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Having dealt with this stuff quite a bit, I'd caution about keeping all your transactional mail siloed. True, many emails may seem not worth having in a busines

Having dealt with this stuff quite a bit, I'd caution about keeping all your transactional mail siloed. True, many emails may seem not worth having in a business user-friendly ESP where your marketing emails live, but if you keep transactional email on a separate system, you lose a lot of visibility into the role of those emails in your business unless you incorporate them into an analytics system elsewhere. A check confirmation email, account renewal notice or other transactional email couple play a critical role in your funnel or with combating churn. If you don't have it married up with everything else, you'll lose a lot of that insight. Any ESP friendly enough for a business user will likely have an API for sending programmatically. Rates might be a bit higher over something like SES, but that may be worth it depending on your scale. It also let's business users manage templates and such without needing to have an engineer touch code, and the reporting is all there.

cimmanom 8y ago
You make a good point. The cost balance may depend on your use case and size. I'm currently at a B2C company that sends hundreds of millions of transactional emails per month. We use Sendgrid. They provide basic open and click tracking, which is more information than our small team has the bandwidth to make use of at this point anyway. If you're a B2B sending 10,000 emails per month with high potential value per interaction, integrating transactional and marketing mail and tracking email interactions with transactional mail on a granular level may be worth the additional cost. And a large team may have use for more detailed data, or the capacity to build out reporting and integrations for themselves. But super early stage, that's not the low hanging fruit you should be worried about. And even if you end up using the same platform, for conceptual purposes, for compliance purposes, and for optimizing deliverability you'll want to consider marketing and transactional email separately.

cimmanom 8y ago

You make a good point. The cost balance may depend on your use case and size. I'm currently at a B2C company that sends hundreds of millions of transactional emails per month. We use Sendgrid. They provide basic open and click tracking, which is more information than our small team has the bandwidth to make use of at this point anyway. If you're a B2B sending 10,000 emails per month with high potential value per interaction, integrating transactional and marketing mail and tracking email interactions with transactional mail on a granular level may be worth the additional cost. And a large team may have use for more detailed data, or the capacity to build out reporting and integrations for themselves. But super early stage, that's not the low hanging fruit you should be worried about. And even if you end up using the same platform, for conceptual purposes, for compliance purposes, and for optimizing deliverability you'll want to consider marketing and transactional email separately.