APSIS Pro is an email marketing solution that drives measurable ROI through personalized emails and organized workflows.
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Sinch Mailgun
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
Works well, relatively easy to use - but lacks some up-to-date and modern features as well as look and feel. The support provided is OK but not world class. It is too bad as APSIS as a company is quite good at inspiring and providing insights into trends in email marketing.
Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.
The user interface is not good. Too much scrolling and too many menues to navigate. Half of the pages are updated to a "new" look with the rest still being the (really) old design. This badly needs a make-over.
There is no one-click "send reminder to those who did not open". To send reminders, it is nescessary to build a filter a do a new send using the filter. Such a simple and often repeated task should be automated.
It is not possible to add a "Why did you leave us?"-page for opt-outs... Really misses this.
The statistics are too limited and to difficult to use - mostly due to the UI design as described above.
No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
Sometimes can be slow in delivery
Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)
It could be more up-to-date and could offer some extra features that other competitors do like templating and better querying and filtering. As it is right now most things are easy to use but seem rather barebones next to Mandrill. The API is easy to implement thanks to the great documentation which is why I recommend Mailgun so often.
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.
MailChimp offers more flexibilty but also seems a bit more complicated to use. We did not use it long enough to really get an idea of the positive and negative.
To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it integrations options seem to be better
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
We are still trying to figure out how to use this medium for sales. We have had some success with Black Monday sales, but in general we do not have much response to our emails.
We have increases our visibility with our customers by making sure to land in their mailbox regulary with nice looking messages.
By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.
