SendGrid Review
- Library of responsive templates
- Design with drag & drop tools
- Deliverability support from panel of experts
- Approachable email marketing automation
- Email performance tools & analytics
Pros & Cons
- Premium-tier functionality across all pricing plans (even the free plan!)
- Over 95% Inbox delivery rate
- Large email template library
- Drag and drop functionality
- High average cost
- Complicated pricing
- Pricing plan-dependent customer support
Plans & Pricing
SendGrid offers two types of pricing plans – commercial (aka Marketing Campaign Plans) and technical (aka Email API Plans). The commercial plan is designed for companies and individuals who need to automate and improve their overall email marketing efforts while the advanced plan allows integrating the email with your app or website.
These plans are available in three different packages – Free, Basic, and Advanced.
Free
The free plan is just that, it’s free. With the free plan, you can send up to 6000 emails to 2000 contacts every month. Also, you get access to design code and editors, segmentation, A/B testing, email insights, 3 email testing credits, 1 signup form, ticketing support, automation, and the ability to involve a single teammate in all processes. This plan is ideal for small business owners and individuals.
Basic
The Basic plan starts at $15/monthly and grows in accordance with the number of contacts and/or emails you send each month. The price ranges from $15/monthly for up to 5000 contacts and grows up to $200/monthly for up to 100,000 contacts. In addition, you get 10 email testing credits, 5 signup forms, and ticketing and chat support, but lose access to automation features.
Advanced
The Advanced plan starts at $60/monthly and grows up to $900 monthly depending on the number of contacts and/or emails you send each month. In addition, you gain access to 60 email testing credits, 15 signup forms, guaranteed fast support via ticket, chat, and phone, automation, adding up to 1000 teammates, and dedicated IPs. This plan is highly recommended to enterprise-level companies.
Overall, the pricing mechanism is rather complicated and while the website’s pricing page is transparent and presents all features and information in detail, it is still difficult to get a clear understanding of how much you’ll be paying each month.
Overview
Twilio SendGrid has been operating in the email marketing field since 2009 and has successfully serviced over 82,000 clients to date. SendGrid has pioneered the idea of transactional emails – automated, commercial activity-related emails that are sent to a given recipient. The brand is suitable for small, medium, and large enterprises alike and its portfolio includes many notable companies including eBay, Meetup, Spotify, Airbnb, and Foursquare.
Rating
"PRICE"
8/10
"EASE OF USE"
9/10
"FEATURES"
9/10
"HELP AND SUPPORT"
9/10
Features and Functionality
SendGrid offers premium functionality across all pricing plans, including the free ones. It can be efficiently used by both tech-savvy and newbie users, delivering satisfying results and boosting efficiency and productivity. Let’s explore some of the most notable features:
Email Design
The email design feature offers a design and code editor that allows you to create beautiful email templates via drag and drop functionality, or to access and edit HTML without breaking structural code. The editors allow you to create anything ranging from newsletters to receipts and password reset emails.
Automation
Email marketing automation allows you to automate numerous routine tasks. You can create onboarding (series) emails for newly acquired customers, nurture leads and attendees both before and after an event, and follow up with leads that interact with your content. Customizable automation triggers allow you to set various events and emails in motion, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Finally, you can track your automation over time to identify best-performing emails, track and make appropriate changes, and easily update subject lines and contents in real-time.
Centralization
SendGrid allows you to centralize all your email communication, including both promotional and transactional emails, in a single place. This allows easier access and management to all past communications, insights, analytics, reports, and statistics. Furthermore, collaboration becomes much easier when everyone uses the same tools and data. In turn, this allows businesses to calculate KPIs and campaign ROIs more efficiently. Finally, information centralization offers practically endless scalability for growing businesses.
Email Analytics
The analytics tool offers an in-depth statistical analysis regarding engagement (open rates and click rates), deliverability (Inbox vs Spam), and audience insights across all email campaigns. You can also dive into recurring email details, as well as transactional email data reports, and make changes when appropriate. Lastly, the reports and data are easy to understand, track, and use in your everyday work.
Templates
SendGrid provides a free, growing library of email templates that you can use for your emails. The templates are customizable – you can easily add your brand logo, colors, and content, and save them for future use. There are multiple industry-specific templates for all kinds of emails including traditional, recurring, newsletters, transactional, financial, etc.
The built-in CTAs make it even easier to achieve high ROI. Furthermore, all the templates are responsive, meaning that they will be perfect on any screen size and device. You can also import your existing email templates and use those easily and hustle-free.
Ease of Use
SendGrid is very easy to use. The software doesn’t have a learning curve and any person can use it effectively from day one. Drag and drop functionality allows users to create virtually any kind of email using pre-designed templates. The reports are also very easy to understand, compare, and help decipher which areas need improvements.
Customer support
SendGrid offers high-class customer support across multiple channels including phone, ticket, and live chat. However, both the communication channels and the speed of customer support depending on your pricing plan. Prioritized and guaranteed fast support is only available to the Advanced plan users. Here are some more details:
Phone Support
Phone support is only available to Advanced plan customers.
Live Online Chat
Live chat support is available to Basic plan users and above.
Video Tutorials
There is a large video library available on the brand’s official website.
FAQ
There is a downloadable FAQ PDF file available on the brand’s official website.
Blog
The blog offers small business marketing insight and help.
Final Word
Overall, SendGrid is an amazing email marketing software. The brand has done an excellent job of combining all the essential and “nice to have” features under a single umbrella. Thanks to the robust, yet easy-to-use features, SendGrid can be used to its maximum by both beginners and advanced users.
The insane scalability makes the tool suitable for small, medium, and large enterprises alike. Furthermore, the free version of the tool doesn’t ever run out and is ideal for individuals or small companies. That being said, there are a few downsides, namely the complicated pricing strategy and limited support (unless you’re a premium user). However, these drawbacks shouldn’t affect the overall experience of the software just because it has so much to offer.
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