Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Oracle Dyn Email
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
The Oracle Dyn Email Delivery service is an email delivery infrastructure which supports sending via an API or SMTP, and is built to reliably support bulk and transactional emails. The service also includes sender reputation management (via its RepMan service), send monitoring and problem tracking service, and analytics to optimize email campaigns.
Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs
Oracle Dyn Email is well-suited for organizations that need to create, manage, and analyze bulk email campaigns from existing email templates. If your organization's business objectives are fulfilled by the out-of-the-box features of Oracle Dyn Email, then it is a perfect solution for you. On the other hand, if you think you will be needing more advanced features, I would suggest looking for another solution.
Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.
The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.
Some questions or requests may go amiss. Keeping important stakeholders in copy of communication is something that is not guaranteed and there is no way to assure this at time of ticket creation.
So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough
While the UI is a little outdated, this system is FAR easier to set up and manage that some other services we have used. Also, our questions to the support team are answered quickly and fully within an hour of submitting a ticket. We have had other services where questions were answered 24 hours later AT THE EARLIEST. Not so with DYN.
