Sendgrid alternative?
I've been using sendgrid for a year. Recently, they added fee for using their newsletter app, which use to be free. Buying a self-hosted autoresponder to send newsletters is an over kill for my needs, as I don't need complicated segmentation and features. I'm looking for a SMTP relay service like sendgrid, which also has a newsletter app and can let me do the following from within the interface without extra cost:
- Store emails (including extra fields names, etc) in a list.
- Create and schedule campaigns.
- See or pull open/click reports via API based on domains (hotmail, gmail, etc)
- See or pull contact who haven't open or clicked on emails since certain date.
To accomplish the #4 using sendgrid, I have to buy a dedicated server to handle the incoming event notifications as my VPS server can't take the load. That's another extra expense.
Mailjet lets me do 2, 3 and 4 but I can only store contacts with emails. Their app is not designed to save extra fields like names, ips and so on. Moreover, their support is really really slow. It takes days to get a reply.
Any alternatives you can suggest for the features I'm looking for?
Answer
Other SMTP relay services that offer newsletter features include Mandrill and Elastic Email. - Elastic Email's marketing platform is included with all plans. - Mandrill's WordPress plug-in sends emails generated by WordPress through Mandrill.
Disclaimer: I work for Ombud, a third-party social platform to research B2B technologies such as transactional email delivery and email marketing.
If you follow this link to Ombud, you can create a custom comparison of transactional email delivery solutions based on those features you want: http://ombud.com/r/xo. Hope this helps!