’t be able to email them by mistake and annoy them. This protects your sender reputation as you won’t get marked as spam for unwanted communications.

Also, the API syncs contact activity with the CRM in real time. So hard bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complainers from transactional emails are automatically blacklisted in your CRM so promotional emails are not sent to those addresses either. And unsubscribe links are automatically inserted in all email templates to take one more thing off your plate to remember. 

Read more: 11 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Email Bounce Rate

For developers AND marketers alike

Sendinblue as a SendGrid alternative makes transactional email (and not only) accessible to users who are not as tech savvy as a developer. Here are our developer resources but if you’re not one, you can still make full use of the marketing platform. 

First, you don’t have to code your transactional emails. The user-friendly drag and drop email builder lets you create any type of email you want from scratch or customizing one of the ready templates available. This way, your transactional emails can be branded and look just as good as the marketing ones. 

With Sendinblue, customizing your transactional emails with individual information like order status is also easy. Ready-made elements for dynamic content personalization are available in the email editor. 

There’s no need to code your marketing automations either. Just add the steps you want in the visual workflow builder. You can even add transactional SMS or rules to manage the contact based on their behavior, too.

Sendinblue vs SendGrid

• All email marketing needs taken care of in one place: bulk email, newsletters, marketing emails, automated campaigns, and every other email marketing use case
• Not just 2, but 4 options for sending transactional emails
• Ready-to-use ecommerce plugins for quick and easy integration
• Unlimited send logs
• No charge for contact list size
• User-friendly email design tool and templates for marketers who don’t have coding skills
• Easy use of dynamic content for personalization
• Preview on different email clients and devices
• Customer support in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese

Overall, Sendinblue is a SendGrid alternative for small businesses when you don’t know how to write code for transactional emails and want to send everything from one platform.

Pricing

You can activate API or SMTP service even on Sendinblue’s free account (300 emails/day). Paid plans begin at $25/10,000 emails/month with automation, signup forms, templates, A/B testing, SMS, CRM, and no daily sending limit.

Mandrill

Mandrill is another SendGrid alternative for transactional email. It offers a full range of features: dynamic content (merge tags), conditional rules and webhooks to react to specific behaviors, click tracking, A/B testing. 

However, it’s owned by Mailchimp and unfortunately you have to pay for both to be able to use Mandrill’s API or SMTP. 

No contact storage available on Mandrill is another downside. You need Mailchimp for list management or the API/ SMTP will make a call to your external database every time it’s sending an email.

Pricing

You get 500 emails to test Mandrill for free. After that, you need a Mailchimp Standard or Premium plan (from $17 for 500 contacts) and add blocks of 25,000 emails starting at $20/month. Price per block goes down as volume goes up but unused email quota doesn’t roll over to the next month. Dedicated IP add-on is $29.95/month.

Related: 10 Best Mailchimp Alternatives Compared by Price (2022)

Mailgun

Mailgun is a close SendGrid competitor. It’s an API-first solution for developers or B2B and is often white labeled by other applications. It offers additional email deliverability services, inbox placement, email verification, and transactional SMS as well.

If you’re a marketer, though, Mailgun can be intimidating. 

You’ll probably need developer’s help for sending any email because it’s not done directly from the platform as with email marketing software. At least you have an alternative to creating the emails in HTML. Mailgun acquired Mailjet for email marketing (promotional emails, newsletters, drip campaigns). Now, you can use Mailjet’s drag and drop email builder to create transactional emails as well.

Pricing

Mailgun offers a trial period of 3 months with 5,000 emails/month. Then, it’s $0.80/1,000 emails. Marketing campaigns are paid on separate plans starting at $35/mo

Dedicated IPs are available on the Foundation 100k plan and up. Validations are an add-on, from $1.20 / 100.

Postmark

Postmark is another SendGrid competitor on the transactional side. It’s built as a transactional email service provider for applications so it’s perfect for SaaS, apps, etc. It’s a robust solution for the tech savvy with detailed reporting and 45 days log retention, boasting superior customer support.

But it lacks campaign building capabilities such as list management, contact segmentation, or a user-friendly design tool needed for ecommerce marketing, for example. Only pre-built transactional email templates are available or alternatively you can use their open-source toolset MailMaison with CSS.

Pricing

Postmark’s pricing starts at $10 per 10,000 emails a month, and you can top up with additional blocks of 1,000 for $1.25 each. Dedicated IP addresses cost $50/month.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES can be counted as a SendGrid alternative as it’s the most basic solution for service emails. The name literally stands for Simple Email Service. It offers APIs and SMTP, core metrics, and a focus on the tech side as it’s a part of the AWS suite for enterprise. Prominent users are Reddit, Netflix, and Duolingo.

It’s a developer tool, usually integrated into stand-alone applications. And so you can’t log in and simply send your emails from its platform. It doesn’t offer a user-friendly interface or email marketing functionality. It works best if you’re hosted on Amazon too.

Pricing

Amazon SES is often cited as the cheapest SendGrid alternative. This can be true, but keep in mind that price depends on your location, your setup, and hosting. There are no set fees, it’s $0.10 / 1000 emails charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. Dedicated IPs are $24.95/ month.

Choosing a SendGrid Alternative

All of the listed SendGrid competitors offer the basic functionality for sending transactional emails. From there, your decision depends on what additional features you need in one email service provider. It’s a good idea for small businesses to try a few SendGrid alternatives for free and see which one’s easiest to use.

The post 5 Best SendGrid Alternatives for Transactional Email (2022) appeared first on Sendinblue.

SMTP is quite a technical subject and if you’re new to the world of email, can be a tough one to get your head around. 

This guide will give you the SMTP information you need to manage your emails in a way that best serves your business.

We’ll also be looking at how Sendinblue functions as an SMTP server and how you can test-drive our free SMTP server.

What is SMTP?

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a communication protocol, or set of rules, used to send email from an email client or webmail provider to a recipient’s email server. 

In short, SMTP sends email to its destination. You can think of it as a postal worker picking up mail from your home, finding the correct destination route, then delivering it to the recipient mailbox.

Once transferred to the recipient’s server by SMTP, the email is retrieved using POP and IMAP protocols.

How SMTP email works (for those who really want to know)

As mentioned, SMTP primarily refers to the set of rules that email servers use to transfer emails over the internet from one email server to another.

The protocol works like this:

• The sender and recipient of the message are specified
• A request is sent to both the sender and recipient to verify they exist
• The message is transferred from the sender to the recipient

Steps for transferring messages over the internet according to SMTP

As a marketer, you may not be interested in the minute details of how SMTP works in practice. In that case, feel free to jump ahead. 

But if you are interested in the technical side, we’re about to take a more detailed look at the process. First, let’s run through some of the terminology related to SMTP.

Ok, now that you’ve got the SMTP vocabulary down, let’s see how it all fits together to create the protocol for transferring electronic messages over the internet.

Here are the 6 main steps that comprise the electronic message data transfer process for SMTP:

1. Email is submitted by a MUA to a mail server’s MSA
2. The message is transferred to the server’s MTA (the MTA and MSA are usually hosted on the same SMTP server)
3. The MTA checks the MX record of the recipient domain and transfers the message to another MTA (this step can occur multiple times until the message is received by the proper receiving server)
4. The message is handed off to the MDA, which saves messages in the proper format for retrieval by the receiving MUA
5. The receiving MUA requests the message from the MDA (usually with POP3 or IMAP)
6. The message is delivered to the receiving MUA‘s inbox

To give you a clearer visual, here’s a graphic that shows the process in action:

What is an SMTP server? 

Any server that receives, handles, transfers, or stores electronic messages transferred through SMTP can be considered an SMTP server.

There are two types of SMTP server you’ll come across:

• ‘Regular’ SMTP servers for sending everyday personal email. These servers typically belong to email providers like Gmail, Internet Service Providers like AT&T, or web hosting providers like Bluehost. They usually have strict daily sending limits.
• Dedicated SMTP relay servers for sending bulk email and transactional emails. Companies like Sendinblue have dedicated servers that support high-volume sending for their customers. 

What is an SMTP Relay?

SMTP Relay refers to the actual SMTP servers through which emails pass before arriving at their destination. But no need to get into the specifics, just think of it as a synonym for SMTP server.

Where is the SMTP server located?

If you’re wondering where to find your SMTP server address, it’ll be in the SMTP settings of your email client or webmail provider. 

These settings tell the email client or webmail provider where they need to send an email to.

Each SMTP server has its own SMTP email address or server name. For example, the Gmail SMTP server address is smtp.gmail.com and the Sendinblue SMTP address is smtp.relay.sendinblue.com. 

Reminder: The difference between an email client and a webmail provider 

Email clients and webmail providers are two methods of sending, receiving, and storing emails. 

An email client is an application installed locally on a computer or mobile device that interacts with an email provider’s server using SMTP. When you set up a email client, you need to enter your email provider’s incoming and outgoing mail server settings.

Once the client retrieves your email, it’s stored locally so you can read and access it whenever you want — even when you’re not online. Popular email clients include Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird.

A webmail provider (like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail) lets you access email directly on the webmail provider’s server.  For example, you connect to the internet and log into your Gmail account to be able to read or send email.

Incoming and outgoing mail is sent over the webmail provider’s servers but these settings can be customized, as we’re about to see next.

Changing the SMTP settings to your email provider of choice

Here’s a key point to note: SMTP server settings can be changed according to the email provider you want to use.

For example if you want to send bulk email through an email client, website, or other application, you can easily change the existing SMTP setting to Sendinblue SMTP or another bulk email provider. 

And there are plenty of reasons why you should do this. Let’s take a look at them now. 

When to switch to a dedicated SMTP relay service

To send large volumes of email 

In the beginning, you might get by sending transactional emails from your website over the PHP mailer function or a free provider like Gmail.

But as your business grows, you’ll need a more robust SMTP service that can handle larger volumes of email.

Free email providers have strict daily sending limits. Sending too many emails could damage your sender reputation or result in important emails landing in the spam folder. 

To send larger amounts of email from your email client or website without running into such issues, it’s best to invest in a professional SMTP service like Sendinblue. 

Better email deliverability

The SMTP server you use to send out emails is associated with a specific IP address. This address is directly tied to your deliverability because it’s this address that ISPs use to check your sender reputation.

The shared IPs of free email providers aren’t monitored closely enough. This means you could be sending emails from the same email server as a known spammer. 

By sending bulk email through one of these free providers, you’re likely to end up in the spam folder. But with a dedicated provider like Sendinblue, the email servers have the necessary infrastructure to deliver large volumes of email to the inbox.

And because we maintain strict control over all of our shared IP addresses, users can benefit from excellent deliverability for both marketing emails and transactional emails. 

SPF, DKIM and DMARC signatures are managed through our Sendinblue domain names to avoid any DNS issues being flagged by the recipient mail server. 

For even more control over your sender reputation, high-volume senders can purchase a dedicated IP address. This way you don’t have to worry about the sending behavior of anyone else affecting your deliverability.

How to choose the best SMTP server to suit your needs

There’s a huge choice of dedicated SMTP sending services on the market. If you’re trying to find the best SMTP service for your business, here are some factors to take into consideration:

• Email volume needs: How much email are you sending? How fast is your business growing? Ideally, you want a solution that can grow with you — without breaking the bank as your needs increase. 
• Pricing: What’s your email budget? How do the prices of different solutions compare for the email volume you need?
• Features: What additional features do you need or would be useful to have? Email delivery reports are a must but don’t get distracted by unnecessary bells and whistles.
• Support: As it’s a technical subject, what support options are offered? Do you have an in-house developer to configure the setup? SMTP servers can become more complex as a business grows so it’s good to know what support resources are available. 

What’s the best SMTP service for sending bulk email?

We’re biased so of course we’re going to say Sendinblue. But don’t take our word for it. Read these in-depth comparisons with other providers Mailgun and Sendgrid to see how we compare on pricing and features.

How Sendinblue works as a third-party SMTP server

As well as being an email marketing software, Sendinblue also functions as a third party SMTP server. Our users have the option of sending email through us rather than through a webmail client or their own server.

There are number of advantages to using Sendinblue SMTP relay service:

• Quick and easy set up. Once you open your free Sendinblue account all you need to do is activate SMTP. This’ll give you your SMTP credentials to enter into the email client or third party application.
• Benefit from advanced email deliverability and an established sender reputation
• Real-time delivery rates and email performance metrics
• Dedicated IPs for high-volume senders

Can I test Sendinblue’s SMTP server for free?

Yes, you can test Sendinblue’s SMTP email service on the free plan with up to 300 emails a day.

Our free plan also gives access to our email marketing platform, automation, transactional email API, and custom-built email plugins for WordPress and ecommerce platforms.

Pricing for paid plans starts at $25 for 20,000 emails per month and you can store unlimited subscribers at no extra cost.

How to set up Sendinblue’s SMTP relay for sending bulk emails

To send transactional messages from third party web apps and websites over Sendinblue’s SMTP relay, you need to follow these simple steps:

1. Open your free Sendinblue account
2. Add and authenticate your domain in the Senders and IPs section
3. Request the SMTP activation by contacting our support team, specifying whether it’s for marketing or transactional emails

Once SMTP is activated, you’ll be given a set of SMTP credentials. 

These credentials can be found by clicking on the company name at the top right of your Sendinblue account and selecting ‘SMTP & API’. SMTP credentials consist of the sending server, a port, login, and password like in the screenshot below.

Once you have these details, you’re good to go! Just enter the credentials into the SMTP settings of your email client or other software.

When sending an email, your email client will verify with our server that the SMTP credentials used for authentication are linked to an active Sendinblue account before sending the email on towards the recipient’s mail server.

The easiest way to modify WordPress SMTP settings is with a plugin.

How to set up SMTP email on WordPress

The easiest way to modify WordPress SMTP settings is with a plugin. We recommend our custom-developed WordPress email plugin (or a third party plugin like WP Mail SMTP).

By default, WordPress sends email over the web host’s servers using the wp_mail() function. ISPs often treat email via PHP as suspicious which can lead to the issue of WordPress not sending email to the inbox.

Sendinblue’s SMTP plugin override the defaut WordPress email settings to automatically send email over Sendinblue SMTP. All it takes is a few simple clicks, no coding required.

1. Create a Sendinblue account following the steps outlined above.
2. Install and activate the Sendinblue plugin on WordPress. Click ‘Sendinblue’ on your WordPress dashboard to configure the settings. Follow Step 2 which requires entering an API key.

3. Head back over to the Sendinblue dashboard. You’ll find your API key under SMTP & API.

4. Copy and paste the API into the entry field on the plugin dashboard and hit ‘Login‘.

On the next page you’ll be presented with a number of additional settings.

Under transactional emails, select ‘Yes‘ to send WordPress email over Sendinblue SMTP. This will override the default wp_mail() function to automatically use Sendinblue.

Once these settings are configured, sent a test email via your WordPress contact form. The email should arrive promptly at the destination mailbox as per the contact form settings.

Wrap up

We hope you’ve now got a better understanding of what is SMTP, how an SMTP server works, and why it’s a good idea to invest in a professional SMTP service for sending bulk email.

Any questions, just leave us a comment below. 

In the meantime, here’s some other content you might be interested in: 

• Transactional Email Explained: Definition, Best Practices, & Setup
• 8 of the Easiest Ways to Improve Email Deliverability
• Email Segmentation: How to Segment Your Lists for Targeted Email Marketing

The post What is SMTP? A Marketer’s Guide to SMTP Servers appeared first on Sendinblue.

Picture this: You buy a brand new laptop for $2000.00, but receive nothing in your inbox. No order confirmation, no payment receipt — just crickets. 

Panic sets in. You start to wonder if you’ve been scammed. That’s the last time I’m buying from them, you tell yourself. 

This kind of unpleasant situation highlights the importance of transactional email.

Because even minor errors or delays with your transactional emails can cause a massive loss of trust among your customers, potentially making them not want to come back.

Now that you’ve an idea of how essential these email messages are to your ecommerce business, let’s take a deeper look at them. In this guide, you’ll learn about:

• Transactional email definition
• Transactional emails vs marketing emails    
• Transactional email examples
• How to set up transactional emails
• Transactional email best practices
• Transactional email design
• How to leverage transactional email marketing

What is a transactional email?

What qualifies as a transactional email?

All emails that are sent automatically and instantly following a specific action or event on your website can be considered ‘transactional’. Common examples include:

• Subscription confirmation (or double opt-in)
• Order confirmation
• Notification emails (delivery updates, new message, etc.)
• Password reset emails and account notifications
• Bills, receipts, etc.

Transactional emails vs marketing emails: What’s the difference?

Transactionals emails are not the same as marketing emails. Transactional emails fulfill the customer communication needs that are necessary to business operations. Marketing emails, sent to an audience of email subscribers, serve to promote and inform. 

While marketing emails are important for growing your brand and revenue, their absence doesn’t affect your core business or website functionality.

Different sending process

The main difference between transactional emails and marketing emails (i.e. newsletters or promotional emails) is that transactional emails are sent after being triggered by a transaction or event on your site. 

These personalized one-to-one communications contain information specific to the transaction that just took place. 

Email marketing, on the other hand, is when you send a promotional message to a list of contacts, i.e. a ‘one to many’ communication. Here, we’re talking about an email campaign — or series of emails — pre-planned and sent at the time of your choosing. 

Are abandoned cart emails transactional?

No. Abandoned cart emails, triggered whenever a customer abandons a cart on an ecommerce site, are not transactional. These are marketing emails. The recipient has to be already subscribed to your email marketing list. Which brings us to the next point…

Email subscription requirements

Unlike transactional emails, marketing emails are sent to email subscribers only. If you want to send a marketing email to someone, that person needs to have opt-ed in to receive promotional emails from you. 

If they’re not subscribed to your email list, then you have no right to contact them. And doing so could very easily put you in hot water with data protection laws like the GDPR and CAN-SPAM act. 

All marketing emails need to have an unsubscribe button allowing subscribers to opt out at any time.

Do transactional emails need an unsubscribe button?

No, because transactional emails do not require the recipient to be subscribed to your email list in the first place.

As these are one-off emails relating to a specific transaction, the recipient can expect to not receive any more emails from you in the future (or at least until their next purchase).

You can, of course, offer the option to join your mailing list at the checkout. But remember, just because someone gave you their email address as part of the transaction, you’ve no right to send them marketing emails without their consent. 

Different emailing software

An important point to note when choosing emailing tools for your business: Transactional emails have different software requirements to marketing emails. 

Because of their automated and instantaneous nature, transactional emails are sent over a dedicated SMTP server or transactional email API. This is done to ensure the best possible email deliverability. 

Using one tool for all emails

If you’d like to be able to centralize all your emails in one solution, some email marketing services like Sendinblue cater for both marketing and transactional emails. 

Some marketers prefer to have both types of email under the one roof as it’s less hassle than managing two different subscriptions. Not to mention that it can also work out cheaper too.  

Transactional email examples

What are the different types of transactional emails?

Transactional email examples come in many different forms but with one thing in common: Important information your customers or website visitors need in order to interact normally with your business.

To give you a better idea, here are a few of the different types of transactional email messages you might set up for your own site (or come across in the wild):

Account creation or email subscription confirmation

Sent after a user creates an account or subscribes to a newsletter, this type of transactional email typically serves as a means of verifying a new customer’s email address.

You can use this type of email for new users if you have user accounts through your site, or you can use it to confirm your contacts’ newsletter subscriptions through a double opt-in process.

Be careful not to confuse the account or subscription confirmation email with the welcome email. This serves more of a marketing purpose and can be sent with simple email autoresponder software.

Order confirmation

This is without a doubt the transactional email that your clients anticipate the most. If you sell online, it’s essential that you send an order confirmation to ensure a positive customer experience.

Order confirmation emails have several objectives:

• Confirm the price and items that were purchased
• Reassure the customer that the purchase went through
• Provide all the necessary information for keeping track of the order (order number, package tracking number, customer service contact details, etc.)
• Give an estimated delivery date

Consumers often worry there were problems with their order or billing information. This email alleviates any concerns by confirming the exact amount that was charged and listing all the items that were purchased.

This is especially important for customers who don’t usually shop online. That’s why you’ve got to make sure your order confirmation emails are set up to provide all the necessary details and put customers at ease.

Order follow-up

Customer communication doesn’t have to stop at the order confirmation email. In fact, it’s important that you continue to follow up with customers so they know exactly what’s going on with their order.

To keep customers in the loop, you can send transactional email notifications for the various steps in the delivery process:

• Order preparation
• Shipping confirmation
• Delivery confirmation

While you may not need to send transactional emails for all these scenarios, you should at least send shipping confirmations. This way customers know that it’s been sent out, can track their shipment, and be on the lookout on delivery day.

These notifications are especially important if you’re running a Click and Collect service.

Bills and receipts

Receipts or bills can sometimes be integrated directly into the order confirmation email, but occasionally, websites dedicate a separate transactional email for this message as well.

This is usually the case for:

• Businesses that don’t deliver a physical product
• Subscription style payments that require regular receipts

Sending bills and receipts are important because they provide complete transparency to customers on how much (and how frequently) they’re being charged.

It’s also important for record keeping — so keep your customers happy and provide them with the receipts they need.

Password reset

Password reset emails might be the least glamorous of the transactional emails, but they’re crucial to providing a positive user experience on your website.

Their purpose is pretty self-explanatory: they allow users to reset their passwords when they’ve forgotten their previous login credentials.

Make sure you’ve got a properly functioning password reset transactional email. Without it, users who forget their password will have no way to get back into their account and interact with your business.

How to set up transactional emails

Transactional emails are sent over SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), an internet protocol for transmitting emails over the internet. And they require a special type of solution to ensure reliable and consistent deliverability.

Use a dedicated and reliable SMTP solution

The best option for successfully managing your transactional emails is to use a dedicated transactional email service like Sendinblue.

Although most ecommerce CMS (Woocomerce, Prestashop, Magento, etc.) provide default transactional emails out of the box, these generic options are limited when compared with dedicated solutions like Sendinblue.

Using a specialized tool lets you:

• Follow real time analytics for email deliverability and engagement
• Personalize your transactional email templates for better branding, design, and user experience
• Ensure optimal deliverability for all of your messages

If you only use your default CMS’ transactional emails, you’ll most likely be left with your fingers crossed, hoping your emails were delivered successfully.

Set up your emails with Sendinblue’s transactional email service

To get transactional emails up and running for your site using Sendinblue, you have 3 options:

1. Use one of our plugins that connects your CMS with Sendinblue (such as our WooCommerce plugin)
2. Configure your SMTP settings manually through Sendinblue
3. Use our email API: read the API documentation here

Note that the second and third options will require programming skills or the assistance of a developer.

Developers can also check out our guide to setting up transactional emails with Next.js and Sendinblue.

If you don’t have access to a developer, your best bet is to find the right plugin to make setup much simpler.

Transactional email best practices

Separate your transactional emails and your promotional marketing emails

Choose a solution that lets you separate the routing of your transactional emails from that of your promotional email campaigns. 

As mentioned earlier, transactional emails serve a very specific and vital purpose.

You don’t want your transactional emails to suffer because of the inevitably lower deliverability and engagement of your marketing emails. Transactional emails need to land in the inbox on time, every time.

One problem with an email marketing campaign can damage your sender score. This can eventually affect the deliverability of your future emails. You want to avoid letting these types of problems impact your transactional emails at all costs.

With Sendinblue, you can:

• Separate your marketing and transactional email streams (by sender and IP address)
• Manage and follow the performance of all of your emails from one account
• All at no additional cost!

Transactional email design

Personalize your transactional email templates with your brand colors

Most transactional emails are pretty bland and unengaging. Why not make them more attractive and recognizable using the colors of your brand?

On Sendinblue, you can edit your transactional emails using any one of several email templates available in the design template library.

The simple act of adding your logo and a few links back to your site can make a big difference in the marketing ROI you get from these messages.

Here’s an example of an order confirmation template that you can customize for your own use in Sendinblue:

How to leverage transactional email marketing

As we’ve mentioned a few times in this article, the main purpose of transactional messages is functionality. It’s about communicating important information to the customer at the right time.

But, transactional emails also represent a massive marketing opportunity for brands who are willing to invest time in developing this digital real estate.

Why exactly do transactional emails have so much marketing potential?

Unlike regular promotional emails, sent at the discretion of marketers or business owners, transactional emails are sent automatically and are expected by customers.

It’s no surprise really that an Experian study found transactional emails had open rates 8 times higher those of marketing emails.

Despite these incredible engagement rates, many businesses fail to take advantage of this for bonus marketing value: no extra content or CTA to bring customers back for deeper engagement. 

In fact, many transactional emails are sent by third parties altogether (payment software, CMS, etc.), meaning they weren’t even created by the business in the first place.

Here are a few ways that you can make the most of transactional email marketing possibilities:

Cross-selling and upselling

This simple optimization you can really boost your online sales.

Amazon is a champion of this strategy, including personalized product recommendations for every order confirmation email:

As you can see in the example above, Amazon is recommending books that are similar in content to the one that was purchased in the order confirmation.

Suggesting similar products to encourage customers to come back for more is a great strategy. So, how can can you set that up?

Well, there are two ways to go about it. 

This first is to integrate dynamic content into your emails. This is more technical but easily managed with a tool that supports dynamic content. With Sendinblue you just have to create the logic and parameters using the templating language.

The other (much simpler) solution is to include a static call-to-action for a product or offer that you are trying to highlight at the time the email is being sent.

While this isn’t as personalized or dynamic, it’s much easier to implement for beginners and can still improve sales significantly — without any additional investment in resources.

Additional information and added value

Transactional emails don’t have to be boring!

There are several ways to make them more engaging and interesting: adding extra “bonus” content or advice, promo codes, or special offers instead of just providing the expected information.

Take for example the email receipts that Uber sends customers after each ride:

This message includes:

• A ride summary: start and end address, date, time, and a map of the route
• A chance to review the driver
• A chance to give a tip
• A CTA to download the UberEATs app
• An invitation to sign up for the Uber credit card
• Social media CTAs

This perfectly illustrates how much value you can get from leveraging the underutilized real estate in your transactional emails.

In Sum…

Hopefully, this guide helped clear up any confusion about the role of transactional emails and the business opportunities they present. 

Now’s your chance to start leveraging transactional emails to get the greatest possible value and continue building positive customer relationships.

Are you looking for a reliable transactional email service solution? Try Sendinblue free to send up to 300 emails per day, or find the paid account that best fits your sending needs.

For more content like this, subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.

The post Transactional Email Explained: Definition, Best Practices, & Setup appeared first on Sendinblue.

Introducing Next.js and Sendinblue

Next.js is a wonderful framework based on React that allows us to render views from the server side. We will use Next.js with Sendinblue to send transactional emails.

Transactional emails are time-sensitive emails sent out following a transaction (e.g. order confirmations, shipping notifications, appointment reminders, etc.). You can learn more about them in this guide.

Sendinblue is a comprehensive suite of SaaS communication tools, including email campaign software, transactional emails, text messages, and more.

Prerequisites?

For this tutorial you don’t have to be an expert in Javascript. Basic knowledge is enough to get the hang of this tutorial.

Setting up Next.js App

You should have npm installed in your computer. First, create a folder called ‘Sendinblue’ for this tutorial and navigate to your project folder in console. Mine is:

Create a file called ‘package.json’ in your project root folder. You can create a file in terminal:

Add this content to the package.json file:

Moving on, open your terminal and run ‘npm i’ – this will install all the necessary dependencies for the Next.js app.

When you are done with installing dependencies, create a folder called ‘src’ and then ‘pages’ inside the ‘src’ folder. Then create a new file called ‘index.js’ inside pages folder. Your path should look like this ./Sendinblue/src/pages/index.js

Now add this content to the index.js file:

Back to your terminal and run ‘npm run dev’ when you see this

ready - started server on http://localhost:3000

On your terminal, go to your browser and open up http://localhost:3000.

You should see a white screen with hello text there. Congratulations! You’ve just set up a next.js app. ???

Server Side Rendering With Express

We need some server side language to send emails with the Sendinblue API. Next.js supports Server Side Rendering with express.js.

In order to do this, you need to create file called ‘server.js’ in your root folder and add this content:

When you’re done, update the script tag on package.json file like this:

Your package.json file should look like this:

Now go to your terminal and start by adding express to our dependencies. Please run:

    npm install --save express

Now try to run the app again:

    npm run dev

You will see our app is running again with express js.

Building the Frontend

For this tutorial we will create a simple button that sends a transactional email using Sendinblue once the user clicks the button.

Let’s create a simple input and button. Open up the index.js file and replace the content with this:

You will have a simple front-end like this:

Setting up an endpoint to send the email

In order to send an email we need to have an endpoint available for our frontend because we can’t send an email directly from client side (or at least we shouldn’t).

In this case we’re going to use express.js to create a new route for us. Add this to your server.js.

As you can see we also use a new package ‘bodyParser’. We will need to require this on the top of the file.

const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

Then, run this on your terminal as well.

 npm install body-parser

Now the server.js file should look like this:

So moving on, it’s time to create an account on Sendinblue. You can get started with Sendinblue on our free plan which lets you send 300 emails/day.

Once on the account creation page you’ll see this page:

Then you’ll arrive on the dashboard:

When you are ready click on the transactional tab on the main navigation.

Click on the templates and start creating a new template:

You can give your template any name.

Let’s move on to the Design tab and for this tutorial I’ve created a very simple design. Make sure to keep {{params.link}} in the design. We will use this to send dynamic data from our next.js app.

Activate the template and you’re all set on the Sendinblue platform for now.

Let’s move on to the Next.js part where we are going to use an ajax call to our /api/email endpoint.

Calling the email api endpoint

Remember that we created an endpoint in server.js for ‘/api/email’? Now it’s time to send a test request from the frontend.

For this tutorial I am going to use Axios package for sending ajax request from the frontend. There are plenty of ways to implement this but for the sake of this tutorial I will make it very simple.

Please create a folder called ‘services’ inside the /src/ folder. Then create another file ‘sendMail.js’. We are going to write a simple service to call ‘/api/email’ endpoint. Inside ‘sendMail.js’ add this content:

Then you need to import this service into your next.js page. Open up ‘/src/pages/index.js’ file and import the sendMail like this:

import { sendMail } from "../services/sendMail";

Now we need to call this function when someone clicks on the ‘Send me this url’ button. Then we need to create an async function called handleOnClick (you can call this whatever you want).

Now you can attach this to the button easily like this: onClick={ () => handleOnClick()}.

The complete index.js content should look like this:

If you go to your browser, open your consol, then click on the button you will see a response ‘true’. This validated email endpoint is working and our axios request works as well.

Last step: sending the email

We’re almost done. Let’s get to the part where we actually send the email. In order to do this we will need a package from Sendinblue called ‘sib-api-v3-sdk’. Switch to the terminal and run ‘npm install sib-api-v3-sdk’. Then create a folder called ‘api’ in the root and inside this folder you need to create a file with the name ‘sendinblue.js’

Add this content to the sendinblue.js:

You need to replace the apiKey with your api key. You can get it from your Sendinblue dashboard in the top right corner:

Once you are done with replacing the API key, go back to the server.js and import the Sendinblue function and call the transactional mail api like this:

const sendinblue = require('./api/sendinblue');

The complete server.js file should look like this:

This was the last step. Now we can start testing. Go back to the frontend and click on the ‘Send me this url’ button. It should send you an email with the template and content we’ve already created. This is what my email looks like:

In case you missed something, you can fork this github repo I made for this tutorial.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope this article provides some insight into how easy it is to use the Sendinblue api and send transactional emails.

If you have any questions or remarks, leave a comment below or reach out to Sendinblue on Twitter.

Happy sending!

The post How to Send Transactional Emails With Next.js and Sendinblue appeared first on Sendinblue.

If you’ve been around email marketing field, then you’ve probably heard some discussion around the topic of email deliverability (a.k.a. The ability of your emails to end up in your contact’s inbox rather than the spam folder). And it’s tough to have a discussion about email deliverability without talking about sender IP addresses.

Many email marketing services allow you to choose between using a shared IP address and a dedicated IP address to send your emails. This decision is one of the big debates in email marketing when it comes to deliverability.

If you’re stuck deciding between the two, or you just want to know a bit more about the subject of dedicated IP addresses for email marketing, this article is for you!

Why does IP address matter for email marketing?

For those unfamiliar, an IP address (i.e. Internet Protocol address) is a numerical identifier assigned to a network-connected device (e.g. a laptop, cell phone, or server) that is used to facilitate the sending and receiving of information over the internet using the TCP/IP communication protocol. This also includes the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), which is the protocol used to send emails between different SMTP servers.

One of the main factors that email inbox providers like Gmail use to determine the quality of an incoming email is the sender reputation of the IP address from which the email originated. In other words, your IP reputation is key in making sure you have good email deliverability.

What’s the difference between a shared and dedicated IP?

As mentioned above, many email marketing software tools let you choose between a shared IP and a dedicated IP for sending your emails… But what does that mean exactly?

• Shared IP: You send emails from a server that is also sending emails for other users. The IP reputation is therefore determined based on an aggregate look at all of the sending activity from all users.
• Dedicated IP: You are the only sender on your IP, meaning the reputation is determined solely on your sending behavior.

Although it might seem like dedicated IP is always the best option, that’s not actually the case. For low-volume senders, it might not be worth the pain because dedicated IPs require a fair amount of work to set up. You also have to be very careful when you first start sending since your dedicated IP has no previous history or reputation with email inbox providers.

This warming up process for dedicated IPs is essential if you want to ensure that you stay in the good graces of email clients receiving your messages. Learn more about warming up a dedicated IP from our tutorial on the topic.

Meanwhile, email marketing service providers like Sendinblue usually work very hard to manage the reputation of their shared IP addresses. That means monitoring the performance of all users and making sure they meet minimum standards that prevent negative effects on the deliverability for others.

For many email senders, it might be better to forego the hassle of setting up a dedicated IP address and just stick with a shared IP.

When should you choose a dedicated IP address for email marketing?

Shared IPs for sending emails may be easier for many, but sometimes they just don’t cut it. If you have more advanced needs.

The main reasons that you would need to use a dedicated IP address for sending your emails include:

• You consistently send a high volume of emails
• You want to take full control of your sender reputation and deliverability
• You want to completely associate your emails with your domain rather than that of your email marketing service provider

The first on the list is the most common reason for using a dedicated IP address to send emails. That’s because email clients like Gmail and Yahoo are super aggressive about monitoring incoming messages, and you need to send a lot of emails consistently if you want to build up enough credit to become a trusted sender with them.

Luckily, if you’re a high-volume sender using Sendinblue you get the option to purchase a dedicated IP so you can start owning your own deliverability.

Ready to start sending? Sign up for Sendinblue today or check out our pricing page for more information!

The post What is a ‘Dedicated IP’ for Email Marketing? appeared first on Sendinblue.

Many companies fail to pay enough attention to their transactional emails. This is because transactional emails often serve a utilitarian purpose, making it easy to forget about the marketing opportunities that these messages present. But contrary to popular belief, transactional emails don’t have to be boring! Overlooking this crucial opportunity to connect with consumers is a big mistake!

Because recipients are expecting them and actively seeking the information they contain, transactional emails often see much higher engagement.

Commonly used transactional emails like:

• Newsletter signup verifications
• Order confirmations
• Order shipment notifications
• Password resets
• Reservation confirmations
• App signup verifications
• Receipts

Provide opportunities to let your brand voice shine and appeal to customers and subscribers. Well-designed transactional emails that provide helpful in-email content, as well as drive traffic back to the main site, are always a winning combination.

Check out these examples of exceptional transactional email design to provide inspiration for your own emails:

1. Consistent Branding

As a brand, Airbnb embodies a sense of homey and personable adventure for travelers. Their use of pink color and soft, casual font in their logo and site gives a fun and relaxed impression. Additionally, their reliance on beautiful imagery gets people excited about exploring new places and having new experiences. Airbnb’s transactional images convey consistent branding to carry this feeling through all their email communications.

This reservation confirmation email uses the same colors as their website and app, to immediately set recipients at ease, but it doesn’t stop there. The use of maps and images to introduce the space and the host provides a fun, friendly, homey feel that gets renters excited about their upcoming trip. Sure, it conveys important details related to house rules, cancellation policies, fees, and other critical rental information, but the email doesn’t let that “boring stuff” drag down its overall feel.

The result is an email that has a purpose! It not only acts as a receipt and legal notification, but it also sells the brand.

By advertising the option to become a host, Airbnb takes this transactional email to a whole new level. They’re using an email designed for one side of their business (attracting renters) to build the other side of their business (finding hosts), fueling business objectives and solidifying their leadership in the industry.

2. Increases Website Traffic

Dollar Shave Club has a subscription box service, which allows customers to get the products they use most often delivered to them directly every month. However, instead of simply emailing subscribers to notify them that their box has shipped, Dollar Shave Club makes smart use of their automated transactional emails by emailing customers before the box ships to give them the opportunity to add items to their order.

This upsell strategy is becoming more popular among retailers because not only does it increase average order value, but it also expertly directs traffic back to the site. Displaying products that are customized to subscribers’ preferences increases the likelihood that they’ll click-through to the site to shop more and take other desirable actions like leaving a review, sending a gift box, or subscribing on social media. The result is increased conversions across the board for a variety of business objectives.

3. Includes Supplementary Information

Hyatt House’s reservation confirmation email is a great example of a transactional email that includes more than just basic information.

While it certainly has relevant reservation information like a confirmation number, check-in and check-out details, and room details, it also includes other corporate resources. By plugging into the wider Hyatt network, the email is able to feature World of Hyatt rewards information, an app download prompt, and a Hyatt credit card offer. It also shrewdly includes user-generated content from social media to give soon-to-be guests an insider glimpse of the property and links to Hyatt’s own vast array of social media profiles across today’s most popular platforms. As a result, travelers can feel confident with their reservation while simultaneously plugging into Hyatt’s juggernaut of rewarding features.

Encouraging guests to take additional actions like download an app or sign up for a credit card paves the way for greater brand recognition and preference for future travels, fueling long-term business growth.

4. Good Use of Color

If there’s one company that knows how to market their products, it’s Apple! And Apple’s iCloud signup confirmation email is no exception.

This email could have simply informed the user that their signup was successful with a one-liner. However, Apple uses this opportunity to introduce subscribers to their service and tout its benefits in a way that makes them excited about getting started and provides real value.

Acting as both a tutorial and expert-grade marketing collateral, the email covers the basics related to document and photo storage, sharing capabilities, phone location services, and notes. While the information itself is plainly presented, the use of images results in a wonderful use of color.

The imagery is eye-catching to excite subscribers and provide an example of what they can expect to see on their own device when using iCloud to its full capabilities. These images pop against a stark background to stand out in a way that’s not overwhelming and supplements the text nicely. The resulting whitespace gives the email a nice balance to avoid feeling cluttered.

5. Simplistic Design

The shortest and simplest email in this lineup is from Kickstarter. This transactional receipt email is sent to supporters once they’ve helped fund a project.

By simply including pledge details and information from the project organizer, Kickstarter creates a straight-forward email that gives backers exactly what they want. Some praise and gratitude coupled with a social media plug are all this email needs to achieve its objective of conveying important information and encouraging additional funding.

Unlike many of the other email examples we’ve outlined, Kickstarter opts for a simple design to let backers know that they value their time and aren’t going to send them anything that they didn’t ask for and don’t want. This strategy can be very effective if, like Kickstarter, customers’ interactions with your business are highly transactional in nature and don’t need a lot of ongoing nurturing.

If you want more email marketing tips, subscribe to our newsletter in the sidebar at the top of the page!

The post 5 Examples of Exceptional Transactional Email Design appeared first on Sendinblue.

Transactional emails are an incredibly important aspect of email marketing. However, they’re also the most underrated and underutilized element!

Many companies treat transactional emails like obligations instead of opportunities. The result is an inconsistent email strategy where promotional emails get all the attention and transactional emails are largely an after-thought. This creates a brand discrepancy among communications and wastes a valuable opportunity to engage customers.

This is even more prevalent in small businesses where employees may lack the time or skills needed to create well-designed transactional emails. However, the right email marketing platform can make crafting branded transactional emails super easy. But before that, you have to understand the underlying strategies behind these emails first.

Generic transactional emails are all too common today — but this doesn’t have to be the case. They have the potential to ooze personality and excitement just like their promotional email cousins. In fact, transactional emails can do as much (if not more) to drive conversions and create loyal followers and customers!

Check out these excellent transactional email examples for ideas on how to improve your customer relationships through all of your messages:

1. Abandoned Shopping Cart Email

What this email gets right:

• On-brand
• Eye-catching
• Includes a discount offer
• Promotes related products

This playful abandoned shopping cart email from Kate Spade not only reminds shoppers that they haven’t finished checking out but also entices them to come back for more.

By offering a discount and suggesting products in related colors and styles, it addresses any concerns about not being able to find the right product and increases the likelihood winning back this lost purchase.

Adding a free shipping offer is another really great example of addressing customers’ biggest concerns and sweetening the deal. The use of the phrase “Enjoy free ground shipping” makes the offer seem indulgent instead of just routine.

The email is on-brand, mimicking the layout of the Kate Spade website, which creates a seamless brand experience and helps establish a deeper level of trust. Like the website, it aims to cross-promote other shopping categories like clothing, jewelry, and shoes, while also encouraging social interaction with the brand.

A transactional email like this certainly stands out in an inbox because of its bright crisp colors and careful balance of text and white space.

2. Welcome Email

What this email gets right:

• Evokes excitement
• Includes value propositions
• Encourages immediate shopping
• Provides additional avenues to connect
• Good balance of images and text

How much different is this message than your standard, dry “Thank you for signing up” welcome email? Zappos knows how important that first interaction is with new subscribers, and they use their signup confirmation email to capitalize on this golden opportunity.

From the very first line, this transactional email gets the new subscriber excited to receive more emails. It reassures subscribers that they made a good decision to sign up and touts the benefits that they’ll receive when they become a customer.

Value propositions like “Free, easy returns” and “365-day return policy” aim to not only sell shoes, but also reduce purchase anxiety, which is why they’re an excellent fit for new subscribers who may not yet be sold on the idea of buying footwear online.

The email then goes a step further and encourages shopping right away by linking to gender-specific footwear and top-selling brands. By featuring an image of someone wearing cool boots and including links to start the shopping journey, Zappos is letting subscribers know that they can get fashionable footwear that they’ll feel good about buying and wearing.

Using casual conversational language like “Wanna call?”, they conclude the email with a friendly offer to help via their contact channels. This final touch rounds out the transactional email by providing everything that a new subscriber would want in their first interaction with a brand.

3. Double Opt-In

What this email gets right:

• Simple, easy to understand message
• Clear call-to-action (CTA)
• Incentivizes the sign-up
• On-brand

Using a double opt-in strategy is always a fantastic idea — especially with the upcoming European GDPR legislation going into effect in just a few months.

Macy’s sends their double opt-in email with flair by using branded colors and images. The message contained inside is simple and straight-forward, offering new subscribers a way to get out right away if they’re already regretting the decision to sign up.

By offering a discount at signup Macy’s is setting the expectation that subscribers will be entitled to these types of benefits moving forward if they opt-into emails. They’re also effectively leveraging this high-intent time — right after subscribers decide that your emails are worth receiving — to drive traffic to their store and encourage a purchase. This is a wonderful way to make sure recipients engage with future emails down the road.

4. Order Confirmation

What this email gets right:

• Upsells
• Visually appealing
• Links to fun co-brand information to encourage click-throughs
• Includes helpful resources

Crate & Barrel’s order confirmation email contains important information like an order number, credit card charge reminder, shipping address, and order summary, but it doesn’t stop there! It also includes a gallery of related products aimed at upselling the customer on complementary items. This visually appealing component adds a pop of color and encourages the recipient to read on further in the email for more promotional content.

In a shrewd move, Crate & Barrel also includes content from their other brands to promote broader brand awareness and encourage click-throughs. Including images as buttons adds to the aesthetic element of the email, making it as aesthetically attractive as it is functional.

Additionally, the email contains links to helpful resources for shoppers related to shipping, delivery, returns, and so on. This reassures shoppers that Crate & Barrel is committed to their satisfaction. Including these links all in one place also increases the importance of this email, making it the type of transactional email that recipients will hold onto even after receiving their products to reference later.

5. Order Shipping Confirmation

What this email gets right:

• On-brand
• Clean and simple
• Uses a strong call-to-action (CTA)
• Includes value propositions

It’s a small detail, but the doodle at the beginning of Chewy’s shipping confirmation email both establishes expectations and rings true to the brand persona. This tiny addition makes the email seem fun and friendly from the beginning, setting the tone for the rest of the email.

Much like the order confirmation email from Crate & Barrel, this email also contains crucial information like an order number, total, and shipping address, but it goes a step further by making this content visually appealing. By inserting images for each item purchased instead of just the product names, it builds excitement over receiving the products and serves as a good reminder.

A big eye-catching blue bar reminds the customer that he/she can simply call or reply to the email with any questions or issues. This strong CTA eliminates the need for the recipient to search through microscopic footer links or click through to an FAQ to get help, which can go a long way in building that trust between your customers and your business.

Finally, the email concludes with a reiteration of Chewy’s brand promises and value propositions to reiterate to customers that they made the right choice for their pet needs.

6. Password Reset

What this email gets right:

• Playful
• On-brand

Most companies wouldn’t view a password reset email as a chance to do anything other than inform a user that his/her password has changed. But Jet understands that this transactional email is one piece in a bigger puzzle of opportunities to let their brand shine, which is why the email uses brand colors and a layout akin to their website.

They turn this normally boring email into something feel-good and worth reading by including the phrase “Your Jet password has been reset and it works like a charm. Good job.” Those two little sentences make a huge difference in setting the tone for the email and makes the Jet brand more endearing to recipients.

7. App Download Prompt

What this email gets right:

• Simple and clean
• Contains a promotional incentive
• Clear call-to-action (CTA)

Obviously, for a company like Uber, downloading the mobile app is essential. However, companies offering an app download to complement their regular web-based experience can learn a lot from this transactional email from Uber.

It’s simple, clean, and uses a small amount of text to get the job done. It omits anything that would clutter the email and only conveys essential information in a way that’s very easy to understand. The CTA button stands out and makes it easy for recipients to understand that their next step should be to download the app.

Additionally, it makes an introductory offer to incentivize the download, which is often necessary to convince customers to take up more space on their phones with yet another app.

8. Special Action Required

What this email gets right:

• Disarming
• Engaging
• Clear call-to-action (CTA)
• Demonstrates authority

Depending on the nature of your business, you may have specific needs that necessitate additional transactional emails, such as notifications or important updates that require action from customers.

For Dunked, they allowed users to reserve URLs before their service was live, but then needed users to confirm that they wanted to keep those URLs by signing up for service after the site had officially launched for business. To do this, they sent a very smart transactional email that reminded subscribers who they were and why they should stick around now that Dunked had launched.

It was very plausible that users may have received this email after not having heard much from Dunked and been alarmed about some strange company getting their email address. To combat this concern, the email reminds recipients what Dunked is and why they’re getting an email now. It then goes on to provide clear instructions on what to do next.

Furthermore, it establishes authority by including links to helpful resources to learn more about Dunked. The signature makes clear that this communication is coming from one of the founders instead of some entry-level customer service employee or a generic corporate email box. The result is an email that is equal parts disarming, engaging, and persuasive.

If you want more content like this, subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter!

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The post 8 Transactional Email Examples that Improve Customer Relationships appeared first on Sendinblue.

I know that I don’t need to tell you how important it is to earn your customers’ trust, but it’s really important. Even the smallest mistakes can chip away at your credibility. That’s why it’s important to reinforce your brand’s image and value consistently, across all of your customer interactions.

Transactional email design is one detail that is often overlooked. These emails perform specific tasks (order/shipping confirmation, order completion, new account onboarding, etc.), so it’s easy to put improvements on the back burner and stick with the default messages in WooCommerce. That’s because the default messages automatically solve the problem with no extra work. Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Using this strategy means your customers will receive boring messages, which look like this:

Definitely NOT “wow-worthy.”

While there is nothing inherently wrong with this email (as far as the content goes), it weakens your business’ credibility because it’s so generic.

Transactional emails have over double the open-rate on average over normal email marketing campaigns. That means your customers are much more likely to interact with these messages than other communications.

It’s essential that you avoid taking the easy way out on your transactional emails and WooCommerce abandoned cart emails. People should trust you to click on a link in an email. That’s why you need to make sure that your customers know who is sending the email and give them a positive impression of your business.

Thankfully, it doesn’t take much effort to adapt these messages in a way that better represents your business with Woocommerce email customizer. This builds trust and gives your customer a more consistent experience from your site all the way through order completion.

Read on for a step-by-step guide to customizing WooCommerce emails to improve your brand perception.

How to Customize Emails in WooCommerce

Customizing emails from the WooCommerce interface is simple. From your WordPress site dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Settings. In Settings, click on the “Emails” tab, and you should see this screen:

From here, you can customize five main aspects of your messages (as seen in the red box).

“From” Name

This is the name that shows up in your customer’s’ inbox. It is usually good to include the name of your company in this section. Putting this information makes the email easily identifiable in your customer’s inbox. If they know it is from your business, they will be less likely to overlook the message.

“From” Address

This is the actual email address that is marked as the “sender” of the email. Including a company email (or better yet, your personal email) is a great way to make your customers feel like they matter.

Even though most people understand that these are automatically generated emails, using a generic no-reply@yourdomain.com can be damaging to your brand perception. That is why it is better to use a real email that gives customers the impression that they are actually communicating with your business.

Header Image

Probably the most important item on the list. This allows you to upload your brand logo to the email and make the communication feel more official. This further increases the recognition of your business and adds credibility to the message and brand overall.

Footer Text

This is the text that appears at the bottom of your emails. Although this is not as visible as some of the other customizable options, you can still use this to add some personal flavor to your emails.

Color Scheme

Here you can adjust the colors of different parts of your emails to be more aesthetically pleasing.

You should also use the same color scheme as your website to give a more familiar experience in your emails. This can go a long way in creating a good brand perception, and also lets customers know what to expect in the future.

What do Customized emails look like in WooCommerce?

Branding your transactional emails with these simple customizations gives your customers a much better experience when reading these messages.

Although these changes are not earth-shattering, they do give a more seamless experience for your customer as they interact with your emails and website.

If you are PHP-savvy, there are additional customizations that you can perform, but I won’t cover those here.

Bonus: How to fully customize WooCommerce emails without coding

If you want an easier way to further adapt your transactional emails in WooCommerce email customizer (without having to deal with any messy PHP), you will need a plugin that connects to your email marketing platform.

This lets you customize WooCommerce emails with more advanced branded templates that look much more unique and are capable of accomplishing other marketing goals as well. These goals could be product recommendations, requests for feedback, or even incentives to refer your business.

These emails offer much more value to your customers besides confirming their order was received. It also creates more value for your business by engaging customers and bringing them back to your store.

Download the free plugin and get started!

Now it’s your turn!

Now you’re ready to start sending better emails to your WooCommerce customers. You learned how easy it is transform your default WooCommerce emails to branded messages that boost your business image.

Do you have other tips on how to use Woocommerce email customizer? Let us know in the comments below!

Don’t have a free email marketing account yet? Sign up today.

Happy Sending!

The post How to Customize WooCommerce Emails for Better Brand Recognition appeared first on Sendinblue.

Here’s everything you need to know about Sendinblue in a nutshell – it’s Easy. Effective. Affordable. 

How affordable?

Monthly plans start at free for up to 300 emails per day, $25 for 40,000 emails per month, and scale up based on your needs.

Read on to see why Sendinblue is CodeinWP’s top Mandrill alternative and get details that will help you decide if it’s time to make a change!

Related page: Comparing MailChimp and Sendinblue

Sendinblue: the Mandrill alternative that’s easy to implement, easy to use

Sendinblue is a flexible SaaS app that enables you to send transactional emails via our reliable SMTP relay system or email marketing API. If you’d like to use marketing automation, send marketing email campaigns and newsletters, or engage customers with SMS marketing, you can also manage those activities from your dashboard.

Create email templates in a snap using our Responsive Drag & Drop Email Design tool or our HTML and Simple Text editor. Then, use our documentation, resources, and the help of our customer support team to answer any additional questions you might have before you start sending. It’s that easy!

If your site is built with WordPress, WooCommerce, Drupal, Magento, Jimdo or PrestaShop, check out how our email plugins can make setup even easier.

Start getting more from your transactional emails without paying more!

What do you get from choosing Sendinblue as your Mandrill alternative?

Access your data in real time

Sendinblue puts comprehensive, live stats for transactional emails at your fingertips. You can research historical metrics or monitor real-time reporting about your email delivery, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, etc. all in just a few clicks.

Need to review the interactions with a specific SMTP email? No problem! Just visit your account Log and use the detailed search tools to find the message, view its status and even resend it. Unlike other services (cough, Mandrill and Sendgrid, cough), your message data will be stored for the life of your account. No 30 or 90-day limits here!

Read more: The Best SendGrid Alternatives for Transactional Email

What do our customers have to say?

Starting with Sendinblue proved to be a smart move for our clients at 3 Men Movers. Here’s what they shared in a recent transactional email case study:

“Sendinblue has allowed us to take our email initiatives to the next level. With responsive design and the transactional email option, we are now sending powerful emails to our customers in the moments that matter most. Thank you Sendinblue for creating an easy to use email platform – we have been so happy!”

Expert SMTP tools you can trust

Our team is always working behind the scenes to ensure your welcome messages, order confirmations, shipping notifications, app alerts, and other important emails reach the inbox with optimal deliverability. With options for light transactional senders and power users alike, we give you the power to choose your right-fit solution.

Should you start with a shared IP or a dedicated IP?

Sending your transactional emails through our SMTP platform from a shared IP is the simplest and most cost-effective way to get up and running. We help new transactional senders build a positive reputation with ISPs when sending from our shared IPs. You’ll start off with a bandwidth of 40 emails per hour and it will automatically scale as you emails continue to be opened and clicked.

High volume SMTP senders can opt to use a single dedicated IP or manage a pool of IPs for greater control, bandwidth-free sending and built-in reputation management. You can monitor your IP’s reputation and control the volume sent from each IP right from your dashboard. Plus, you can use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC security protocols with your dedicated IP to securely sign emails with your domain and completely control your reputation.

Have another question?

Check out our transactional email implementation FAQs for even more details about getting started.

Get reliable sending at friendly prices

Sendinblue’s pricing is based on the volume of emails sent and is available in two structures: monthly plans and pay-as-you-go email credits.

Monthly Plans – Shared IP

• 300 emails / day (up to 9,000 / month) – Free 
• 40,000 emails / month – $25 
• 60,000 emails / month – $39 
• 120,000 emails / month – $66 
• Add a dedicated IP for $145 per year

Monthly Plans – Dedicated IP Included 

• 350,000 emails / month – $173 
• 750,000 emails / month – $334 
• Send up to 15,000,000 emails / month with our enterprise plans

How much can you save?

Based on Mandrill’s new pricing structure, your first 40,000 emails would cost $50 ($40 for email credits + $10 for a MailChimp account). Compare that with just $25 for 40,000 emails per month. Ready to start saving?

Create your free account and try Sendinblue today!

The post Try Sendinblue: the Mandrill Alternative for Transactional Email appeared first on Sendinblue.