Mandrill

Mandrill is a transactional email solution provided by MailChimp in which there is a free trial available for your first two thousand sends which is great. And then it's only ten bucks USD for twenty five thousand emails per month which is perhaps six thousand sales from your website if you factor multiple transactional emails sent to each customer on average per sale. With potential account creation and verification emails, as well as purchase confirmation, receipt or licensing details in follow ups so that's tremendous value in my opinion. Although I would recommend the dedicated IP address as well which is an addition thirty dollars USD per month if you are sending perhaps more than fifty to one hundred thousand transactional based email per month. This help ensure your best consistency and deliverability by eliminating the shared IP and association with any unsavory email reputations held by any of the accounts using it as well. Of the major transactional email providers including Mandrill, Amazon SES, Mailgun, MailJet, PostMark and SendGrid I like Mandrill third on the list, so far. Amazon SES and Sendy are my favorite transactional software combination and easily the most cost effective. Sendy is an awesome one time purchase of around sixty dollars I believe, last time I checked and makes setup very simple to use Amazon SES which is the least expensive option by a lot. SendGrid is next starting at ten bucks USD per month for forty thousand transactional emails sent. Their integrations are very good perhaps because it's been around longer than Mandrill while they offer twelve thousand emails per month free to get going which is fantastic. Mandrill is very solid and has my favorite user interface which doesn't count for much I realize but simply came to mind. I like and trust MailChimp to have excellent deliverability and so this would only increase due to the fact you're only sending to people who are already opted in for a very particular reason other than email marketing. In fact, by all accounts the three providers I have narrowed it down to for our start up requirements each have excellent deliverability. And while we are scaling for growth this will take time to reach one hundred thousand emails per month, in order to qualify for the SendGrid Pro account as a viable, practical option, as we're setting up for the long term. And Sendy doesn't seem to have dedicated IP support unless I am mistaken but by nearly all accounts the deliverability is still excellent though simply ignoring this important feature may not be the best long term plan. Leaving Mandrill as perhaps the most cost effective transactional solution which would be fifteen or twenty dollars less than SendGrid between fifty and one hundred thousand emails sent yet with the dedicated IP which could be added at any time.

I wish that Mandrill had some of the integrations that SendGrid does such as Google Apps Engine though there is a development pipeline and I would hope a sound company such as MailChimp would listen to their customers feedback regarding new features. Otherwise this is a very solid transactional email platform without a lot negative about it in my opinion.

After completing this research I am most interested in Mandrill and SendGrid for our long term transactional email. I believe Sendy may be very affordable but the dedicated IP is a deal breaker I am willing to invest in to help ensure superior deliverability even though it's not marketing email and not as much of an issue. And we're not quite ready to proceed though will be in the near future. Meanwhile I will keep a close eye on both softwares as a service and when it's time to finally decide between the two perhaps there will be new developments to observe. Otherwise, I will let also factor in the quality of analytics at ease of API integration to be significant factors at that time.