SendGrid review

SendGrid review

When cloud technology was introduced, it changed the ways we use the Internet. Previously, we depended heavily on personal infrastructures for storing and retrieving data and files. Cloud technology has given us the option to share resources with everyone else, thus enabling us to create coherence and achieve economics of scale… significantly.

Here’s a news flash for you. Cloud technology has “invaded” our lives more than know. From web hosting to Google Apps to storage, cloud technology is being introduced and adopted. And now, as an email marketing environment, like what SendGrid is offering.

Why Do We Need An Email Marketing Tool?

Now, I hear some of you wondering why in the world do you need an email marketing infrastructure. Well, do you remember the times when:

1. your emails mysteriously disappeared in the Internet black hole?
2. you wished that integrating marketing emails were much easier.
3. you wondered how well or not your email campaigns are doing.
4. you were searching high and low for a software to help you manage your hundreds of emails.

If the above situations ring true, then you may want to find out more about SendGrid and what it can do for you.

Who is SendGrid?

SendGrid was founded in 2009 by 3 engineers. While they are fairly new, they definitely do not lack experience and technology. To date, they have sent over 65 billion emails with billions being sent per month and not showing any signs of slowing down. In fact, the number’s increasing. They have offices in Boulder, Denver and Anaheim with international offices in Frankfurt and London.

Because of their performance and potential, they were named “One of the Top 16 OnDemand Cloud Computing Private Companies to Watch“. They count popular brands like Pinterest, Pandora, StumbleUpon and foursquare as their customers too!

SendGrid’s Services

Previously, many companies were forced to build their own email system from scratch. This however, was very expensive and difficult to scale in future when the need arises.

SendGrid offers these companies an alternative. By tapping onto the cloud technology, they have created a simpler and much less expensive way to send emails. Their plans are based on email credits per month. Email credits are the number of email requests eg when you send newsletters or automatic confirmation emails. These credits are not allowed to be carried forward to the following months.

For those who are sending hundreds and thousands of emails daily, SendGrid provides the complete email system from setting up the email server to ensuring deliverance of the emails to offering analysis of your email campaigns.
Thus, the service is a useful method many organizations used for sending newsletters and for bulk emailing campaigns.

SendGrid Pros and Cons

For those of you who are familiar with email marketing, you may wonder how SendGrid fares especially with many established email marketing companies like AWeber, ConstantContact and VerticalResponse around.

Pros

• Affordable

  Most of other email marketing tools charges based on the number of subscribers eg $15 per month for 0 – 500 subscribers for unlimited emails per month. While “unlimited emails” is very tempting, you need to really think about your number of subscribers.

  Because SendGrid uses cloud technology, their infrastructure costs less and thus, they are able to transfer this cost saving to their customers. SendGrid charges based on number of emails. You pay for the service you use, not what you have.

• Support

  SendGrid’s support is awesome. When you need help, you get to choose from phone support, live chat, email, online support, forums or you can also search through their documentations and knowledge base.

• Reporting

  There are 2 kinds of reporting ie Basic Reporting and Advanced Reporting. Basic covers general information about the emails that you sent like deliverability rate, invalid email and spam reports. Advanced Reporting provides a more detailed tracking system.

Cons

• I certainly don’t see many issues with SendGrid. But if you must, then I would wish for a free newsletter service. Currently, they offer a few packages for you to choose from. See the pricing chart below.

  Please note that I have omitted 2 other packages from the chart, namely Platinum and Enterprise. This is because the Silver, and the Gold packages are most suitable for most users.

Pricing and Features

Did you know that SendGrid has a Free Plan? The only catch is that you are limited to 200 email credits per day, which is more than enough if you are a small business.

The Lite Plan charges $0.10 per thousand emails. Its’ scalability is great for smaller companies or organizations that do not have a large mailing list. It helps keep the cost to a minimum. This plan comes with just the basic features, of course, without advanced reporting (just the basic reporting tool is available) and newsletters editing features. There is however, a limit to bandwidth depending on your account age, to reduce spammers abusing the system.

Next is the Bronze Plan. It costs $9.95 per month for up to 40,000 emails. If you exceeded your email credit limit, then you just need to pay $0.001 per email. It comes with advanced reporting.

SendGrid recommends their Silver Plan. At $79.95 for 100,000 emails, it is pretty affordable. Plus, you get both Basic and Advanced Deliverability features, which are good tools to ensure a higher chance of email deliverability.

The Gold and Platinum Plans‘ features are similar to the Silver Plan’s. The only difference is the email credits, where the former allows 300,000 emails (for $199.95 per month) and the latter provides up to 700,000 emails (for $399.95 per month).

For larger organizations who need millions of email credits, there’s the Enterprise Plan, where prices are negotiable and you get an account manager.

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With such great features at an amazingly low price, SendGrid’s cloud technology is definitely placing many on cloud nine! There are a range of packages to cater for the different usage. Plus, you get to scale your usage too. So, why not head over to SendGrid to check it out.