SendGrid Buyer's Guide

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Choosing an email service provider (ESP) is an important task: you entrust your ESP with your email that you rely on to acquire, engage, and retain customers. You deserve a partner you can count on to help you send your email with confidence.

This Buyer’s Guide outlines the benefits of choosing SendGrid to be your trusted partner. We know that there are many ESPs hungry for your business. Read on to learn about the solutions and services that set us apart so you can make an informed choice.

Chapter 2: Email Expertise

Partners in your success.

SendGrid pioneered the cloud-based email industry, solving the acute pain of email delivery at scale for over 80,000 paying customers worldwide. We invest in a large team of experts to ensure we’re always on the cutting edge of what’s next, and we make that intelligence actionable for you.

Email Industry Insiders

As a customer, you’ll benefit from our relationships with key email ecosystem influencers, including inbox service providers, data providers, and more. This ensures you’re never caught flat-footed by industry changes, and have an influential advocate in your corner.

Experts Available on Demand

Most companies hire just one email expert to manage the complex and ever-changing email deliverability protocols. With SendGrid, we have a team of over 100 expert deliverability, compliance, and engineering personnel dedicated to staying on top of all email issues, so you don’t have to.

Reliable Support

Rest assured that you have people in your corner when it matters most. We have a global team of technical support engineers who are available 24/7/365 to assist via live chat, phone, and email.

• Need hands-on expertise? Premier customers enjoy dedicated customer success managers and customized consultation is available for all Pro and above accounts through our Expert Managed Services.
• Prefer to self serve? Leverage our comprehensive product guides, FAQs, documentation, and support videos to find answers fast.

Chapter 3: Deliverability

The help you need to make it into the inbox.

While other ESPs may tout high deliverability percentages, we know that every sender is unique and getting to the inbox is a collaborative effort. With SendGrid, you can trust we’re continuously optimizing the performance of emails sent over our platform through advances in compliance, our Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), and security. We also empower you to maximize your own deliverability with access to our experts, tools, and resources.

Get Started on the Right Foot

Quick and easy setup means you can start taking advantage of your ESP investment sooner. From determining the best IP address infrastructure to making sure all available feedback loops are in place, our team will act as an extension of your email implementation team to help you get up and running smoothly. We will also walk you through authentication setup, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, so you can be sure your emails are meeting all industry best practices.

Reach the Inbox

At SendGrid, we know that delivered does not necessarily equal inbox and if your customers aren’t seeing your emails in their inbox, they won’t engage. Our Customer Success and Professional Services teams will work with you to ensure your delivery is optimized and emails are reaching, and staying in, the inbox through ISP monitoring and outreach, reputation monitoring, and spam filter testing.

Keep Improving

Sending large volumes of email is complex. The more email you send, the harder it becomes to scale your infrastructure, drive customer engagement, and maintain your deliverability. As your email partner, our team of expert compliance and deliverability coaches will help you to grow your email program while improving your bottom line.

Chapter 4: Scalability

Proven at any scale.

Whether you’re a startup sending your first emails or an enterprise company messaging the world, SendGrid is more than up to the task. Our proprietary cloud-based MTA offers unparalleled processing speed and throughput and powers more than 100 billion emails each month; it’s why we’re trusted by leading senders like Uber, AirBnB, eBay, and Spotify.

Need to scale up or down in a given month? Not a problem. We offer flexible plans with right-sized features and tools to make sure you’re paying for exactly what you need.

Chapter 5: SendGrid Email API

The SendGrid API was built to provide powerful, reliable email delivery you can trust. Whether you’re sending password resets, billing receipts, or in-app message notifications, SendGrid’s customizable API will help you:

• Work faster. Integrate and deliver in 5 minutes or less via SMTP or one of seven code libraries for our API.
• Solve problems. Troubleshooting is easy with our active developer community network, robust documentation, and support.
• Be secure. Trust your data with us and our two-factor authentication, custom user permissions, API key permissions, IP Access Management, and more.
• Maintain focus. Spend time on your core business rather than building and maintaining a costly in-house email infrastructure.
• Access insights. Benefit from real-time email analytics and performance feedback for quick, well-informed decision making.

Powerful data allows you to make powerful decisions.

SendGrid allows you to categorize email campaigns and track statistics in real time. Your email analytics are available via our dashboard and API so that you can connect your deliverability to response rates.

We provide you with:

• Bounce and repeat bounce reports
• Spam and repeat spam reports
• Invalid email
• Blocked reports
• Unsubscribe rates
• Dynamic list segmentation
• Open and unique open rates
• Click-through and unique click-through rates
• A/B testing statistics
• Custom category tracking

Chapter 6: SendGrid Marketing Campaigns

SendGrid Marketing Campaigns was built for marketers who have big goals and limited time to achieve them. Whether you’re working to drive acquisition, engagement, retention, or all of the above, Marketing Campaigns helps you:

• Save time. Streamlined and easy-to-learn, our email marketing solution helps you go from signup to successful sending, fast.
• Work your way. Our flexible campaign builder frees you from the frustration of rigid, step-by-step wizards of other tools.
• Get personal. We’ve made segmentation approachable so you can take advantage of powerful personalization to craft messaging that resonates.
• Keep improving. Clear, actionable analytics make it easy to test, learn, and improve—without getting bogged down in a data overload.

Marketing Campaigns also provides you with:

• Responsive template library
• Design editor with drag & drop, WYSIWYG, and per-module code editing options
• Code editor with useful tag completion, image management, and split-pane previewing
• Custom fields to power personalization and segmentation
• Engagement segmentation to target recipients based on how they interact with your campaigns
• A/B testing of both subject lines and content
• Actionable analytics
• Built-in unsubscribe management
• APIs for programmatic contact management, segmentation, and campaign sending

Chapter 7: SendGrid Expert Services

SendGrid Expert Services will work with you to ensure your SendGrid account is properly set up, serviced, and that you are getting the business results you expect. As one of the largest and most trusted email delivery platforms in the world, you can be confident SendGrid services are providing you with the expert advice and support you need to drive email engagement and growth.

SendGrid Expert Services range from one-time customer Onboarding Services to custom Email Delivery Consulting and ongoing Expert Managed Services. All SendGrid Expert Service offerings provide you with:

• Email Expertise. SendGrid’s team of email experts will help you with API integration, sending and deliverability best practices, IP and sender authentication setup, email authentication configuration, and much more.

• Account Monitoring. Get real-time insight into your email performance with tools that monitor inbox deliverability rates, spam placement and deny lists, campaign engagement, and domain and brand reputation.
• Expert Technical and Account Management Support. Expert Services customers receive priority technical support including incident response times of 2-4 hours and a dedicated customer success manager and delivery expert who act as an extension of your team.

Chapter 8: One Platform for the Entire Team

Enjoy seamless collaboration that increases your efficiency.

SendGrid is able to uniquely meet the needs of both your development and marketing teams. By choosing SendGrid, your transactional and marketing email stays under one roof, allowing for increased collaboration, fewer vendors to manage, and a partner who understands and serves your entire email program.

Chapter 9: Resource Library

Learn about email deliverability from the best.

We empower our customers to send with confidence. We provide numerous resources that can help you become an excellent sender. Take advantage of our expertise by visiting:

• Our 2022 Email Deliverability Guide
• The SendGrid Blog
• Customer Success Stories
• SendGrid Webcasts
• SendGrid Support
• Best Practice Guides
• Documentation

Chapter 10: Additional Questions?

Ask the Experts

We have experienced representatives who can answer all your questions about our email platform and offerings. Contact us to learn how SendGrid can help your business.

Access our Resources

Visit our Documentation to preview how our technology can integrate with your system.

Join our Community

We have a vibrant community on Twitter, Facebook and Github where customers and developers share ideas on how to improve the email landscape.

Some of our valued customers: