While sending a large number of emails for your newsletter, promotional or marketing campaigns, or transactional emails, you need to use a professional SMTP relay service. An SMTP relay or an email delivery service
With so many options available for an SMTP Relay Service in the market, making a choice for one which best suits your needs might become difficult. Here are 5 factors you should consider looking at before choosing an SMTP Relay Service.
- Easy Website/App integration
Your SMTP relay service should be able to integrate the backend of your website or app to allow you to send emails effortlessly. It may help if the SMTP relay service is providing an SDK for seamless integration or a migration API if you’re switching from a current email delivery service. If you don’t want to use a specialized email infrastructure, you will most likely be using a hosted SMTP relay service. In this case, you should consider using an SMTP service provider which allows you maximum credits and email sends without any delay. This will help your application achieve an increased capability of relaying emails.
- 24/7 Support
For services like an SMTP email service provider, there can be a number of issues occurring at any hour of the day. Or you might simply have some trouble with integrating the service into your backend. In both cases, having your SMTP relay service available to you at each hour of the day is a relief. Some ESP’s provide chat as well as phone support services. In spite of good deliverability, if you cannot integrate the service into your stack, it becomes pretty useless. Make sure you check out the support availability before choosing an SMTP relay service.
- High Email Delivery Rates
This is one of the most important factors you must consider before finalizing your choice. An SMTP relay service is basically a service that helps you deliver your business emails into your client’s inboxes. Whether the emails are promotional, newsletters or transactional, you should ensure that the service is able to provide you good numbers on deliverability with respect to market standards. Some metrics you should be looking out are how good your domain reputation is, how good the IP and email sending reputation of the SMTP relay service is and what kind of clients the service accepts. In many cases, your emails end up landing in spam, not because you are sending bad emails but because your email delivery service has hosted a business that sends bad emails on the same IP as it uses to send your emails.
- Additional Features
You might want to check out all the additional features your SMTP relay service provider is giving you and make a comparative analysis of all the providers available in the market. You can then cross-reference these against your requirements. Some essential features you might want are email templates, subject line optimization, real-time reports and analytics, transactional logs pf all your emails and a sandbox test to check how well the relay service is able to get your emails into the inbox. Some SMTP relay providers such as Pepipost use ML algorithms to optimize the sending of your emails for better engagement. Look out for such unique features as they are always a bonus to have.
- Pricing
Pricing of various SMTP relay services vary, most of the pricing plans start from $15 and go up to $500. Most of these services give a certain number of emails free per month. You should have an approximation of the number of emails you are going to be sending and then choose a service at the most affordable price for your needs. Make sure you also look at the overage costs of emails as you might not always have the correct estimation of the number of emails sent. Some SMTP relay providers like Amazon SES also provide a pay-as-you-go plan.