Looking to take your Transactional & Promotional Email Marketing to the Next Level? SendGrid is here to make it happen.
March 02, 2019

Looking to take your Transactional & Promotional Email Marketing to the Next Level? SendGrid is here to make it happen.

Sam Lepak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Twilio SendGrid Email Marketing

Our company currently uses SendGrid for all promotional and transactional marketing emails. Our marketing team designs via the HTML editor all our promotional emails, A/B tests, category stats, and segments contact lists inside SendGrid. Our backend RoR setup up the majority of the implementation - he claimed it to be exceptionally easy. For us SendGrid allows us to keep track of all our emails in one place. Rather than having one email service provider for promotional emails (ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, etc) and one email service provider for transactional emails (Mailgun, Mandrill, etc.), we are able to have them all in one place.
  • Being a startup and going through an accelerator program in the GAN network, we were able to take advantage of SendGrid Accelerate program and leverage SendGrid training, resources, and early beta access to new products. Not to mention their dedicated IP address.
  • SendGrid has an extremely simple UI/UX. From creating emails in the editor via HTML or drag & drop, to being able to manage our unsubscribe lists and even viewing KPIs on emails and specific categories; SendGrid is extremely intuitive.
  • Compared to other email service providers, SendGrid has an exceptional deliverability rate. Being a global company and have thousands of users all over the world, we have never had an issue with delivering emails. Over 99% on all promotional campaigns and a near perfect rate on all our transactional emails.
  • SendGrid recently launched automation/sequences. While this is still in beta, they have a weird setup where you must configure your entire contact list twice to be able to put contacts through the automation. It will be interesting to see their roadmap for this product as they continue to develop the marketing side of their product.
  • I've had trouble setting up their tracking with our website via Google Tag Manager. Followed their instructions and ended up contacting SendGrid support and they said that we needed to implement the code on the actual website. Wish we could have it done with Google Tag Manager.
  • Being a part of SendGrid we have a 12-month credit because we participated in an accelerator program. When we get off the program we expect to pay around $150/month. This is a tiny amount compared to money we would have been paying with ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp. SendGrid has saved us tons of money as we continue to grow.
  • With SendGrid we are now able to determine which promotional and transactional emails are working. In terms of open rate, CTR, A/B testing subject lines, copy, etc. We also are able get excellent support whenever we have a question or issue with our account.
  • Being a mobile app company at first, retention is a major KPI. With SendGrid we launched a new onboarding email that sends a drip welcome sequence to our users. With this new email sequence we have increased our 1-week retention from 8% to 17%.
Before using SendGrid we used Mailchimp and were very limited with segmenting our users. Then we moved to ActiveCampaign and paid a ton of money for sending a few promotional emails per month. Then we got SendGrid - letting us rid both of ActiveCampaign and Mailgun and having all our emails in one central location.

Not only did we save a ton of money with the SendGrid Accelerate program but we will also save $200 a month once we are on a paid plan. While some of the features (lead scoring, automations) aren't as advanced as ActiveCampaign, SendGrid is perfect for our startup with 50k+ email list.
Being a luxury/lifestyle brand, it's extremely important that our digital products and messages all are able to use the same style, font, colors, etc. With SendGrid's HTML builder we were able to import fonts and keep our message consistent with all our other channels.

SendGrid is also extremely well suited for being able to view statistics on emails. Because of their email tagging/categories we are able to track onboarding emails, cart abandonment emails, and run A/B tests and understand which emails are working and which are not.

Twilio SendGrid Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
7
Dynamic content
9
Ability to test dynamic content
8
A/B testing
9
Mobile optimization
9
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
7
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
8