Good, but requires patience
Updated May 17, 2021

Good, but requires patience

Zee Gimon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Twilio SendGrid

We use both SendGrid marketing and transactional emails for a project we're helping to promote. It is a convenient tool for communicating with your clients and/or users regarding the account setup and other things, but also to send digests and updates (since the database is the same). It is mainly being used by me and a couple of my colleagues.

Our developers also have said that it is a convenient tool for them to integrate with.
  • Integrating with websites and mobile applications (registration, account activation, etc.) in terms of transactional emails
  • Sending (and scheduling) marketing emails
  • The prices are quite affordable as well (compared to other market leaders in email marketing)
  • The unsubscribing and cleaning the lists is a pain. You need to use a special tool to collect all your bounced, reported, unsubscribed, blocked, and invalid emails and then you create a separate list with them to delete it (along with all the emails that match the ones in the list)... Can we make it a bit simpler?
  • When you're creating/editing a marketing email, if you get into HTML code, it ceases to be a nice text WYSIWYG block and instead, you have to edit it ONLY in HTML from now on :( If I want to clear the trash in the code, it doesn't mean I want to switch to code-only.
  • Perhaps it's Chrome, but the layout is buggy. For example, when I edit a marketing email and I scroll down the email, the part of the screen that has the tools for editing the text is covered by the text of my email.
  • We've been actively corresponding with over 10K people using SendGrid and it is much cheaper than it would've been with MailChimp or similar email marketing providers.
  • Scheduling email campaigns is convenient because you can do them in bulk and then you don't have to worry about your email marketing for a while :)
We have been looking for an email marketing provider that would match the budget ("not too high" :), our database numbers (over 10K subscribers), and convenience. MailChimp is very convenient and easy to use, but it was expensive at 10K+ subscribers. Emma, which I haven't used, but evaluated, was even more expensive. SendGrid was the tool that our developers were already using for transactional emails, therefore it made sense to try it. Also, SendGrid was four times cheaper than MailChimp.
SendGrid is convenient when you also use transactional and marketing emails together because you can use the same database, clean it, get permissions, and everything from your clients/users at the same time. It has templates which you can use and edit, or you can create your own, therefore it is quite versatile (you can also import your own HTML layout, but it might not work as good as you hoped it would...).

Twilio SendGrid Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
6
Dynamic content
8
Ability to test dynamic content
8
Landing pages
Not Rated
A/B testing
Not Rated
Mobile optimization
8
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
5
Triggered drip sequences
Not Rated
Dashboards
8
Standard reports
8
Custom reports
8

Using Twilio SendGrid

ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Well integrated
Unnecessarily complex
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Creating a list and managing it
  • Creating a marketing email
  • Cleaning your list from all the unsubscribes, bounces, etc. The seemingly simple step requires too many actions on the users' side.
  • Editing a marketing email - the layout sometimes lags and overlays the text instruments when you scroll down. So editing is not always simple.
It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument.