Rock-solid transactional email with strong MailChimp integration
February 24, 2017
Rock-solid transactional email with strong MailChimp integration
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Mandrill
Our business used Mandrill as an outbound email infrastructure for our entire organization. Our primary use case was as a robust transactional email platform for sending notifications and newsletters to new and existing users. We used the Mandrill API and SMTP services and integrated them in with Wordpress and a custom-built form engine to send messages to users and internally to our own team as notifications. Mandrill replaced a free but flaky transactional email platform with one that was much more reliable and easy to troubleshoot and report on.
- 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.
- Mandrill used to be a standalone service, but now requires a paid MailChimp account to use. This is unfortunate for users of other email platforms.
- Mandrill's analytics sometimes leave a bit to be desired. The interface is nice and clean, but drilling down into deep analytics can be cumbersome.
- Mandrill lacks a mobile app similar to the ones offered by competing transaction email platforms.
- Mandrill ensured high deliverability for messages sent to marketing leads in our customer funnel. This was incredibly important for making sure we captured leads early and often.
- Mandrill was a solid and efficient way to send transactional notification messages to customers using our web-based payment system. With online payments, quick response is key, and Mandrill absolutely delivered.
- Mandrill messages meant that our internal team always received notifications about leads, new sales, or problems with our systems in a timely manner. As a small startup, moving quickly was essential and we couldn't afford to miss a beat. Mandrill made sure we didn't.
Amazon SES was a service we evaluated before eventually landing on Mandrill. SES is very affordable, but some of our less technically-inclined employees found it difficult to use. We also found the API to be lacking in meeting our needs. And as an existing paid MailChimp customer, the integration with Mandrill made for one less service we would have to maintain.