Picking a single provider really depends on your needs, wants, and app type.
I’m going to speak very general here but many times you want a separate provider for app transactional sending vs marketing.
My personal favorite stack is postmark (transactional in app) & active campaign (marketing). Sometimes I go Mailgun over postmark depending on client needs.
The reason for the split is both for email health & delivery as well as ease of setup.
You can cut out the monthly cost of Mailchimp if you wanted to build all the campaign, list, & batch sending features in your via postmark and save a decent chunk of money, even more if you do Mailgun.
My personal favorite email managers.
(Marketing) all of these tend to be about as equally as strict with content sent and following emailing rules.
Active campaign: one of the best for list/campaign management, can install 3rd party tracking pixels on emails, a bit more complicated to use than mailchimp.
Mailchimp: easy to use, builder is good, can’t install 3rd party tracking pixel.
Really all 3rd party CRMs will accomplish the same thing but far more expensive (ex hubspot, Zoho, pipedrive, Monday)
My personal favorite email server/senders
(Transactional)
Postmark: World class deliverability when starting, very strict, great batch sending if not using a marketing email provider, scaleable.
Mailgun: Not as strict, far more flexible, cheap, scaleable, far superior over sendgrid.
Amazon SES: this is my favorite ONLY when I know the client will be sending millions of emails per month, hard to setup, super scaleable, not forced to follow many rules but your domain reputation and email sender score can take a big hit if you’re not knowledgeable with email best practices.
Here’s my email builder & sender if you want something easy to use out the box.
While I believe PM to be the best overall, there are 2 limitations that may be big issues based on your use case.
#1 Conditional Text: PM templates use Mustachio which is simple and powerful BUT is limited in terms of IF/Else conditional text (it CAN display text if a value exists but Mustachio CAN’T use the value of the value as a condition for which text to use).
#2 HTML Designer - not available in PM unless you also use ActiveCampaign. That being said PM does provide you with basic layouts so if you’re comfortable editing text within html and don’t need to do anything fancy, this limitation probably won’t be a game changer.
Would you mind sharing a little more about your experience with Loops for marketing emails? I’m looking through their content and it seems like there’s a lot more covering transactional emails so I wasn’t sure how friendly they were towards marketing. Thanks!!
I would say that they are marketing-first actually. They started with only offering the ability to send marketing, then added transitional emails after.
The deliverability with Loops is pretty good. Let me know if there’s any specific questions you have!
Check out their docs as well, this talks about the different types of emails you can send via Loops: Types of emails - Loops
Nope, I don’t send marketing outside of my audience. I want people getting my emails to expect to get my email. I also don’t think Loops allows for cold emails