SendGrid: The Best Kept Secret in Email Marketing

Within the email industry, SendGrid is widely recognized as a leading transactional email provider (notifications, receipts, alerts, etc.). Our reputation around transactional email sometimes overshadows the fact that SendGrid also powers email marketing programs for many of the most sophisticated, highest-scale marketers in the world. In fact, more than half of the 22 billion emails we send each month are marketing emails.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen an increasing number of major B2C brands move their marketing programs from traditional email service providers (ESPs) to SendGrid. Why are these clients transitioning from conventional marketing software to SendGrid’s platform? The answer is that they see SendGrid providing a better way to ensure delivery of the right message, to the right recipient, at the right time.

More effective targeting and personalization

Modern email marketing is data-driven and highly personalized to each individual recipient. Brands track and store rich data about their users—things like demographics, engagement history, and purchase/activity history—in various internal databases and CRMs. To effectively leverage this user data and create 1:1 personalized content, customers have to push data between their internal data warehouses and their email system, and programmatically generate email content.

With many ESP systems, syncing and merging user data into targeted campaigns is cumbersome and slow. Data often has to be batched and uploaded hours or even days later, which inhibits a brand’s ability to transform user insights (app/website activity, message opens/clicks, etc.) into timely messages and relevant content. Furthermore, these ESP systems aren’t designed to generate personalized, optimized messages for hundreds of thousands, or millions of recipients at a time. The result is either delayed campaigns, or “dumbed down” campaigns with less personalization.

SendGrid’s modern API architecture enables both continuous low-latency data syncing and fast programmatic message generation at high-scale. This empowers top B2C brands to send highly-targeted offers, digests, engagement emails, and other campaigns to their users.

Faster marketing velocity

Another challenge for email marketers is that many ESP systems don’t provide campaign reporting on a timely basis. Customers wait hours, days, and in extreme cases weeks to receive campaign performance data. Moreover, the format in which this performance data is finally received is not always easily ingested back into internal databases and CRMs. Consequently, campaign iteration and optimization cycles suffer.

SendGrid provides customers with real-time email analytics via webhook, showing deliveries, bounces, opens, clicks, and more down to the individual recipient level. This data can easily be pushed into the customer’s databases and BI systems, allowing the email team to quickly analyze campaign performance, test and iterate messaging and segmentation, and identify opportunities for new campaigns.

More reliable and timely deliverability

After a campaign has been generated, the speed with which it arrives in a recipient’s inbox is critical for things like special offers, winbacks, time-limited sales, and behavior-influenced messages. Rapid delivery can provide a significant advantage over competitors who are competing for share of mind and wallet from the same consumers. Conversely, slow delivery becomes competitive liability.

SendGrid’s platform is built to handle high-throughput scenarios. We routinely process and deliver millions of messages in minutes for individual customers. Many ESP systems struggle to handle even fractions of that volume load, and are only able to do so with high latency. In addition to the technology, SendGrid also has a world-class staff of deliverability consultants, technical account managers, and support engineers who help our customers optimize their email programs to get the highest deliverability possible.

Looking ahead

At SendGrid, we’ve already seen data-savvy and forward-thinking marketing organizations partner with us to drive their user messaging efforts. We expect to see this trend continue as companies increasingly look to data and technology to drive a competitive edge.

If you’re interested in learning more about SendGrid’s email marketing capabilities, contact our Sales Team.