Best 5 Alternatives to Mandrill for Transactional & Marketing Emails
Best Transactional Emails, Mandrill Alternatives, Marketing Emails | Amazon SES
If you have less than 2000 subscribers or members for your website or app, sending emails to them is not a headache. Within a few minutes or hours, you could reach all your members. But if you have say 5000, 10000 or 50000+ members, sending emails to theme 2-3 times a week is a serious business. If care is not taken, you could spend a fortune or you will simply not be able to derive proper benefits from the large numbers you have.
Before we delve further, it is important we make some definitions on the following:
i). Transactional Email ii). Marketing Email.
Marketing Email vs. Transactional Email: What’s the Difference?
Transactional Email
Transactional emails may also be called “triggered” emails because they include any email that is triggered by a user’s interaction with a web app (think of a purchase receipt). Often times, transactional emails are sent through SMTP relay or programmatically through API.
Transactional email users use their email service to programmatically send those messages. You will be using the email service as the delivery engine instead of relying on your web hosting company.
Marketing Email
Unlike the transactional emails that are triggered and sent programmatically, marketing emails are timed and sent strategically to your recipient list. You can still use SMTP relay (which we do at JobHouse Ghana) or Web API to send these messages, but traditionally, their content and purpose are different than transactional messages.
Again, the content of these messages could be considered transactional or marketing, the difference is how you use your email service to send them.
Top 5 Mandrill Alternatives for Transactional Email or Marketing Email
Mandrill used to be the “best” option for many small businesses when it come to transactional emails and marketing emails. Though it was specifically designed for transactional emails, with an SMTP plugin (such as WP-Mail-SMTP) and newsletter plugin such as (MailPoet), you could easily send both transactional and marketing emails at a very great cost.
In February 2016, Mandrill announced that it will be discontinuing its free tier for transactional emails. As of March 16th, new Mandrill users will create their accounts through MailChimp (the mother company of Mandrill) and existing users will be required to merge their accounts with a MailChimp account where they will be charged $20+/mo for transactional emails. In effect, Mandrill increased their prices 4 times! The deadline for merging accounts was April 27th and to me, that was the death of Mandrill.
Here Are The Top 5 Alternatives
1. Amazon SES
Nothing beats Amazon when it comes to their price per email and their deliverability. At the same time, integrating the platform with your tool or site can take more time. Alternatively, you can use an outside solution that acts as the middle man between you and Amazon. For instance, Sendy ($59) does this for marketing email. You can also contact us to configure Amazon SES for you at $25 only!
Price-wise:
- 62,000 monthly emails for free.
- After that, it’s basically $0.0001 per email or $1 per 10,000 emails!
2. Mailgun
- http://www.mailgun.com/pricing
- First 10,000 emails per month free, then starting at $5 per 5k mails
- Used by: GitHub, Stripe, Heroku
- Sending via SMTP, HTTP API
- Features: Delivery statistics, Recipient Variables (first name, order value, …), Open, click & unsubscribe tracking, Dedicated IP, Inbound Email
3. SendinBlue
- https://www.sendinblue.com/pricing
- 9k emails per month free (limited to 300 per day)
- Sending via SMTP, HTTP API
- Features: Delivery statistics, Templates, Template Editor, SMS Marketing, Dedicated IP
4. SendGrid
- https://sendgrid.com/pricing
- Free plan for 12k emails / month. Paid plans starting at $10 for 40k emails, or $0.10 for 1k emails
- Sending via SMTP, HTTP API
- Features: Analytics (open, click, bounce, etc.), Templates, Mobile apps, Fine grained API permissions, Dedicated IP, Inbound Email
5. Elastic Email
- http://elasticemail.com/pricing
- First 25k emails per month free, then $0.19 per thousand
- Sending via SMTP, HTTP API
- Features: Email Open and Click Tracking, Templates, Dedicated IP, Inbound Email API
How To Use Amazon SES to send both Transactional and Marketing Emails (WordPress)
From the introductory paragraphs, we have clearly defined Transactional and Marketing Emails.
Configuring Amazon SES for Transactional Email on WordPress website
You will need to create account at Amazon Web Services and and go through the process and configure your SES.
You can get help from this article on Setting up Email with Amazon SES.
I must confess, the process is not straightforward and it will be near impossible for a beginner to configure. But you can contact us to configure Amazon SES for you at $25 only!
Configuring Amazon SES for Marketing Email on WordPress website
You can use Amazon for marketing emails. For many website owners with large users/subscribers, sending marketing emails comes at a heavy cost. But Amazon’s pricing is 10x cheaper than the nearest rival. That’s why it is important to get the configuration for Amazon if you have really large numbers.
To set it up for Marketing Emails, you will need two plugins:
- An SMTP plugin. You can use this free one WP Mail SMTP. We also use it. It reconfigures the wp_mail() function to use SMTP instead of mail().
- A Newsletter plugin. You can use MailPoet. The free version allows up to 2000 subscribers but the Premium version is unlimited. So the choice is yours.
Then, you follow this article on Configuring Email Clients to Send Through Amazon SES. Remember you will still need to have gone though Setting up Email with Amazon SES already.
As I have indicated early on, the process can be difficult and confusing, but the benefits of setting Amazon SES up far far outweigh the hassle.
In case you are unable to go though my guide to do the configuration yourself, you can contact us to configure Amazon SES for you at $25 only!