7 of the Best Transactional Email Services

Transactional emails are a crucial aspect of any business’s communication strategy, as they facilitate communication with customers regarding specific actions they have taken, such as welcome emails and password reset emails.

Transactional emails, unlike promotional emails, are essential for the operation of a business, and therefore, their delivery must be reliable and timely.

This is where transactional email services come in. Transactional email services are designed to help businesses send automated, personalized, and timely emails to their customers in response to specific actions they take.

There are many benefits to transactional emails, and these services make sure you can take advantage of all of them.

Though, with so many options available, choosing the best transactional email services for your business can be challenging.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the top transactional email services available and what makes them stand out.

From Mailchimp to SendGrid, we’ll cover the features, pricing, and ease of use of each service so that you can make an informed decision for your business.

What are transactional email services?

A transactional email is an email sent to a user in response to an action taken by that user, like creating an account or making a purchase. Transactional emails contain information specific to each user and are sent to individuals one at a time. Here are a few examples:

• Welcome emails
• Account creation emails
• Password reset emails
• Subscription confirmation emails
• Order confirmation emails
• Payment receipt emails
• Shipping emails

Transactional emails are emails that users should expect to receive when they complete an action, again such as creating an account on a website or making a purchase. They may contain important information, such as passwords or order confirmation & shipping details.

A transactional email service is, well, a service that allows users to send transactional emails.

Through SMTP, a transactional email service allows its users to send transactional emails automatically and at scale, eliminating the need for any manual email sending when customers change a password or make a purchase.

Now, with all that said…

What are the best transactional email services?

Here is our shortlist of the best transactional email services:

• MailerSend
• SendGrid
• Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill)
• Mailgun
• Postmark
• Amazon SES
• MessageBird (formerly SparkPost)

The sister service to MailerLite, MailerSend is a simple transactional email service provider that simplifies the process of sending and managing promotional and transactional emails. Designed for developers and businesses of all sizes, MailerSend provides a comprehensive suite of features and tools to help businesses maintain customer relationships effectively.

At its core, MailerSend’s platform is built around a powerful email delivery optimization engine that ensures emails are delivered reliably and efficiently. Using intelligent email routing, real-time delivery monitoring, and domain and IP reputation management, MailerSend ensures that emails reach their intended recipients’ inboxes, rather than being marked as spam or getting lost in transit.

In addition to delivery optimization, MailerSend provides a range of other features to help businesses create and manage their email campaigns. This includes customizable email templates, A/B testing, unsubscribe management, email tracking and analytics, a dedicated IP address, and integration with popular CMS and CRM platforms.

Features:

Drag and Drop Editor

MailerSend’s email builder tool is very similar to its sister platform MailerLite; their drag-and-drop editor is incredibly simple and makes creating eye-catching transactional emails easy for even the least technically savvy users.

If you don’t want to create your transactional emails yourself, MailerSend comes with a litany of pre-made email templates for different use cases; welcome emails, trial expiration emails, password resets, and many more.

These transactional email templates can speed up the setup process for all kinds of transactional emails while still looking professional and maintaining your brand’s identity.

Additionally, you don’t even have to pay for MailerSend to get access to these templates, you can find them on their website to download or as part of their free plan.

SMTP Relay

If you’re looking for outstanding email delivery speed while maintaining email deliverability, then MailerSend is the best transactional email provider for you.

MailerSend’s SMTP relay makes transactional email sending simple using clean, dedicated IP addresses to make sure your transactional messages get to where they need to be quickly while maintaining your sender reputation.

Transactional email delivery relies on good email deliverability, which MailerSend provides. Their SMTP server ensures your emails get to inboxes and avoids spam traps along the way, which you can check using MailerSend’s email analytics.

Email API

Using MailerSend’s transactional API, users can customize and send emails to their subscribers in real-time from their own apps. You can include dynamic content, including user-specific information or personalized messaging, to improve engagement and drive conversions.

MailerSend’s RESTful HTTP API is incredibly easy to integrate into your own apps; just make an account, get an API key, and you’re done. You can then add MailerSend’s email API to your own app and you (or your team) can get to configuring inbound routing.

If you don’t want to integrate MailerSend with your app or you don’t have an app to integrate with, that’s fine. MailerSend integrates with many other applications such as Zapier and WordPress, plus e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce.

Additionally, your sender reputation is further protected by several security protocols, namely SPF (Sender Policy Framework; to prevent phishing), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail; to verify the sender), and DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance; for protecting your domain from hacker attacks) security protocols.

Trusted by organizations like Uber, Spotify, AirBnB, and more, SendGrid is an all-in-one email marketing software meant for just about anyone, be they developers, marketers, startups, and so on.

SendGrid believes that lost emails are lost customers, so they ensure that their email delivery service provides the most deliverable emails possible. They boast that, with brands like Uber, they are responsible for delivering over 100 billion emails per month with their MTA (mail transfer agent).

One of the key benefits of SendGrid’s transactional email service is its scalability. The platform is designed to handle large volumes of email, putting SendGrid above other popular email service providers for businesses with a high volume of transactions. With SendGrid, businesses can send millions of emails per month, without worrying about the reliability of the service or the impact on their infrastructure.

Features:

Dynamic Email Templates

As is the standard of transactional email service providers, SendGrid provides its users with a plethora of email templates for different circumstances; notification emails, transactional emails, email marketing, et cetera. Additionally, through an HTML or WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, you can customize your transactional emails to fit whatever need you see fit.

Personalization is a major factor in the effectiveness of your email marketing, as marketers who use personalization in their emails report 27% higher unique click rates and 11% higher open rates than those who leave their emails general. Additionally, 52% of consumers say they’ll look elsewhere for their shopping needs if a brand sends an email that’s not personalized.

Testing Dynamic Templates

Creating personalized emails for your recipients is one thing, but after an email reaches the recipient’s inbox it could render entirely differently. Fortunately, SendGrid allows you to test your dynamic transactional emails for inbox rendering, link validity, and performance against spam filters.

If you put in the effort to create and personalize your transactional emails and they don’t make it into any inboxes, then that would just be time wasted; because they address this issue directly by allowing you to test before you send, SendGrid is a great transactional email service.

Automated Transactional Emails

SendGrid’s marketing automation features are robust and easy to access through a marketing automation flow chart, just like setting up a drip campaign for your email subscribers. It features a drag-and-drop editor where you can place triggers for email marketing messages to be sent on a schedule.

One of the standout features of Mailchimp Transactional Email is its easy-to-use interface, which makes creating and sending transactional emails a breeze. The platform is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy for even non-technical users to navigate and operate. Additionally, the service integrates seamlessly with other popular tools like Zapier, enabling users to automate their workflows and streamline their email campaigns further.

Features:

Global Infrastructure

Considering how established Mailchimp is in the email marketing space, it’s a no-brainer that their global infrastructure is as solid and fast as can be. The capacity for flexible IP deployment allows you to “warm up” an IP address by progressively adding more emails over a 30-day period to prevent that IP address from gaining a “bad reputation” from ISPs.

This ensures that your emails will not only maximize email deliverability but will arrive in the recipients’ inboxes as fast as possible for a transactional email service provider.

API Documentation

Again, considering how ubiquitous Mailchimp is in the email marketing space, it’s no surprise that the amount of developer documentation surrounding their email API is extensive. Mailchimp users may not know about MailchimpDeveloper, but MailchimpDeveloper is a full-on backend overview of how transactional email services operate and how to operate their email API.

You can use this email API or Mailchimp’s SMTP server to send your first emails and get your online business started in just a few minutes; just configure your DNS and you’re good to go.

Developer Guides

As a second part of their API documentation, the MailchimpDeveloper platform is full of useful information for the more technically minded to get their transactional email up and running. In this aspect, Mailchimp is easily the best transactional email service.

When a company’s services are trusted by names like Microsoft, Wikipedia, the NHL, American Express, and more, that’s a good sign of the quality of their services.

Those companies I just named aren’t random, either; they are just a handful of the 150,000+ companies which use Mailgun to build great apps and email programs.

Mailgun is a transactional email service provider that offers powerful APIs for sending, receiving, and tracking emails. It aims to provide developers with a reliable infrastructure to integrate email functionality into their applications and websites.

With features like analytics, email validation, and deliverability optimization, Mailgun simplifies email management and enhances user experience.

Features:

Powerful APIs

As they state on their website, Mailgun builds everything API-first so developers can have as easy of a time working with Mailgun as possible.

Whether it be their simple interface, compliance with standards, or 99.9% uptime SLA (service level agreement), Mailgun makes sure their infrastructure is as easy to scale with and as structurally sound as possible.

Mailgun’s robust APIs enable developers to seamlessly integrate email functionality into their applications and websites, including sending and receiving emails, managing mailing lists, and tracking email delivery and engagement.

Deliverability Optimization

Mailgun offers various tools and features to improve email deliverability and ensure that messages reach recipients’ inboxes.

The first (and most surprising of which) is that, with your Mailgun account, regardless of how much you’re paying, you get an assigned Technical Account Manager (TAM) who monitors your account and optimizes your email deliverability while minimizing your bounce rate.

On average, Mailgun’s email deliverability is at 97.4%, which beats the industry average by 12.4%.

Mailgun’s deliverability tools include email validation to identify and remove invalid addresses, bounce handling to handle delivery failures, and reputation management to maintain a positive sender reputation and avoid spam filters.

Email Analytics

In tandem with Mailgun’s deliverability optimization, they offer real-time email performance and proactive reputation monitoring which can have eyes on it 24/7 due to your TAM.

On top of that, if Mailgun detects a dip in your performance, your TAM will reach out to you with a plan to get back on track.

In the field of more standard email analytics, Mailgun provides detailed analytics and insights to help users monitor the performance of their email campaigns. This includes metrics like open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates, allowing users to optimize their email strategies based on data-driven insights.

Pricing: Mailgun offers a free trial with 5,000 emails for 1 month, including their email APIs, suppression management, email tracking/analytics, a drag-and-drop template builder, and more for users to dip their toes into the platform. Their paid plans start at $35/mo with 50,000 emails per month included, and $1/1,000 emails past the monthly limit you choose.

Postmark is a reliable transactional email service that prides itself on its incredible time-to-inbox times, email deliverability, and customer support. It isn’t just for transactional email, either; Postmark has become a hub for all kinds of application-based emails to help prevent users from splitting their emails between services.

They also have simple but extensive API documentation to help developers get their applications up and running as quickly as possible.

Features:

Message Streams

To keep your promotional and transactional emails separate and protect your transactional emails’ deliverability, Postmark routes your promotional emails through a parallel but separate sending infrastructure.

Until recently Postmark rejected all kinds of messages that were sent to multiple recipients at once, which caused their customer base to split their messages across multiple services. For example, emails like product update announcements and updates to your terms of service couldn’t be sent using Postmark, because they were meant for multiple people at once.

To eliminate that need, Postmark has opened its platform to all application-based emails but has kept transactional and promotional emails separate because promotional emails can affect your transactional emails’ deliverability.

Delivery Time Optimization

In short, if you’ve ever tried to reset a password and were left hanging for minutes waiting for the email to appear, you can get why Postmark focuses so much on fast email delivery.

Simply put, consistent email delivery is one of Postmark’s key features and they advertise their delivery times on their website and status page.

Postmark aims for delivery times between 0 and 10 seconds, where any time after that is looked into as if Postmark is experiencing problems as a whole.

SMTP Service

Setting up your web application to send emails using SMTP couldn’t be easier. It’s as simple as copying some credentials into a config file and you’re ready to send.

Postmark supports TLS to secure data sent between your application and its servers.

Additionally, Postmark’s clear and concise documentation makes it easy to start sending using SMTP. It covers advanced features like tags and custom metadata, as well as common pitfalls so you can troubleshoot any issues you may have.

Pricing: You can experience Postmark’s platform with 100 free emails per month with no credit card required. From there, their paid plans start at $15/mo for up to 10,000 emails and scale up past 1.5 million monthly emails for $775/mo.

Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a part of the Amazon Web Services platform and is an incredibly lightweight, stripped-down email service provider where users may have to build the functionality outside of sending emails themselves.

If there’s one thing that Amazon SES stands out for, it’s the price. Amazon SES is incredibly cheap compared to its competitors but has the (lack of) features to match its price.

Features:

Global Reach

The fact that Amazon is such a global company makes it much easier for multinational businesses to place their applications closer to endpoints, enhancing the experience on the user’s end.

Considering the companies that use Amazon SES like Netflix, Duolingo, Reddit, and more, it’s clear that these multinational companies trust Amazon SES with their transactional emails enough to choose them for their multinational needs over any other transactional email service.

However, the advantage these companies have is that they have the resources to build any functionality that Amazon SES doesn’t come with, like tracking and monitoring for message events ad deliverability insights.

Secure Email Authentication

Considering the reach Amazon has, it’s no surprise that they take great care in making their platform as secure as possible. To do this, they use an incredibly secure email authentication process that ensures its reputation as one of the top transactional email services.

They also take great care in verifying sender identities, meaning the email addresses or domains you want to use to send or receive emails.

The sender’s identity needs to be verified before using Amazon SES SMTP to send emails, and that can be done either through email address verification or domain verification.

Dedicated IP Addresses

Amazon SES uses two types of IP addresses: dedicated IP addresses and shared IP addresses.

A dedicated IP address gives users exclusive access to that IP address and they are the only ones sending emails from that IP address. This gives users complete control over their sender’s reputation and allows users to monitor and manage their email deliverability more effectively.

A shared IP address means that multiple users send emails from the same IP address, and the reputation of that IP address is determined by the collective email-sending behavior of all the users sending emails from that IP address.

Pricing: Amazon SES operates on a pay-as-you-go style payment system, where it generally costs $0.10/1,0000 emails you send plus $0.12 per GB of sent email attachments.

Formerly SparkPost, MessageBird is the platform trusted to deliver 40% of all commercial emails worldwide. Used by companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Booking.com, and more, MessageBird delivers over 4.5 trillion emails to customer inboxes annually.

MessageBird is laser-focused on high-volume senders and enterprise operations and places a premium on security, data, and compliance.

Features:

Deliverability Analytics

MessageBird allows its users to unify email delivery, analytics, and their industry-leading data footprint to find trends across the industry and receive early warning of email issues before they impact your business.

Their user interface is also incredibly slick and intuitive and allows users to monitor engagement, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and more On top of that, users can see what types of people are driving the majority of their complaints, allowing them to make changes and adjustments necessary to please that group.

Enterprise Support

Considering how much of the world’s transactional email that MessgeBird takes credit for, they’re incredibly secure worldwide.

They are ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified, GDPR-compliant, an associate member for GSMA, and ACM registered. This may not mean much to you just looking at it, but all of that means that MessageBird ensures continuity and compliance for hospitals, banks, and even governments due to their commitment to expertise, compliance, and security in every corner of the world.

API Documentation

MessageBird’s API reference documentation allows its users to quickly and seamlessly integrate SMS, Chat, and VOice functionalities into your website or application with the MessageBird APIs.

Their APIs use HTTP verbs and a RESTful endpoint structure. An access key is used as the API Authorization framework. Request and response payloads are formatted as JSON (although they provide a GET alternative for requests), using UTF-8 encoding and URL-encoded values.

Pricing: MessageBird has three service tiers that come with different features and cover different email-sending volumes. Their starter plan starts at $20/10,000 emails and scales up linearly from there.