Item: Twilio SendGrid
Rating: 8
Author: Jake Bodmer

Overall Satisfaction with Twilio SendGrid

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Twilio SendGrid API primarily for our Marketing department but regularly use it for Product, Customer Care, and Data team-specific campaigns, allowing us to drive important company KPI's and get direct from consumer feedback. The platform solves a major business needs which is sending email messages to our audience as well as SMS but to a lesser degree.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Makes setting up your initial account pretty simple and straight forward. You can get set up with a single list and unsub group and get going really quickly.
You can grow your complexity over time and SendGrid is set up really well to handle that expansion. Setting up DNS, expanding IP addresses, grouping unsubs, etc. It scales really well as your business and team grow.
I'm a huge fan of the API delivery which lets us set up a lot of automated actions which lets us focus more on testing and optimizing making even a lean team a super powerful team.

Cons

The UX isn't as intuitive as other systems and it takes some getting used to the navigation. Additionally, they're adding a lot of new features, so finding the features you're used to while figuring out the new products can lead to some confusion.
The documentation while expansive doesn't provide a lot of real-world use cases to help navigate through an issue. It can be a bit general, leaving you with just as many questions as you started with.
They don't have as many features as you'd find in some marketing cloud solutions which may have additional features. While SendGrid is making strides in this department they're not quite there yet but most likely will be more comparable very soon.

Return on Investment

The ability to get messages to our customers automatically at the right time allowing us to convert more often.
Streamlined processes so we're saving time every week.
Allowed the team to be very powerful and agile, we can get more done then we could before as we have more time to focus on other core functions.

Alternatives Considered

Sailthru, Constant Contact, Mailchimp and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

We selected SendGrid for the flexibility it offered us where we could set up APIs from our own database and CDP to trigger one-to-one messages, automate campaigns, personalize comms and save money over other systems that require you to host your data in their systems and charge a monthly fee. The system lets us select vendors that work for us to handle other objectives rather than trying to do everything out of the box.

Key Insights

Do you think Twilio SendGrid delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Twilio SendGrid's feature set?

Yes

Did Twilio SendGrid live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Twilio SendGrid go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Twilio SendGrid again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Unbounce, Sumo Logic, Recurly

Support Rating

The support is rather quick but their first step is almost always to suggest something in the documentation. There's not a great deal of real-world examples to help solve issues. Most support can be general at first and take a few back and forth emails before a helpful answer is given. Most of the time their team will continue to work with you until the ticket is resolved.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great if you have someone with a bit of technical know-how on the team to make sure you're getting the system set up properly, there is some degree of difficulty that you get with SendGrid that may not be present with other platforms that have focused on ease of setup. That being said, once that setup is completed the system is easy to use and you get get a lot done with a small team.

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Twilio SendGrid Product Review: Hope it helps!

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