With the advent of social media and direct messaging, you’d often hear “email is dead”. Communication through email is still very much alive. Email has the not very sexy task of informing people, reliably. Maybe the most boring reason of all is that it’s integrated in countless security systems. For example, you need an email address when you sign up for a service.
And that takes us to a type of email that is very important for any business: transactional emails. This type of email is usually automated and triggered by an event or an action taken by the recipient. These can be when you sign up for a new service or book a room at a hotel. They’re just as important as the other type of email: marketing email.
In contrast to marketing emails, a transactional email is sent to you individually because of an action you took on a website or in an app. Marketing emails are usually sent to all subscribers (or a segment of them) at once. They typically contain promotional content which is also why services classify them as spam and they land in the junk or promotions folder.
This is also why transactional mails are important for your service. Since they aren’t likely to be flagged as junk, they land in the inbox of your audience. The open rate is very high because the recipient expects communication from you. They give you the opportunity to build trust with your audience.
You could really say transactional email is the golden ticket for a marketer and you don’t want to squander it. You’d want a system that developers and non-tech team members can contribute to equally. Mailersend has built a transactional email management system with a drag-and-drop email builder and team members can collaborate.
Pros and cons of Mailersend
Mailersend is the sibling service of the email marketing provider Mailerlite built just for transactional mails. Just like with its sibling, you can expect Mailersend to be easy to grasp and affordable.
It’s designed both for developers and non-tech people. It has dynamic email templates so that you can send personalised messages in real time but on scale, without coding. The techies can use webhooks and inbound routing to automate workflows.
Pros
- You don’t need your credit card at hand when signing up
- Generous free tier allows you to send 12’000 emails per month
- Easy to use interface
- Well-documented API
- Responsive and competent support team
Cons
- Setup can be a bit lengthy goes through an approval process
Who is Mailersend for?
If you’re looking for a way to send transactional emails but without all the technical hassle and costs, Mailersend is a good place to start. Mailersend is not a huge company (and all the downsides that are usually associated with it: bureaucracy). It’s a small agile company with responsive and competent customer support.
It’s worth noting that Mailersend has a thorough and extensive screening process before you can really start to work with it.
Mailersend user interface
It’s quite typical that transactional email providers have a vetting process. So, don’t be surprised if the validation process for your account can take a while.
For the verification process, you need to verify your domain by setting DNS records. This step may be a bit technical and hence it’d be good to have a techie around. When you’ve completed the 4 steps, your account will then be vetted. Once approved, you have access to all the features.
For transactional mails, it’s important that they can be sent in real time and are personalised as well as on scale. You don’t want to constantly write a new email copy for each email. For Mailersend, the solution is to give you dynamic email templates. That is, you create just one template but it can use dynamic date for personalisation.
Depending on how you like to create mails, you can use a
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Rich-text editor
- HTML editor
You don’t need a line of code for creating a dynamic template, but you can. No matter how you go about it, Mailersend has prepared pre-designed templates.
If you’re already using a website builder, it’s a cinch to create a new transactional email with personalised and dynamic content.
All in all, Mailersend is easy to use, no matter your tech skill level. It has an uncluttered and intuitive interface. Everything you need to do is just a few clicks away. It’s built so that everyone in your team can contribute.
Sending mails
Now comes the fun part, how do you use your new template within an app or your website? You get the API instructions below the template itself. If the API instructions are too concise, you can read up more about the API in the well-documented developer help centre.
As long as your domain is confirmed, you can also send emails using its SMTP relay. This means you can use your everyday email tool to send emails.
Automation
You don’t need a big unwieldy tool (and probably costly) tool to build your automation. Since Mailersend gives you the API and webhooks, you can use them to connect with Zapier. For triggers, you can use an app like Coda or Airtable which activates an email action.
Mailersend integrations
Mailersend offers 3 inbuilt integrations
- Woocommerce
- WordPress
- Zapier
It’s very interesting that there are more automation tools out there that connect to Mailersend. There are Integromat and Pabbly Connect that can help you automate your emails.
Mailersend reporting
Even for transactional emails, reporting is vital. You can drill down and get
- Sending volume
- Open and click rates
- Spam complaints
- Device used
- Opens by location
- And more
Support
Mailersend is an agile company with a responsive and competent support team. You can reach the team via chat or email. Just click on the help icon in the lower right hand corner.
Especially setting up and sending emails may pose a challenge for the not so tech-minded. Still, the instructions are clear and there’s extensive documentation that you can read up.
Mailersend pricing
Mailersend has a free tier (Starter) with which you can send up to 12’000 emails per month free of charge. If you need more but know that you won’t be sending anywhere near 50’000 emails per month on a regular basis, you can also pay as you go.
With the Premium plan, you can send up to 50’000 emails per month. Again, you can go over the allotted emails. For everyone else, there’s the Enterprise plan.
As you see, Mailersend has flexible pricing with pay as you go. You can use it when you have higher than usual volume and you don’t need to commit to a higher monthly fee.
Is Mailersend right for you?
If you’re a budding entrepreneur, running a small and growing e-commerce or online community, your communication needs also grow. As you may know, services such as WordPress and Woocommerce don’t come with a built-in email server for transactional emails.
This is exactly where Mailersend can help you. It’s easy to set up and has an intuitive interface so that it’s also easy to use. With the SMTP relay, you can also set it up to use in your favourite email tool (such as Outlook).
It’s worth emphasising in closing that Mailersend is for transactional emails only. This means it should be used in combination with your existing marketing email provider and CRM. If you use it like this, it doesn’t have any major drawbacks. And the best last: You get to use it for free for up to 12’000 emails a month.
Original post here: Mailersend review
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