Want to skip the theory and jump straight to the step-by-step email marketing guide? Click here!

Benefits of email marketing for agencies

Email marketing helps agencies to communicate consistently, share insights, and show expertise — all at a reasonable cost. 

But that sounds too hypothetical, right? 

Let’s explore the real benefits of email marketing in more detail. 

1. Offers great return on investment (ROI)

Email marketing delivers one of the highest returns on investment among digital channels. In fact, a recent study by Litmus shows that each dollar spent on email marketing likely returns an average of $36. 

This high ROI is mainly due to its ability to reach a highly targeted audience at a low cost while nurturing relationships over time. 

Unlike other marketing channels that require constant investment, email campaigns reach a targeted audience with minimal extra expenses — provided that the sender reputation and email infrastructure are properly maintained.

For example, you could use a personalized email drip campaign to guide a lead through the sales process. When a potential client downloads a free eBook, an automated email sequence triggers.

The client starts by receiving a warm welcome email. After that, they get messages tailored to their needs, with relevant case studies, and, eventually, an offer for a personalized consultation.

This campaign engages prospects over time without manual follow-up. It increases conversions while keeping costs low.

However, keep in mind that achieving this ROI isn’t easy and can vary considerably. The success of your email marketing campaigns will depend on various factors, including: 

• Quality of your contact list
• Content quality and value
• Email deliverability and sender reputation

For instance, only a well-timed promotion that aligns with your clients’ needs and preferences could encourage immediate responses and drive conversions.

2. Support advanced personalization and dynamic segmentation

Unlike other marketing tools and approaches, only emails let you use all the collected data on your users, and hyper-personalize messages automatically (if you use the right tools). 

For instance, Maichimp marketing platform allows you to segment your email list using demographic data, purchase behavior, engagement history, and custom attributes of your choice. Then, when creating a targeted email campaign, you can layer these criteria and target them separately with curated content. 

GetResponse, another email marketing platform, offers dynamic segmentation, meaning contacts are automatically transferred from one segment (e.g. new users) to another (e.g. loyal customers). 

And the email marketing platform ActiveCampaign offers a dynamic content feature that automatically personalizes sections of an email based on each user’s preferences, actions, or other data.

3. Allows scalability through automation

Email marketing automation allows you to handle repetitive tasks without manual intervention.  Instead of manually sending each campaign, you can create automated workflows that trigger messages based on client actions. 

Here are some of many examples of email automations that companies use:

• Welcome emails
• Onboarding sequences
• Birthday or anniversary messages
• Post-purchase follow-ups
• Re-engagement campaigns
• Upsell or cross-sell recommendations
• Feedback and review requests
• Event reminders
• Lead nurturing sequences
• Drip campaigns
• Seasonal campaigns and holiday promotions

4. Increased customer retention and loyalty

Businesses are ready to invest in personalization and loyalty programs because they pay off. The PwC Customer Loyalty Executive Survey 2023 revealed that businesses delivering personalized experiences see a 1.7x increase in incremental revenue year-over-year and more than double their customers’ lifetime value. 

Retaining loyal clients is far more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, and email marketing helps with that through hyper-personalized, relevant content delivered at the right time. When subscribers receive regular, helpful information, they feel appreciated and develop an emotional bond with the brand—almost as if it were a friend or even a family member. 

5. Revenue expansion from white labelling

Agencies can white label an email marketing platform to charge their clients usage fees in addition to the usual retainer. A white label platform would be hosted on the agency domain and show the agency logo. Top ESPs charge 4-5 times more than some of the lesser known brands, so there’s an opportunity for a healthy markup with white label. Plus, when agency clients use an agency branded tool it can promote client retention as well.

How to get started with email marketing

It’s now clear that there is a lot to gain from email marketing. But where should you begin?

Here is a simple framework for any business ready to hit the ground running. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a digital marketing agency, UX audit agency, a travel agency, or another service provider. 

We’ll cover foundational strategies and best practices that work across industries.

Step 1. Develop the strategy

Start by deciding what you aim to accomplish with your email marketing strategy. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, nurture leads, or drive sales?

You can use a SMART framework to ensure your goals are both realistic and trackable. SMART stands for:

• Specific. Clear and precise goal
• Measurable. Trackable outcomes
• Achievable. Realistic and attainable
• Relevant. Aligned with broader objectives
• Time-bound. Set within a timeframe

For instance, if your goal is lead generation, you can define your smart goals as follows:

• Specific. Generate 100 new leads in December through email campaigns from a website that generates 10k visitors per month.
• Measurable. Track the number of leads collected via sign-ups or downloads.
• Achievable. A website generates 10k visitors, so we need to convert 0.1% of them, which is quite realistic with the right strategy.
• Relevant. Lead generation aligns with the agency’s broader objective of increasing sales.
• Time-bound. Achieve this goal in December.

Having well-defined objectives from the outset will provide direction for each email campaign and allow you to assess its success.

Once you’ve established your goals, the next step is to create content that truly resonates with their interests and needs.

This directly impacts open and click-through rates, as subscribers are more likely to engage with emails that are relevant to them. 

Start by gathering data on your website visitors, looking at metrics like:

• Demographics (e.g., age, gender, location, income level)
• Behavior patterns (e.g., frequency of website visits, time spent on site, past purchases)
• Interests (e.g., preferred product categories, hobbies, or topics followed on social media)
• Engagement levels (e.g., email open rates, click-through rates, social media interactions)
• Browsing history (e.g., pages visited, items viewed, searches conducted on your site)

This information can reveal insights about your audience preferences and help you design emails that capture their attention. 

With goals and audience segments defined, list the tactics you’ll use to achieve them. For example, for lead generation, you might consider:

• Offering a discount or special offer for new subscribers.
• Hosting webinars or online workshops that require registration.
• Using exit-intent popups to capture emails before visitors leave.

As you outline your tactics, consider the tools that can support your execution. Since many agencies also function as consulting partners, it can be helpful to explore software for consultants as these often include features like project tracking and client collaboration that streamline your workflow.

Remember that flexibility is essential, especially for small businesses starting a campaign from scratch. If a strategy isn’t working, adjust as needed. 

Step 2. Build a quality email list

A well-targeted email list ensures that your messages reach people who are genuinely interested in your content. This increases the likelihood of higher engagement and conversions.

Focus on relevance, consent, and engagement potential rather than simply increasing numbers. A small, targeted list with high engagement rates often delivers better results than a large, unfocused one.

For instance, working with 100 people and achieving a 1% conversion is better than sending emails to 1,000 people with no conversions.

Begin by creating valuable content that attracts subscribers. Offering something of interest, such as an informative guide, exclusive discount, or access to premium content, encourages people to sign up willingly. These are known as lead magnets and provide an immediate benefit in exchange for an email address.

When selecting a lead magnet, think about what would most appeal to your target audience. For instance, a downloadable e-book or checklist may work well for users looking for detailed information, while a discount code might attract shoppers to an e-commerce site.

The lead magnet you create will also depend on the distribution channel you want to target. Organic channels are ideal for attracting people who are genuinely interested in what you offer. 

These channels ensure that the list of email subscribers is built with engaged subscribers who are more likely to interact with your content. Some of the organic channels you should consider include:

• Social media
• Referral campaigns
• SEO-optimized blog content
• Google ads
• High-impact landing pages
• Webinars or virtual events 

Avoid the common pitfall of buying email lists, as these lists often contain unqualified leads and can harm your sender’s reputation. Purchased lists can lead to high spam complaints and low engagement, which may damage deliverability and violate regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM. 

Lastly, regularly clean your list to keep it up-to-date and engaged. Remove inactive subscribers, as keeping them can lower engagement rates and harm deliverability. Maintaining good email hygiene keeps your list fresh and focused on engaged subscribers.

Step 3. Send relevant and personalized content

A 2023 research by Statista shows that 62% of consumers are less likely to trust brands with poor personalization. This means that only relevant, personalized content has the power to capture your audience’s attention, leading to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Plus, if content appears even slightly irrelevant, email service providers may label it as spam. This could negatively impact your email deliverability and inbox placement of your future campaigns. 

To avoid this, ensure each message resonates with the audience’s interests and needs. That means you need to go beyond using just the recipient’s name and personalize content based on each subscriber’s past interactions, preferences, and interests. This makes subscribers feel understood, boosting engagement and loyalty. 

Timeliness also matters for both transactional and promotional emails. If your email reaches the inbox when it’s most relevant to the subscriber, it’s more likely to be opened and acted upon. 

For instance, a segment of early-morning shoppers might respond better to emails sent in the early hours, while another group may engage more during the weekend.

You can leverage data and automation to find the best times to reach specific segments and send triggered emails that respond to real-time events, like a subscriber’s recent activity.

Most importantly, ensure each email delivers genuine value. Subscribers are far more likely to engage with content that gives them a good user experience. Plus, consistency is crucial for building trust, strengthening client relationships, and boosting open rates.

Step 4. Take care of email deliverability

Even if your content is well-targeted and personalized, it won’t matter if your emails don’t land in your subscribers’ inboxes. That’s why you need to pay close attention to your email deliverability. 

It depends on three key factors: 

• Technical setup
• Content quality
• Engagement signals

Getting each of these right ensures your emails land in the inbox rather than being filtered as spam.

First, ensure to choose a reputable email service provider (ESP) that supports authentication protocols like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. These protocols are important for:

• Verifying your identity as the sender
• Building trust with email providers
• Increasing the chances that your emails land in subscribers’ primary inboxes.

Email providers also assess content relevance, so each message should engage the recipient. For instance, a clear, compelling subject line captures attention and signals value to providers. Irrelevant subject lines or content full of spam words can lead to low engagement, which negatively impacts deliverability. 

Engagement signals — such as open rates and the frequency of emails marked as spam — are tightly connected to content relevance. If subscribers aren’t engaging with your emails, it signals to email providers that your content may not be valuable. This can lead to lower inbox placement. 

Aim to increase engagement by sending personalized, timely messages that resonate with each segment. For example, if you segment based on a client’s purchase history, you can send targeted offers or product recommendations that align with their specific interests.

Lastly, ensure to test your emails to check for any issues with deliverability before launching a campaign. This proactive approach will help ensure that your emails consistently reach the intended inbox.

Step 5. Test, track, and optimize email campaigns 

Regular testing and analysis help you to know whether your campaigns are resonating with subscribers or if adjustments are needed to boost performance.

Start by running A/B tests on various elements of your emails, including subject lines, call-to-action buttons, images, and email copy.

Test one variable at a time. 

For instance, you might test the subject lines of two email newsletters to see which one leads to higher open rates. You can also experiment with different CTAs to determine which generates more clicks.

Each test should have a clear hypothesis and measurable objective. This way, you can confidently apply findings to future campaigns.

Once you’re running campaigns, track key performance metrics that indicate how well your emails are performing. Here are what different metrics in your email funnel could mean:

• Open rate — shows how effective and compelling your subject lines are.
• Click-through rate (CTR)  — Reflects how engaging your email content is and whether recipients are motivated to take action.
• Conversion rate — Shows how well your email drives desired actions, like signing up for a consultation or purchasing a service.
• Bounce rate  — might point to issues with email list quality.
• Unsubscribe rate — May suggest the content isn’t aligning well with subscriber expectations.

Use insights from these tests to optimize your future campaigns based on what appeals most to your audience. If A/B testing shows that certain subject line types boost open rates, incorporate that style into future emails. 

Also, adjust your send frequency based on engagement data; if engagement drops with weekly emails, consider moving to a biweekly schedule.

You can also go beyond standard metrics by analyzing user behavior through tools like heatmaps to identify popular click areas and preferred links and align content with audience preferences. Also, assess interaction timing to optimize content delivery. 

Cost of agencies’ email marketing

The cost of email marketing for an agency in general or brand marketing agencies exactly can range anywhere from free to around $5,000 per month. 

Still, email marketing remains more affordable than most other digital marketing channels. For example, paid search ads like Google Ads or PPC can have a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) between $5 and $50, depending on the industry and the services you offer.

In the SaaS development industry, the keyword “saas development” shows a price per click  from $10 to  $38 in Google Keyword Planner as for November 2024

In contrast, email marketing’s CPM is usually much lower, often under $1, depending on factors like:

• The size of your agency
• The volume of emails sent
• The pricing of your email marketing solutions
• The cost of any additional email marketing software
• Whether you handle email marketing in-house or outsource it

Of all the factors, the primary cost driver is the number of emails sent monthly. Higher volumes often require advanced software plans, costing anywhere from $50 to over $1,000 per month.  

Higher email volumes also impact deliverability, which may require investing in dedicated IP addresses. These tools can cost an additional $20 to $100+ per month.

Labor costs are another significant factor. The amount depends on whether you’re using an in-house team or outsourcing. 

Hiring in-house email marketing experts, designers, and developers typically costs $50,000 to $90,000 per role annually. Larger agencies may also need to hire project managers to oversee strategy and execution. 

On the other hand, full-service email marketing agencies typically charge between $2,500 and $10,000 or more per month, depending on the scope of services, campaign complexity, and subscriber list size. The best email marketing agencies in the US  may charge higher fees due to labor costs but bring valuable expertise in:

• Market-specific expertise
• Copywriting
• Content marketing 
• Regulatory compliance 

Other factors that affect how an email marketing company can charge include:

• Quality of current email list
• The complexity of email design
• Frequency of your campaigns
• Platform you use

You could also hire freelancers, who generally offer more affordable rates than agencies. Freelancers typically charge anywhere from $20 to $150 per hour, depending on their level of expertise and the complexity of the tasks.

There are also a few other crucial tools and software integrations that can increase costs. For instance, to track your campaigns effectively, you might need CRM integrations and advanced analytics tools or apps. CRM tools alone can add anywhere between $50 and $200 per month. 

Some companies may also invest in data protection tools, which cost $20 to $200 per month, to comply with regulations like GDPR. 

Best email marketing software for agencies

This is a snapshot of some of the best email marketing software for agencies, focusing on their pricing, core strengths, and customer support ratings. 

*I’ve calculated the prices based on sending 10,000 emails per month to a contact list of 2,000 addresses. These prices are current as of November 2024.

Best choice: Mailtrap Email Delivery Platform

G2: 4.8, Capterra: 4.8

Mailtrap is an email delivery platform for developer and product teams with high inboxing rates and fast email delivery.

The platform lets you send both marketing and transactional emails, has a separate steam for bulk emails. It offers an intuitive template builder with drag-and-drop and HTML editors, pre-designed email templates, a clear campaign scheduler, and other automation features.

Mailtrap provides advanced analytics with a dashboard and visual graphs to track key deliverability metrics. And drill-down reports on each mailbox provider with detailed insights will help you fine-tune email campaigns while maintaining a strong sender reputation.

If your main concern is email deliverability and placement, Mailtrap is the right tool for you. Here are the GlockApps test results of emails sent via Mailtrap. As you can see, more than 90% of transactional and marketing emails landed directly in the inbox or relevant tabs, with less than 6% being sent to secondary tabs.

Pricing

Mailtrap’s free plan includes up to 3,500 emails per month, which is usually enough for fast-growing agencies. For businesses with larger email-sending needs, Mailtrap has very affordable paid tiers that start as low as $15 per month for 10K emails and an unlimited contact list. The full plan description is here.

HubSpot

G2: 4.4, Capterra: 4.5 

Best for: teams that need CRM with marketing automation capabilities

HubSpot is ideal for agencies that need an all-in-one solution to manage client relationships and email campaigns in one place. It offers marketing automation, CRM, email marketing, and analytics — all in one place.

The platform’s CRM allows you to monitor each lead throughout the entire customer journey, ensuring no opportunity is missed. Also, it integrates with popular digital marketing tools like Salesforce, Slack, and Shopify, making it adaptable to various client needs and existing workflows.

Pricing

HubSpot offers a range of pricing plans to accommodate different needs. Its free plan includes basic CRM features, email marketing, and some automation tools — ideal for small-scale users. For more advanced features, you can pick from HubSpot’s premium plans to match your agency’s needs.

BigMailer

G2: 5.0, Capterra: 4.9

Best for: Multi-brand management with role-based user management

BigMailer is an email platform built for marketing agencies and designed for managing multiple brands or locations. It offers advanced segmentation and reporting capabilities, drag-and-drop template editor and template library, image hosting with free stock image search. BigMailer allows you to manage both marketing and transactional email with a unified customer view and offers support for RSS-to-email campaigns as well. For agencies serving clients in the same industry or in multiple locations email template sharing can offer an improved workflow over most ESPs. 

Agencies have an option to white label BigMailer and charge their clients usage fees, which can promote client loyalty and retention while expanding revenue. 

BigMailer customers love it for its timely live chat support and complimentary advisory on email deliverability and strategy.

Pricing
BigMailer pricing plans are based on subscriber list size and include a monthly limit of total emails sent that’s x10 the subscriber count. The plans don’t have locks on any features, making it easy to test and evaluate the platform on the lowest level. Agencies can request a free trial via live chat.

NotifyVisitors

G2: 4.8 Capterra: 4.9

Best for: agencies requiring an all-in-one marketing automation platform capable of enabling multi-channel outreach

NotifyVisitors serves as a versatile toolkit for agencies to manage email marketing and other channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications, all from one platform. NotifyVisitors is easy to use and supports behaviour-based targeting and personalization to enhance engagement.

The drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy to create responsive branded emails. Agencies can also use pre-built automation workflows like welcome emails, cart recovery, and re-engagement campaigns that save time and enhance conversions.

Pricing

NotifyVisitors offers a wide variety of plans to consider for various agency needs. A free plan is offered, supporting up to 1,000 contacts, email templates, and very basic automation – ideal for smaller teams starting. For multichannel automation capabilities, advanced analytics, and priority support, you can be upgraded to one of NotifyVisitors’ premium plans, depending on how big your contact list is and usage.

Mailchimp

G2: 4.3, Capterra: 4.5

Best for: teams that are looking for a budget-friendly email marketing and automation tool

Mailchimp is a great option for agencies looking for an affordable and easy-to-use email marketing platform. It includes essential tools like email automation, basic CRM, and audience segmentation in a simple interface. 

The drag-and-drop email builder and customizable email templates help marketers create professional emails without much design effort. It has a robust analytics feature that makes it easy to track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

Pricing

The free plan includes basic templates, limited automation, and up to 500 contacts — suitable for smaller campaigns or trial purposes. For more advanced needs, it offers other premium plans. 

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

G2: 4.5, Capterra: 4.6

Best for: teams that need multi-channel marketing and personalization

Brevo is great for agencies looking for an email marketing platform with SMS capabilities for multi-channel campaigns. The platform lets you manage both email and SMS in one place, making it easy to reach audiences through different channels. Brevo also has strong personalization and segmentation tools for tailored messages based on customer behavior.

It also provides detailed reports on email and SMS performance. Brevo integrates with various CRMs, eCommerce platforms, and API tools.

Pricing

The free plan lets you manage unlimited subscribers and send up to 300 emails per day at no cost. The Starter plan costs $8.08 per month. It allows you to send 5K emails, includes some basic automation, and support. For other plan details visit the official site. 

How to send an email marketing campaign

You can use any email marketing tool to send your first email campaign, but in this section, I’ll show you how to do it with Mailtrap. Don’t worry, the process is simple and straightforward and will take you less than an hour once your domain is verified.

Set up your Mailtrap account and domain

First, create an account with Mailtrap. After logging in, head to the “Sending Domains” section and add your domain for verification.

Once you’ve added it, go to your domain provider (e.g., GoDaddy) and paste the DNS records that Mailtrap provides. You can find the DNS settings in your domain provider’s dashboard under “Manage DNS.”

After updating the records, click on “Verify all” in Mailtrap and wait for confirmation that your domain is verified.

Import your contacts list

Open Mailtrap web app and go to the “Contacts” section. Select “Import Contacts,” and upload your email list in CSV format. 

Make sure to map the fields correctly so Mailtrap can read them properly. 

Before importing your email list, clean it to remove inactive, invalid, and duplicate email addresses.

Create your email template

Go to the “Templates” tab. Here, you can design your email from scratch using the drag-and-drop builder or an HTML editor. Another option is to choose a pre-built template and customize it to your needs.

The builder has useful tools like AI-powered copy suggestions and a free library of images to help you craft the perfect message. Once you’re done, click “Save” or “Send Test” to send a test email to your own inbox for review.

Please note: merge tags won’t work in test emails because they are only sent to your address, not the full email list. So, there’s no need to worry about that for now.

Set up and schedule your campaign

When your email is ready, click on “Campaigns” in the left sidebar, then select “Create New Campaign.” 

Fill out your campaign details and click “Continue.” Choose the template you created, and add merge tags for personalization!

Select your target audience, confirm your list, and you’re good to go. You can schedule your campaign to send up to two weeks ahead, send it right away, or save it for later use.

See how easy that was!

Wrapping up

If you seriously plan to add email marketing to your service list, be sure to check the following materials:

• What is mail marketing: in-depth guide
• Email deliverability explained
• Types of email marketing 
• Email marketing strategy explained

Good luck! 

• Deliverability platforms [jump to section]
• Quick check tools [jump to section]
• Testing tools [jump to section]
• Monitoring tools [jump to section]
• Optimization tools [jump to section]

Disclaimer: Every tool on this list has been tried and tested by our deliverability experts, so you can expect a 100% unbiased list and reviews. You can also check our guide on how to improve deliverability yourself, to understand the main principles before picking a tool!

Best email deliverability tools: a snapshot

Click on a deliverability tool to jump ahead to the detailed review.

• Mailtrap Email Delivery Platform is the best for product companies with large sending volumes who are looking for high deliverability and industry-best analytics. 
• Postmark is for developer teams who want a reliable email API and SMTP server for sending transactional and bulk emails. 
• Email Warmup for SMBs and enterprises that want to improve their deliverability by warming up their emails.
• Mailgun is for developer teams who want to send emails or test their inbox placement, validate their lists, and preview their HTML emails in one place.
• Smartlead is for teams that are looking for unlimited mailbox support, automated warmup, and tools to maintain solid email reputation.
• MxToolbox is for users who are looking for a free solution for various quick deliverability checks or a high-end tool with advanced monitoring and deliverability features. 
• Sender Score is for people who just want to assess their sender reputation and email configuration for free before jumping to a paid solution.
• Barracuda is for teams who want to check if their IP has been flagged as spam by one of the most aggressive filters out there. 
• GlockApps is for users who need a full-stack tool for testing deliverability, email placement, and security, and can spend an extra few bucks on it.
• SendForensics is for teams who need an all-in-one deliverability platform that provides scoring for email configuration, authentication, and inbox placement.
• ZeroBounce is for people who need a full set of diagnostic tools and deliverability consulting services. 
• Google Postmaster Tools is for teams who want to analyze the performance of emails they send to Gmail users.
• Microsoft SNDS is for teams who need insight into emails they send to Outlook and Hotmail users.
• Yahoo Sender Hub is for teams who want to see how their Yahoo emails are performing.
• Everest by Validity is for heavy-duty users who need various dashboards to track their deliverability in great depth.
• InboxAlly is for people who need to improve their reputation with the most popular mailbox providers.
• TrulyInbox is for users who need to warm up their domains and improve their email deliverability and placement.

And for your convenience, here’s a table with a brief overview of each deliverability tool:

*Prices are relevant at the time of writing. I’ve added them in case you need to scale email sending volume and upgrade to a paid plan.

Best email deliverability platforms

Features such as automation, workflows, editors, segmentation, don’t matter unless your emails land in inboxes. So, instead of listing platforms with shiny features, I decided to focus on email deliverability. 

A platform with deliverability features should help you build and maintain a good domain reputation, send your emails, and analyze their performance. Ideally, it should also have testing functionalities to check your spam score, authentication protocols, and sender reputation. In other words, it should provide complete control over your email infrastructure. 

Best email deliverability platform: Mailtrap

G2: 4.8 🌟 Capterra: 4.8 🌟

Mailtrap Email Delivery Platform is designed for product companies with high sending volumes. It’s a perfect choice for companies focused on high email deliverability, in-depth analytics, and growth-focused features.

Mailtrap email deliverability features:

• High inboxing rates 

Mailtrap has high inboxing rates by design, meaning your emails will land in primary inboxes regardless of the plan you choose. For example, here’s how it performed with the free plan on our tests:

Now, just imagine the deliverability rates you can reach with dedicated IPs, auto warm up, throttling, and other deliverability features. 

• In-depth analytics

One of Mailtrap’s selling points is its analytics, which include helicopter view dashboards and drill-down reports. Through this dashboard, you can see your deliverability rate, unique open rate, unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounce rate, how your emails perform with various Mailbox Providers, and more.

• Separate bulk stream

For its high-volume email senders, Mailtrap offers a dedicated bulk stream. With its bulk-aware email API, you can send your marketing emails on top of transactional while your deliverability stays the same, all without any additional costs.

Additionally, you can use Mailtrap’s free checkers to make sure your emails are authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC or to see if your IP or domain are on blocklists. 

• Deliverability experts

Lastly, you can schedule a free consultation with one of Mailtrap’s deliverability experts, who will tell you how to optimize your sender configuration for the best possible results. We also offer tracking our customers’ Google Postmaster dashboards, so when something is off, we immediately notice them and suggest the needed fixes. 

Pricing

Mailtrap has a variety of plans you can choose from, but most importantly, you get a lot of important deliverability features by default for all plans. Check them out:

For more details, please consult the official Mailtrap pricing page.

Customer experience

Whether we’re talking about Trustpilot, Reddit or Twitter, I’m always happy to see that Mailtrap gets a lot of love on these platforms:

Postmark

G2: 4.6 🌟 Capterra: 4.9 🌟

Postmark is an email service provider that offers a reliable email API and SMTP for transactional messages. It’s a good choice for developer teams who want to send both transactional and bulk emails.

Postmark email deliverability features:

• Stable email infrastructure

Postmark has data centers in multiple locations worldwide, ensuring geographic load balancing so you can enjoy low latency and fast sending from your application/project.

Additionally, Postmark handles IP reputation, blocklists, and all of the protocol-related bits and bobs for their customers. This way, you don’t have to worry about your configuration. Instead, you can focus on sending.

Here’s how it performed in our deliverability tests:

• Separate sending stream

Similarly to Mailtrap, Postmark offers a separate sending stream you can use for bulk emails. You can also create a specific sending stream, which can come in handy if you’re sending different types of email. 

• 45 days of full email content history

If you’re into email logs, you’ll be happy to hear that Postmark is not only super detailed but also keeps your content history for 45 days.

• Real-time notifications

Postmark offers webhooks, which you can set up to get real-time notifications for email deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, and more. 

Pricing

Considering you also get a slider to select the number of emails you want to send and adjust the plans according to your sending needs, I have to say that Postmark has great pricing. Albeit a bit more expensive than some of its competitors out there. Here’s a table that sums it up:

For more details, please consult the official Postmark pricing page. 

Customer experience

When it comes to customer experience, for whatever reasons, Postmark isn’t seeing much love on TrustPilot. However, when I went to Reddit or X, I’ve seen a lot of positive remarks like this one:

EmailWarmup

EmailWarmup is a standalone deliverability solution that combines powerful email deliverability tools into an intelligent, intuitive, and easy-to-use dashboard. It’s designed for SMBs and enterprises that operate across a range of industries: from legal, SaaS, e-commerce, healthcare, agencies, and FinTech. 

EmailWarmup studies your actual campaigns and sequences in real time and mirrors them perfectly. That way, your email warmup matches your sending style, looks natural, and is hyper-personalized, helping you reach inboxing rates as high as 98% on Pro accounts. The best part is that they back their claim with a full refund guarantee.

EmailWarmup email deliverability features

• Personalized, automated email warmup 

EmailWarmup uses AI engines powered by Claude Opus 4.1 style-guides and GPT-5, supervised by expert copywriters who understand human communication patterns, and prompt engineers who know how to guide these LLMs using NLP. 

• Free deliverability testing

Other platforms charge you $25-85 monthly for basic testing, while EmailWarmup.com gives you unlimited tests for free (forever). 

The testing network covers over 50 mailbox providers (including regional ones), and you get a comprehensive breakdown of where your emails are most likely to land. And, you can take an email deliverability test without having to worry about credit limits or surprise bills.

• Email spam checker 

You can install Email Warmup’s email spam checker browser extension in your Gmail and Outlook with one click. Once set up, you can see your deliverability rate and the percentage going to spam in real-time.

• Email deliverability consultants

EmailWarmup gives you access to a free email deliverability consultant, assigned to your account, who diagnoses and resolves any potential issues. Note that this consultation is free for all users. 

Moreover, their experts handle the technical work for you (e.g., SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup, blacklist removal, advanced segmentation strategies, etc.), working as an extension to your team. 

Pricing

If you don’t count the free tier, Email Warmup has only one plan, which gives you access to all of the platform’s features. Check it out:

Mailgun

G2: 4.2 🌟 Capterra: 4.3 🌟

Mailgun is a transactional email API and SMTP service for developers that offers a standalone Optimize suite, a set of features dedicated to improving your deliverability.

Now, I must note that Optimize is a standalone suite, so you pay for it separately. The good thing here is that you can use it in combination with any other ESP; it doesn’t have to be Mailgun specifically.

However, if you want to use Mailgun, you might be interested in how it fared in our deliverability test:

Mailgun email deliverability features:

• Mailgun Optimize

With Mailgun Optimize, you can see in which inbox folder your emails land exactly, whether it’s spam, promotions, socials, or the main inbox. 

Additionally, Mailgun included various different mailbox providers in its seed list, which is a big plus since not all mailboxes are equal.

You can also upload your email list and validate it or embed Mailgun’s API in your signup page or form to verify contacts automatically when you collect them. Or integrate it with your preferred CRM.

• Fast delivery at high volumes

Mailgun promises fast delivery at high volumes because of its Rapid Fire Delivery SLA, available on high-tier plans. Essentially, it’s SLA-backed email delivery with infrastructure capable of up to 15,000,000 emails per hour. While it is certainly achievable, it depends on your pricing plan, configuration, and domain reputation.

Also, Mailgun webhook API provides data about delivery events such as accepted, delivered, clicks, spam complaints, unsubscribes, and permanent or temporary failures. And you can configure the webhooks on a domain level. 

• Mailgun Inspect

Mailgun offers another suite of tools for building emails called Mailgun Inspect. You can use it to test email accessibility, image rendering, and email design components like buttons, links, CTAs, etc. 

And the better your emails, the more chances you have of landing in inboxes.

Pricing

Mailgun Optimize offers two different pricing tiers, and you also get one month for free, regardless of which one you choose. Here’s what you get:

And if you want to use Mailgun as your ESP, it has a similar pricing model to Postmark. Meaning, it’s got several tiers with a slider that lets you choose how many emails you want to send per month. Check it out:

For more details, please consult the official Mailgun pricing page.

Customer experience

From what I’ve found, Mailgun users are mostly satisfied with how it delivers their emails. For example:

Smartlead

G2: 4.6 🌟 Capterra: 4.3 🌟

When evaluating the best email deliverability platforms, feature lists only matter if your emails truly hit the inbox. That’s why Smartlead is designed as a deliverability-first email automation platform. 

All of its features revolve around helping you land in primary inboxes and maintain a flawless sender reputation, whether you’re sending hundreds or hundreds of thousands of emails.

Smartlead email deliverability features:

Smartlead offers unlimited mailbox support and automated warmup for each sender: it “learns” and simulates genuine human sending to build reputation across Gmail, Outlook, and custom ESPs.

You can also use unique IP servers, dynamic IP rotation, and automatic sender matching to optimize deliverability at scale, not just for one-off campaigns.

• Inbox Placement Testing & Spam Insights

“SmartDelivery” proactively tests where your emails land (e.g., inbox, promotions, spam, etc.) with real-time reports across major mail providers before launching your campaigns.

Built-in spam and readability checkers flag problematic content and provide actionable fixes, allowing you to optimize before sending.

Here’s an example report of inbox placement rating with Smartlead’s free plan:

• Comprehensive Authentication & Blacklist Checks

Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC validation ensures authenticated sending and greater trust with mail servers.

Blacklist monitoring and verification help you spot issues wherever they arise, even when you send at volume.

• Deliverability Analytics

With Smartlead, you can track open rates, click rates, reply rates, bounces, and sender reputation per campaign and mailbox. The central “Master Inbox” provides a comprehensive inbox view, letting you monitor all vital deliverability metrics in one place.

• Auto-Mailbox Rotation & Sending Limits

Smartlead distributes email volume over multiple accounts, preserving deliverability as you scale. Moreover, there are daily thresholds and send windows that prevent over-sending and help you navigate provider-specific limits.

Smartlead Pricing

Smartlead offers competitive plans including all core deliverability features, unlimited mailboxes, and a 14-day free trial (no credit card required). Plans can be customized to meet specific sending and outreach needs.

For more details, please consult the official Smartlead pricing page.

Best email deliverability check tools

Email deliverability check tools allow you to quickly assess whether the key factors of your email infrastructure (e.g., email authentication, domain, IP, etc.) are working well.

Some of the criteria I went by when demoing them include:

• Ease of use and speed of the check
• Accuracy of the checks I performed
• Comprehensiveness of the tool

MXToolbox

G2: 4.0 🌟 Capterra: 4.5 🌟  

Launched in 2004, MxToolbox is one of the oldest deliverability testing tools in the industry. It offers a variety of free tools for checking your domain health, and it’s pretty barebones. This makes MxToolbox perfect for people who want to quickly assess their DNS records, check if they’re blacklisted, analyze headers, etc.

For example, you can use MxToolbox’s deliverability tool to quickly validate your domains’ email authentication methods.

Simply send an email to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com and you’ll get detailed SPF and DKIM information, header analysis, and blacklist reputation report.

Or, visit the SuperTool, an all-in-one solution by MxToolbox, enter your sending domain, IP address, or mail server hostname, and get a report regarding the following:

Pricing

MxToolbox also offers two paid plans for users who need something more than a quick deliverability check. The paid plans include access to multiple monitors for the top 30 blacklists, SPF flattening, email configuration analysis, and quite a bigger email message volume.

The plans are a bit more expensive, but they’re dedicated to enterprise users. Here they are:

For more details, please visit the official MxToolbox pricing page.

Sender Score 

G2: N/A Capterra: N/A

Sender Score is a free tool by Validity for people looking to quickly assess their sender reputation and email configuration health.

It’s also super straightforward to use, as all you need to do is open Sender Score in your preferred browser and enter your domain or IP address. You will then see your sending domain information, SSL and sending IP details, and a few other details.

Furthermore, SenderScore also tells you how you compare to others in the industry on the global average.

Another Sender Score feature I liked is the bounce lookup, which tells you why your messages are bouncing just by typing in the error message you get when you bounce. For example, I typed 4.1.2, a common potential issue with bounces, and I was taken to the page with the definition and possible fixes.

Barracuda Reputation Lookup

G2: N/A Capterra: N/A

Barracuda Reputation Lookup is a free tool you can use to check if your IP address is on the Barracuda blocklist, one of the most aggressive spam filters out there. The blocklist is maintained by Barracuda Networks, which flags IPs with a 95% accuracy rate.

According to Barracuda, most emails are flagged because they’re deemed as spam, contain viruses, or they’re sent from improperly configured email servers. 

To find out if your IP is on the list, go to the lookup page, enter your IP or domain, and click on ‘Check Reputation.’ If you are on Barracuda’s block list, you can use the Removal Request.

Note: For a detailed list of reasons why IPs are listed, consult the official Barracuda page. 

Best email deliverability test tools

Now, I’ll show you the best tools you can use to test your email deliverability, from constant monitoring to ongoing optimization.

While I was researching and demoing the tools here, I paid attention to:

• How well they reflect real-world email delivery
• The number of mailbox providers they cover (e.g., Gmail, Outlook, etc.)
• How detailed their analytics and reports are
• How easy to set up and use they are
• The range and the quality of features they offer
• The cost per test and overall pricing model

GlockApps

G2: 3.7 🌟 Capterra: 4.8 🌟 

GlockApps is a full-stack diagnostic tool for deliverability, email placement, and security.

One of its main features is Inbox Insight, with which you can see exactly where your emails are landing, whether it’s the primary inbox, spam folder, other tabs, or if they’re simply missing. 

Then, there is the DMARC Analyzer that provides you with weekly and monthly DMARC digests and sends you reports if something goes wrong. 

Uptime Blacklist Monitoring helps you keep your email authentication records healthy and notifies you if your IP gets blacklisted. So, if you don’t want to check your IP against blacklists manually with MxToolbox or Barracuda, you can use GlockApps to automate the process.

You can also book a 1-hour meeting with one of the GlockApps deliverability consultants. They’ll hear out your deliverability issues, diagnose them, and provide you with solutions on how to solve them.

Pricing

Below is GlockApps’ bundle plan, which includes both its spam and DMARC functionalities:

For more details, please visit the official GlockApps pricing page.

SendForensics

G2: 3.8 🌟 Capterra: 4.5 🌟

SendForensics is an all-in-one deliverability platform that provides scoring for email configuration, authentication, and inbox placement.

With SendForensics, you can monitor your domain and IP health, see if you’ve been blacklisted, see your DMARC failure rate, and more.

You also won’t have to worry about ending up on blacklists cause SendForensics allows you to set up alerts via email, Slack, or webhooks to notify you in real time in case you get blacklisted.

You can also run tests with SendForensics’ seed list to see how your emails are doing with the most popular providers like Gmail or Outlook and see if they’re going to the main inbox or spam. And when it comes to inbox placement with different providers, I have to say that SendForensics is quite thorough.

To round this tool up, you can monitor your DMARC compliance and preview your emails on the most popular clients and devices.

Pricing

SendForensics offers 4 different pricing plans, with the main difference between them being the amount of monthly DMARC reports you get and a number of domains and users. Everything else, such as spam tests, client previews, inbox placements tests, etc., you get unlimited.

For more details, please visit the official SendForensics pricing page.

ZeroBounce

G2: 4.7 🌟 Capterra: 4.7 🌟 

ZeroBounce started off as an email validation tool but eventually added a suite of email deliverability tools. Now it’s geared for people who need a full set of diagnostic tools and deliverability consulting services.

What makes ZeroBounce different from its competitors is its depth of email server analysis, which checks the following: 

• Header information
• RFC-based testing
• DNS records
• Email ports
• Authentication

Additionally, ZeroBounce also offers placement analytics, as well as email warmup to improve it.

Lastly, ZeroBounce has an email finder, which your outreach team will love. Essentially, it helps you find professional, validated email addresses based on name and domain, which can be useful for generating leads.

Pricing

ZeroBounce has separate pricing plans for validation and deliverability tools. Validation starts at $20,00 per 2,000 emails, whereas the deliverability suite has 4 different tiers based on your quantitative needs:

For more details, please visit the official ZeroBounce pricing page.

Best email deliverability monitoring tools

In this chapter, I’ll break down the free deliverability monitoring tools offered by the most popular inbox providers. 

These tools are important because they help you comply with the latest sender requirements released by the most popular mailbox providers (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple.). If you don’t comply with these, your emails will be rejected, which directly impacts your deliverability.

Check out our dedicated blog articles for more details:

• Google and Yahoo Email Sender Requirements
• Outlook’s New High-Volume Sender Requirements Update

Google Postmaster Tools

G2: N/A Capterra: N/A 

Google Postmaster Tools is a tool that lets you analyze the performance of emails you send to Gmail users. More specifically, you can monitor:

• Compliance status
• Spam rate
• IP reputation
• Domain reputation
• Feedback loops (FBL)
• Email authentication
• Email encryption
• Delivery errors

To start using Google Postmaster Tools, you will need a regular Google Account or a Google Workspace account and a registered sending domain. For a step-by-step guide on setting up Postmaster, check out our dedicated article on the topic.

Moving on, the tool itself consists of several dashboards, such as the Compliance Status dashboard, which lets you see if you’re compliant with the aforementioned email sender requirements. If you see a ‘Needs work’ status, it means you’ll have to tweak your sending configuration a bit.

Then, there is the spam rate dashboard, which tells you what percentage of your emails have been reported by recipients. To comply with Google’s requirements, you need to be under 0.3%, whereas the industry standard is 0.1%.

Two other very important dashboards are the IP and domain reputation dashboards. Here, you should aim for Medium and High, or yellow and green, since everything below means that ISPs don’t think you’re a legitimate sender and don’t consider your emails trustworthy.

Microsoft SNDS

G2: N/A Capterra: N/A 

Microsoft SNDS is a tool offered by Microsoft that lets you know how your emails sent to Outlook and Hotmail users are performing. It mostly concerns:

• Email IP reputation
• IP address activity
• Spam complaints
• Spam trap hits
• Spam rate

To set up Microsoft SNDS, you need a Microsoft account, the IPV4 address of your sending server, and access to the associated domain’s reverse DNS to verify ownership.

Unlike Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS consists of only one dashboard with many columns for monitoring different things, like the Filter result, for instance. This is likely the most important column since it scores your IP address health based on how many emails you hit Outlook spam filters. 

Right next to the filter result, you’ll find the complaint rate, which shows the percentage of recipients who reported your message as spam. 

You can also see whether you hit a spam trap maintained and managed by Outlook. For example, this would be nearly impossible to detect without Microsoft SNDS.

P.S. We also have an in-depth article breaking down Microsoft SNDS and a video explaining the Outlook high-volume email sender requirements. 👀

Yahoo Sender Hub

G2: N/A Capterra: N/A 

Yahoo Sender Hub is a tool that allows you to monitor the performance of emails you send to your Yahoo contacts. Through its dashboard, you can track your:

• Domain reputation 
• Authentication status
• Spam complaint rates
• IP reputation
• Inbox placement

To use Yahoo Sender Hub, you need a Yahoo account, a verified sending domain, and proper email authentication.

Overall, Yahoo probably has the most modern dashboard out of all inbox providers, which makes sense since it’s a relatively new tool, having launched in 2024. It’s super easy to use and set up and has all the stats you need to comply with Yahoo’s requirements.

Additionally, if you’re feeling tech-savvy, it also supports advanced email technologies, such as AMP or Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). You can use these to improve your brand visibility in your recipients’ inboxes.

Best email deliverability optimization tools

Email deliverability optimization tools are designed to actively enhance your inbox placement. What I mean by this is that your goal is not only to land in the inbox but to end up in your recipients’ primary folder.

So, I evaluated the following tools based on:

• How effective they are at improving my sender reputation
• How easy to set up, integrate, and use they are
• Whether some of their functionality can be automated
• How sustainable their deliverability improvements are

Everest by Validity 

G2: 4.2 🌟 Capterra: 5.0 🌟

Everest is a platform that provides various dashboards for tracking your email deliverability. Think of it like a highly customizable cockpit for email marketing.

With Everest, you can track basic email engagement metrics, such as opens, uniques, average read time, etc. But you can also get an insight into what % of people skim your emails, what time they read them the most, from which devices, and more.

With Everest, you can track feedback loops for over 30 mailbox providers and get valuable information such as spam complaints. 

Tip: You can also integrate Everest with your Microsoft SNDS and Google Postmaster Tools accounts to monitor your reputation.

However, Everest is not only about dashboards. You can also use it to preview your designs across major devices and mailbox providers, test your subject lines and email content for spam, and see if you’ve passed authentication checks or if you’re on blocklists.

If you want to stay above the competition, Everest allows you to track competitors’ sending patterns and see what they’re doing. This way, you can determine the best performing days in your niche, adjust your email sending configuration, and ensure your messages stand out. 

Pricing

Although slightly on the more expensive side, Everest has pricing plans for businesses of all sizes:

For more details, please visit the official Everest pricing page.

InboxAlly

G2: 4.6 🌟 Capterra: 5.0 🌟

InboxAlly is a tool that teaches inbox providers to understand that emails coming from your domain are trustworthy and are wanted by your recipients. Think of it as a more advanced form of email warm up that improves both your deliverability, as well as your engagement. 

To achieve this, InboxAlly sends emails to seeded inboxes, automatically opens them and clicks links. Additionally, InboxAlly also has the option to reply to some of the emails, mark them as ‘Not spam’ if they end up in spam, or if they end up in the wrong folder, like ‘Promotion’ for example, move them to the primary one. This makes inbox providers see that your email content is valuable. 

To achieve this, InboxAlly provides you with a list of seed emails you can download and add to your email-sending software. 

Then, you create a sender profile where you choose the engagement actions you want InboxAlly to take. For example, the tool can:

• Warm up your domain
• Open your seed emails
• Click on the links
• Move them to a specific folder
• Mark them as not spam (if they end up in spam)

All of this happens automatically once you send the seed emails.

After sending the emails from your email-sending service, you’ll be able to monitor their activity and inbox placement in the InboxAlly broadcast dashboard.

Oh, and one more thing, InboxAlly offers a free spam tester that doesn’t require either an account or a sign-up. You just send your usual content from your sending address to the InboxAlly audit email, and they’ll send you a free audit and deliverability report.

Pricing

InboxAlly pricing is super simple, as it mostly revolves around the amount of daily seed emails allowance. So, the more you pay, the more you can warm up your emails:

For more details, please visit the official InboxAlly pricing page.

TrulyInbox

G2: 3.1 🌟 Capterra: N/A

TrulyInbox is an email warm-up tool that improves your email deliverability and inbox placement by building positive sender reputation for major mailbox providers through gradually sending simulated human-like interactions with other users. 

The tool is pretty straightforward, as all you need to do is add your email account and provide the necessary information like in the screenshot below:

Currently, supported email service providers include:

• Gmail/Gsuite
• Office 365 (nATIV)
• Outlook.com/Hotmail.com/Live.com
• Yahoo Mail
• Zoho
• GoDaddy
• Yandex

Once you’ve added your email account, you configure your preferred warm-up settings by selecting how many emails per day you want to send, reply rate, etc.

Upon starting the process, TrulyInbox adds you to their warm-up pool and starts automatically sending emails from your mailbox to other users simulating real-life user exchanges.

The key phrase here is ‘real-life user exchanges’ because the emails look something like this:

You can also track the inbox placement of your warm-up emails, albeit the analytics are a bit minimal, but they do the job nonetheless.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, I have to say that TrulyInbox is quite affordable and straightforward. Each plan offers a specific amount of warm-up emails and a reply-rate specific to it, which increases as the cost does. There’s also a free plan and some tech features like warm-up API:

For more information, please visit the official TrulyInbox pricing page.

Wrapping up

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’re one step closer to becoming an email deliverability expert. 

One last tip to go: Don’t be afraid to mix up the tools on this list. For example, pair Google Postmaster Tools with Microsoft SNDS or use Everest to combine them both. The possibilities are endless.

Also, don’t get caught up in all the email metrics and data and forget to implement best practices. As one Reddit user would put it:

For more actionable tips and tricks, check out our blog, where we’ve paved the way for you with articles such as:

• What Is Email Feedback Loop and Why Is It Important?
• Email Protocols Explained: IMAP vs POP3 vs SMTP [2025] 
• Cold Email Marketing: Definition, Importance, and Guidelines
• 13 Reasons & Solutions for Why Your Emails Are Going to Spam 

Fortunately for you, in the last couple of weeks, I have interviewed our deliverability experts, developers, as well as marketers, and asked them for recommendations. I tested each email infrastructure provider they recommended, and here are the results!

If you want to skip ahead, you can do so by clicking on some of the following links:

• A snapshot of the platforms
• Detailed reviews of each platform
• In-depth comparison criteria

Best email infrastructure platforms for developers: a snapshot

Click on a platform name to jump ahead to the detailed review.

• Mailtrap is the best email infrastructure for developer and product teams who need high inboxing rates, fast email delivery, and 24/7 expert support.
• SendGrid is for teams that need a scalable email delivery service with a lot of quality-of-life features.
• Mailgun offers developer teams an email infrastructure with detailed email logs, a validation API, and extra features to tweak their sending configuration.
• Amazon SES is for experienced developers who are already deep in the AWS ecosystem and want to go easy on their budget.
• Postmark offers a minimalistic yet configurable email infrastructure for teams that need to send transactional emails with no extra features.

For your convenience, here’s a quick comparison of the email infrastructure platforms:

Disclaimer: The ratings, features, and prices are up-to-date at the time of writing this article, but they may be different when you’re reading it, as they’re prone to change.

What is an email infrastructure platform?

An email infrastructure platform is a platform that provides you with the tools you need to send and control emails reliably. That is, without having to build and maintain that infrastructure yourself.

Such a platform should allow you to send both transactional (e.g., password resets) and marketing emails, like newsletters and product updates. So, best case scenario: an email infrastructure platform should cater to both developers and marketers, but that’s not always the case.

However, you typically need all bases covered if you are:

• Sending a high-volume of emails
• A startup or a fast-growing product
• In a regulated industry, and you need a reliable email infrastructure

In case you’re a solopreneur with a vibe coding project, you can do well with just an email API or SMTP service.

On the other hand, if you need to send notifications in other channels, you can also use notification infrastructure services like Knock, which integrate with providers like Mailtrap to help you orchestrate your messages across email, SMS, push, chat, and even supports in-app messaging.

What to consider when choosing an email infrastructure solution?

Over at Mailtrap, we leave nothing to chance and leave no stone unturned. That’s why, before creating this list, I conducted thorough research and tested each email infrastructure solution I present here.

Documentation research

Before creating an account for each email infrastructure platform, I dug through:

• Official API documentation to see how flexible and configurable an email infrastructure is, how many use cases it covers, what it offers, etc.
• User reviews and testimonials to have a better idea of what the community thinks about platforms and whether they stay true to their advertised promises.
• Blogs and help centers to check if there are any helpful step-by-step tutorials that can help you set up an infrastructure and start sending emails.

Hands-on testing

Once I was done with the extensive documentation research, I verified my sending domains and:

• Sent transactional emails since they’re the heart of every email campaign and pretty much mandatory for most businesses nowadays.
• Launched email campaigns to see how well I could promote my product and keep in touch with my users. I’ve also played around with contact management.
• Tried out email template design tools and personalized my messages as much as I could, testing templating logic and dynamic content along the way.

In the following section, we’ll start with the reviews of each email infrastructure platform. However, if you’re interested in checking out the criteria I used in detail, click here.

Best email infrastructure provider: Mailtrap

G2: 4.8 🌟 Capterra: 4.8 🌟

Mailtrap is an email platform for developer and product teams that offers high inboxing rates, fast email delivery, and 24/7 expert support. It’s best for digital product companies that need to send transactional and bulk emails at scale.

To achieve high inboxing rates, Mailtrap uses separate sending streams for transactional and bulk emails, dedicated IPs, email warm-up, throttling, and other features. 

Most importantly, you’ll see high rates regardless of the plan, since they’re there by design.

Recently, Mailtrap has gone a step further and conducted deliverability tests with the top email infrastructure platforms. We’ve used free plans, didn’t warm up domains, sent the same email template, and covered a few other technical tidbits to make the tests 100% fair. Here’s how Mailtrap performed: 

However, sending emails without knowing where they are landing would be like shooting in the dark, wouldn’t it? That’s why Mailtrap has helicopter view dashboards and drill-down reports, with which you can track important email metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, etc.

See a discrepancy in your email metrics or simply want to improve their performance? You can do so with the help of Mailtrap’s expert consultants, who can help you with any potential issues or simply give you a hand with email deliverability optimization. Of course, there’s also Mailtrap’s customer support team that works around the clock, which you can reach via tickets or live chat.

Key features:

• Strong deliverability features
• Fast email delivery
• Industry-best analytics
• Safe and fast scaling
• 24/7 expert support
• GDPR compliant
• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified
• Advanced webhooks
• Email marketing suite
• Comprehensive API documentation
• Integration to MCP servers via Claude, Cursor, or VSC code editor.

Pricing

To help you scale efficiently (and affordably), Mailtrap offers several straightforward pricing plans, along with a slider that lets you choose your monthly email sending volume. Here’s a quick summary table:

For more details, please consult the official Mailtrap pricing page.

Developer experience

Official API documentation

Mailtrap offers easy-to-use SDKs for Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Python, Elixir, and Java.

If you’re a developer, you’ll appreciate Mailtrap for its straightforward approach to email sending. Namely, to start using the platform, all you need to do is verify your domain and copy/paste the pre-made code snippet of the programming language or framework you’re using.

For instance, if you want to send emails with Flask, a popular Python framework, you could just use this pre-made snippet and insert your credentials, simple as that:

app.config['MAIL_SERVER']='live.smtp.mailtrap.io'
app.config['MAIL_PORT'] = 587
app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'] = 'api'
app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'] = '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>'
app.config['MAIL_USE_TLS'] = True
app.config['MAIL_USE_SSL'] = False

Moreover, if you ever get stuck or lost in the process, Mailtrap has a comprehensive knowledge base with a plethora of step-by-step articles, as well as a blog, and, wait for it, even a YouTube channel. For example, if you want to add sending functionality for Python applications, here’s a dedicated tutorial you could follow.

Security & compliance

Mailtrap checks a lot of boxes when it comes to email security & compliance, from super solid email authentication to GDPR compliance. Additionally, it is ISO certified, while SOC 2 certification is on the way. 

Testimonials

When it comes to user testimonials, I am happy to see that Mailtrap gets a lot of love on the web. It’s praised for deliverability, separate sending streams, and working well at scale.

Another user, a developer, says Mailtrap’s analytics help him notice delivery issues quickly and that the platform delivers as expected. 

SendGrid

G2: 4.0 🌟 Capterra: 4.2 🌟 Trustpilot: 1.1 🌟

SendGrid by Twilio is a communication platform for transactional and marketing email sending. It offers an email API and SMTP relay for developers, whereas marketers can use its campaign builder to launch campaigns.

It’s a solid choice for teams that need a scalable email delivery service with a lot of quality-of-life features.

By quality-of-life features, I mean automatic IP warm-up and throttling, ready-made code snippets, engagement quality API, and a few others. Although these aren’t mandatory by any means, they can be quite useful for email infrastructure optimization.

Moving on, another notable SendGrid feature is its deliverability insights dashboard, where you can track the most important deliverability metrics, such as delivered, bounced, opens, etc. You can also see what’s causing your emails to bounce, track deliverability trends, filter metrics by top mailbox providers, and more.

Speaking of mailbox providers, I must note that SendGrid had mixed deliverability test results when it comes to providers like Yahoo, Outlook, and AOL.

Key features:

• Solid analytics
• High sending throughput
• Granular user control
• Email validation API
• Onboarding assistance
• SMS support via Twilio
• CRM support
• Pre-warmed up, geo-specific IPs

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, SendGrid doesn’t beat around the bush. Namely, it has two pricing tiers with a custom one for enterprise users, along with a slider for selecting your desired email volume. 

Although I don’t like the fact that the free plan only lasts for 30 days and that costs do ramp up if you want to send more than 100,000 emails/month or use dedicated IPs. Moreover, if you want to send email marketing campaigns, you need to pay for a separate pricing plan.

For more details, please consult the official SendGrid pricing page.

Developer experience

Official API documentation

SendGrid supports C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

The platform has made sure that the onboarding process is as smooth as possible, providing everything from guides on setting up your email infrastructure to an extensive API documentation. Similarly to Mailtrap, SendGrid also offers pre-made snippets for easier sending.

Lastly, in case you get stuck or if you’re facing an issue, you can contact SendGrid’s customer support via ticket, chat, or phone. However, its availability is a bit limited to different pricing tiers, and I’ve seen some concerning remarks about it.

Security & compliance

One of the security features that stood out to me with SendGrid is its IP Access Management, which lets you control who can access your account based on their IP address. As for compliance, it passes pretty much all checks.

Testimonials

While scouring the web for online user testimonials for SendGrid, I’ve noticed that people are generally satisfied with how easy it is to integrate and its validation functionality. However, some users think you need experience setting up DNS records to complete the email infrastructure configuration.

Other users think SendGrid’s email API is one of the most reliable out there and claim that the platform reduced their bounce rates, although they’re not satisfied with the pricing.

Mailgun

G2: 4.2 🌟 Capterra: 4.3 🌟Trustpilot: 4.1 🌟

Mailgun is a transactional email service that provides an SMTP and email API, with an infrastructure that’s, according to its creators, ‘designed for developers, by developers.’ 

Due to its technical nature, it’s specifically suited for developer teams who need detailed email logs, a validation API, and extra features to tweak their infrastructure.

More specifically, Mailgun keeps your email logs for up to 30 days, and you can filter them by event types, list name, tag names, and some other categories. This specificity works like a charm for tracking down exactly where your emails went, where they landed, and everything that happened in between.

Additionally, Mailgun has an email validation API, which you can use to perform everything from basic syntax checks to cross-reference your email list against Mailgun’s huge database of addresses (450 billion, to be more specific).

When it comes to sending emails, Mailgun offers Rapid Fire Delivery SLA for its end-tier users and high-volume senders. It promises reliable sending of up to 15,000,000 emails per hour and swift delivery.

As for deliverability, Mailgun is as solid as they come, although it sent a significant portion of emails to spam in our tests. So, you be the judge.

Key features:

• EU and US data centers
• Scalable infrastructure
• Email validation
• Onboarding support
• Inbound email support
• Solid compliance
• Robust documentation
• Developer-friendly email infrastructure tools

Pricing

Mailgun has a solid free plan that lets you send 100 emails per day, with the paid plans starting from $15. One of the few downsides that I must mention is that the logs are kept for quite a short time if you don’t use its most expensive plan, and that dedicated IPs cost $59 per month.

For more details, please consult the official Mailgun pricing page.

Developer experience

Official API documentation

Mailgun supports Python, Go, Node.js, PHP, Java, and Ruby.

Regardless of whether you want to send or validate emails, the documentation is geared towards developers more so than the average Joe, with scripts, error logs, and whatnot.

The platform also offers pre-made code snippets for various programming languages, although they are not as detailed as the scripts other platforms offer. Nonetheless, they still get the job done. 

Security & compliance

After researching its compliance and security documentation, I think it’s safe to say that Mailgun is quite a secure email infrastructure platform. 

Testimonials

Mailgun is one of the few email infrastructure platforms that actually has mostly positive reviews on Trustpilot, which is a ratings website notorious for negative comments. Most users there praise Mailgun for its reliable customer support, like Jessica in the screenshot below:

The situation was similar on other review websites, with users praising the platform’s straightforward integration and email sending reliability. However, I’ve noticed some users also agree with me on the lack of example code.

Amazon SES

G2: 4.3 🌟Capterra: 4.7 🌟Trustpilot: 2.3 🌟

Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a cloud-based email service provider that’s anything but simple. Nonetheless, it’s a reliable solution for experienced developers who are already deep in the AWS ecosystem, since it uses the AWS Global Infrastructure.

If you or your dev team are tech-savvy, you can configure Amazon SES in a lot of ways to fit your sending needs. You can configure your IPs, encryption, event archiving, and a plethora of other things.

Besides offering a highly configurable email infrastructure, another benefit of Amazon SES is that it can be integrated with many AWS services. These include Lambda for executing backend logic on email events, CloudWatch for monitoring metrics, SNS for sending notifications, S3 for storing email content, and the list goes on.

One more thing you can fine-tune with Amazon SES is permissions, which can be adjusted based on users, roles, or systems. This means you can manage your API key authentication and management, separate access for different clients and environments, etc.

And if you’re interested in how Amazon SES performs in terms of deliverability, here are the numbers it reached in our tests:

Moving on from configuration and fine-tuning, it’s also important to note that new Amazon SES accounts start with a high default sending quota. That is, 50,000+ messages per day, to be more precise. Of course, this number can be scaled at your request if it’s not enough for your sending needs.

Key features:

• Highly configurable infrastructure
• Integration with the AWS ecosystem
• Secure and compliant
• Strong and reputable IPs
• Solid webhooks
• A/B testing
• Supports data residency for EU, US, and Asia
• Super affordable and budget-friendly

Pricing

As you might have noticed, I didn’t include a table for the Amazon SES pricing section since the platform doesn’t have tiers or anything of the sort.

Instead, Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, with the following prices:

• 1,000 emails = $0.10
• 10,000 emails = $1
• 100,000 emails = $10

As for the free plan, you get 3,000 emails per month during the first year after you start using SES. And if you’re using Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you get the first 62,000 emails for free.

For more details, please consult the official Amazon SES pricing page.

Developer experience

Official API documentation

Amazon SES has official libraries for Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Go.

As I have already mentioned, Amazon SES is a great choice for experienced developers who are already in the AWS ecosystem. This is mainly because the UI doesn’t hold your hand, although the documentation really is extensive and has everything you need.

For instance, just check out the main account dashboard. It doesn’t look like your typical email delivery platform, does it?

Similar to Mailgun, I must say that Amazon SES lacks some pre-made code snippets for SMTP integrations, although there are many scripts for setting up its SDKs.

Lastly, setting it up also requires you to take a few extra steps than you usually would. You need to move out of the SES sandbox, create IAM credentials, configure permissions, all on top of verifying your sending domain. So, you be the judge whether this is worth the extra bucks you save thanks to its affordable pricing model.

Security & compliance

Since it’s a part of the Amazon infrastructure, you could already have guessed that Amazon SES has nailed down its security and compliance.

Testimonials

Whether you browse through social media pages or review websites, you’ll see that Amazon SES is often praised for its prices. But, you can also find as many comments on how its services are not friendly to use.

Additionally, I have noticed that people aren’t at all satisfied with the Amazon SES customer support team, which is a shared trait of all things AWS.

Postmark

G2: 4.6 🌟Capterra: 4.9 🌟Trustpilot: 2.1 🌟

Postmark is an email platform catered towards developers who want to send transactional emails. It’s best for teams who are looking for a minimalistic solution, configurable infrastructure, and no extra features.

Namely, Postmark’s API is highly configurable, giving you room to either simplify sending transactional emails or play with your email infrastructure. It supports batching of up to 500 messages per batch, uses Mustachio templates, and you can also connect webhooks for key events like deliveries and opens.

Besides sending emails, you can also use Postmark’s email API to configure inbound servers, parse incoming email, handle inbound email, and more.

Another one of Postmark’s standout features is its separate sending streams. They function like the one provided by Mailtrap, except they can also be configured for custom email types. For example, you can send verification emails through one stream and invoices via another. All of this goes towards improving your chances of landing in the main inboxes.

Another feature that makes Postmark stand out from the rest of the competition are email logs, which are not only detailed, but are also kept for up to 45 days. And no, it doesn’t depend on your pricing plan, you actually get detailed email logs for this long on all plans. However, you can pay to keep logs for up to 365 days, which can be handy if you plan on conducting audits.

Key features:

• Minimalistic interface
• Fast email delivery
• Separate sending streams
• Inbound processing
• Developer-friendly
• Email logs for up to 45 days
• Transparent deliverability status
• Extensive documentation
• Offers MCP agents

Pricing

Although many people say that Postmark’s pricing has gone up since it was acquired by ActiveCampaign, I’d say that it still has an affordable and generous model. For instance, you get 5 domains, 15 streams, and 45 days of email logs even on the basic plan.

However, it has a few add-ons, such as dedicated IPs, which cost $50/month and for which you need to be sending 300,000 emails per month or more. You can also pay for custom activity retention and DMARC monitoring, which are not needed but are appreciated. 

For more details, please consult the official Postmark pricing page.

Developer experience

Jump to: Official API documentation

Postmark has official libraries for Ruby, RoR, .NET, Java, PHP, and Node.js.

As you’ll notice after spending only a few minutes in the Postmark dashboard, you’ll notice that this email infrastructure platform is super intuitive to use, especially if you’re a developer. You’ve got everything you need to start sending emails laid out for you, and the setup is super simple.

API documentation is clear and has code snippets you can use to configure the service, either via its email API and SMTP service.

Security & compliance

Postmark is a secure email infrastructure platform, although I should note that it has servers in the US and doesn’t have HIPAA certification.

Testimonials

Besides Postmark’s customers page, I checked out what review websites have to say about the platform. Most users praise the platform for its deliverability and straightforward interface, although there are some who don’t like its pricing model.

Postmark’s email API also gets a lot of praise, as well as its ability to send transactional emails. However, I’ve noticed a few negative comments about its customer support, which makes sense since it can only be reached via tickets.

Email infrastructure services comparison criteria

In the following section, I’ll describe the criteria I used to find the best email infrastructure services on the market.

Email deliverability & performance

To help their users reach the best deliverability rates, providers typically use a combination of dedicated IPs, proper warmup protocols, and more. Additionally, for optimal performance, most infrastructures nowadays are cloud-based.

Also, speaking of deliverability, I must note that there’s a noticeable discrepancy in rates between different providers. To paint you a better picture, here are the results from the recent deliverability tests we conducted over at Mailtrap:

Note: To make sure the tests were fair to everyone, we used free plans, shared IPs, and identical email templates for all providers. For more information on our testing methodology, be sure to check out our deliverability comparison guide.

Scalability & throughput handling

Scalability refers to how well an email infrastructure provider is able to allow you to increase your business’s sending volume without facing any bottlenecks or deliverability issues.

For example, if you want to increase your sending throughput from 50k emails/month to 150k, you should be able to do it without any increases in bounces, spam rates, etc.

So, a provider should give you some control over their infrastructure, in terms of queuing, and especially throttling, which lets you limit how many emails you can send per second or minute. All of this goes a long way in avoiding spam filters and sending emails with peace of mind.

Reliability & uptime guarantees

Although every email infrastructure promises reliability, to ensure there are no loose bolts, I’ve checked documentation for data on datacenter distribution, backup mechanisms, load balancing, and database replication.

Moreover, I’ve visited status pages with real-time uptime metrics, like this one, for example, and service-level agreements (SLAs), if there were any. This way, I was able to get a better idea of whether a provider is actually reliable or not.

Deliverability analytics & monitoring

Although not all, most transactional emails need to land in your recipients’ inboxes in order to move them down the funnel. For example, a new user registers at your website and needs to verify their email before continuing to shop. If the verification email misses their inbox, they might give up trying to register and ditch the shopping.

Not to mention all of the latest email marketing laws and regulations imposed by the most popular inbox providers.

That’s why it’s super important to monitor your key email deliverability performance metrics. These include delivered rate, bounce rate, spam complaints, and body. And every serious email infrastructure provider will provide you with advanced analytics, including a dashboard or two, where you can track your metrics.

Dedicated IP & IP pools

A feature that goes a long way, especially if you’re a high-volume sender, is having dedicated IPs. Compared to shared IPs, dedicated ones are used solely by one sender and give you complete control over your sending.

Most email infrastructure platforms include them in mid-to-end tier plans, although some also offer them as separate add-ons, which I’ll be sure to mention in the article.

Some providers also offer separate sending streams, which allow you to send transactional messages at the same time as marketing emails without your deliverability and sender reputation taking a hit. However, there’s a big difference between a separate sending infrastructure that consists of IP pooling and dedicated IPs, and a true separate stream. 

Here’s an overview of what each email infrastructure provider on this list offers in terms of separate sending streams:

Pricing comparison

Pricing-wise, I have made sure not to include any platforms on this list that have hidden costs and auto-charges. What I mean by this is that many email providers charge you automatically when you go over their contact or sending limits.

Additionally, I have checked whether important features like dedicated IPs and email templates are available to all plans or they’re reserved to premium tiers or as add-ons.

And if you’re interested in the sending costs for each platform on this list, here’s a quick summary:

Transactional email sending

Every email infrastructure platform needs to provide the tools for reliable sending of user-triggered, or transactional, emails. This is especially true if you’re a high-volume email sender.

SMTP & email API

One of the first must-haves for any developer-friendly email infrastructure is an SMTP service with pre-written code snippets for popular programming languages and frameworks. You can simply copy/paste these into your configuration and start sending emails right away.

The provider should also offer a regularly maintained and updated email API that supports major SDKs like Go, Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, etc. These allow you to integrate the infrastructure into your app without spending too much time on it.

Webhooks

Webhooks are the bread and butter for any dev who is serious about their sending configuration. They let you track events in real time, get delivery status notifications, handle spam and bounced messages, and more.

However, not every email infrastructure provider offers the same range of webhook events or has fast error handling.

MCP server

As you might already know, MCP servers are the new kids on the AI block, helping developers send code-free emails using their favorite robot helpers or editors.

Now, I’m not saying every email infrastructure platform must offer MCPs, but let’s face it: they are a nice quality-of-life feature that can make your life easier.

For example, platforms like Mailtrap and Postmark offer MCP servers, which you can hook up to your IDE. Then, you can test your emails locally and then send them when you’re ready, which is a nice way to smooth out your production process.

Transactional emails performance analytics

Previously in the article, I mentioned deliverability analytics and monitoring of the most important email marketing metrics. But what if you want to know details like the status of your sent emails, when it was delivered, to which inbox they went, etc?

For this, email infrastructure platforms usually have email logs, which typically range from 15 to 60 days of retention, depending on the plan you choose. So, I’ll make sure to point out how long you get to keep your emails with each provider on the list, and a few other important details.

And, here’s another table that summarizes email log retention for each of the providers:

Marketing email sending

If you want to send marketing emails on top of transactional messages, an email infrastructure provider should ensure high deliverability for targeted marketing campaigns, as well as provide you the tools you need to send targeted campaigns.

Campaign management

Although you can technically send email marketing campaigns via an email API, let’s be honest: it’s not the most optimal way to go about it. That’s why most platforms offer a UI with a campaign wizard that guides you through content creation, list uploading, scheduling, etc.

Contacts management 

Contact management via an API is a whole different story since you want a convenient way to collect your sign-ups and turn them into contacts in your email list. Some providers offer contact APIs, like this one, for instance.

With these, you can set up automatic collection of new sign-ups, without having to enter them manually.

Workflow automation & triggers

Whether you’re sending strictly transactional or marketing emails, you need automations to provide a smooth customer experience, move your users down your funnel, or even clean up your list. 

For instance, you can set up an automated follow-up for new sign-ups or send an email whenever someone leaves their cart full without making a purchase.

Some platforms have dedicated workflow builders for this, while others use API triggers to do this. So, a different cup of tea for everyone. 🍵

Campaign optimization

To optimize your email campaigns and see what works best and resonates with your audience, you need to perform A/B testing. This includes testing your subject lines, headings, buttons, etc. 

Email editor & email templates

Nowadays, email infrastructure platforms typically offer some of the following tools to help you create email content:

• Email template features – Templates save you a lot of time, either by giving you a preset for your design or a full-fledged design you can customize according to your liking. However, it’s pretty much the golden standard nowadays to have dynamic templates, which can be personalized for your recipients.
• Drag-and-drop editors – Feeling creative? Use email builders with top design tools to make your ideas come to life by simply dragging and dropping them on the empty canvas. 
• HTML editors – If you’re old school and want to create HTML templates manually, pretty much every platform out there offers an HTML editor. Basically, code on the left – design on the right. Some platforms also let you host your templates and then reference them later via API in production.

Marketing emails performance analytics

Tracking the performance of your marketing emails is equally important as it is for transactional emails. You simply need to be able to see how many of your emails have been delivered, how many have received spam complaints, and how your audience is reacting to them in general.

For this, you can set up custom webhook events or track them via email APIs, but the industry-standard is a dashboard with all of the most important stats presented via graphs or charts. Here’s how we do it over at Mailtrap, for instance:

Security & compliance

Domain authentication & sender reputation

Most inbox providers, like Gmail and Yahoo, require proper domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) for bulk senders. If you don’t have it set up, they have the right to send your emails to the spam folder or even block them altogether.

So, ideally, you’re looking for an email infrastructure platform that ticks all authentication boxes and ensures your sender reputation stays intact.

Data encryption & transmission security

TLS / STARTTLS encryption, event logging, and token-based authentication — these are only some of the security standards providers use to keep your data safe. And here’s a summary of what the platforms in this article use:

P.S. Click here to find out how different providers handle their security.

Compliance certification

A compliance-ready infrastructure is what most providers need to offer nowadays. This means having certification for SOC 2 and supporting GDPR, amongst other things. 

Now, it’s time for another table, this one summarizing the compliance of each email infrastructure provider: 

P.P.S. Interested in learning more about compliance amongst providers? If so, check out our dedicated article.

Onboarding, UX & support

Support

Sometimes, things don’t always go according to plan, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of sending-functionality code, integrating an API, and similar. That’s why every email infrastructure platform should have dedicated support for agencies in case they get stuck.

Some platforms offer chat support and SLA-backed support, while you can reach others via phone or a ticketing system. Therefore, here’s what you can expect regarding customer support from each platform on this list:

Note: The support type and availability mostly depend on the pricing plan you choose. For example, Mailtrap has 24/7 customer support via tickets available to all users, even on the free plan, whereas you need to be a paying user to get support from Mailgun.

Documentation & developer guides

If you want to make your developer team’s lives easier, choose an email infrastructure platform that provides robust documentation with guides they can use for adding sending functionality.

For instance, Mailtrap has prepared for its developers an extensive knowledge base and API documentation where they can find anything they’re looking for: from domain authentication to adding webhooks. Additionally, there’s the Mailtrap blog and even a YouTube channel with dev guides.

Also, many platforms, not only Mailtrap, provide developers with ready-made integrations. These are snippets you can simply copy/paste into your app/project code and start sending in a minute. This goes a long way toward improving user experience, right?

For your convenience, here are the links to each provider’s developer guides. Feel free to compare them and find the one that suits you and your team best:

Support & developer community

For this section of the article, I asked myself the following questions:

• Does the platform provide any official SDKs for easy integration?
• Are there any libraries maintained by the community?
• Has the platform been covered on Stack Overflow or any community forums?
• Does the platform have well-maintained GitHub repositories?

Any email infrastructure platform that didn’t pass these questions didn’t make it to this list. 

And if you’re interested in automating your email sending process by connecting it to a platform’s email API, here are the supported SDKs by each platform:

Customer feedback & reputation

Researching how each of these email infrastructure providers has been received on social media and ratings platforms has probably been the most fun part of writing this article. I’ve seen everything, from community backlashes on X to well-deserved praise on Capterra.

I’ve also read some case studies where I could get a glimpse of how a certain platform helped a specific business reach its goals.

All of this allowed me to see what the general opinion of each of the provider’s user base is and to bring you a non-biased review. With that said, here are the ratings from the most popular review platforms, with their overall rating combined:

Wrapping up

Hopefully, I’ve made it a bit easier for you to choose the best email infrastructure platform for your business/team.

Just remember: not every solution will work the same for everyone. Choose wisely and based on your team’s requirements and needs. Focus on finding good deliverability, scalability, developer-friendly APIs, and the key tools you need to send both transactional and marketing emails.

To sum it up, here are the top providers by use case:

• Mailtrap for sending high-volume emails
• SendGrid for scalable delivery
• Mailgun for experienced developer teams
• Amazon SES for teams using AWS
• Postmark for minimalistic transactional email sending

FAQ

What is email infrastructure?

Email infrastructure is a combination of software and hardware components, such as mail servers, mail transfer agents (MTAs), and IP addresses, that work together behind the scenes to send emails when you press the send button.

What is an email infrastructure provider?

An email infrastructure provider is a service that offers the set of tools you need to send and manage your emails. This way, you can send transactional and marketing messages without having to build an email infrastructure yourself.

What is the best email infrastructure provider?

Although every business has different requirements for its email infrastructure, there is no best email infrastructure provider. However, Mailtrap is an email platform that provides a flexible email infrastructure that can fit most teams, especially those who are looking for high inboxing rates, fast email delivery, and 24/7 expert support.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What data you should collect
• How to collect it legally
• How to use it to improve segmentation, personalization, and automation

Without much ado, let’s start with the basics.

What is data-driven email marketing?

Data-driven email marketing is the practice of using real customer insights (data points) to shape every aspect of your campaign. This includes subject lines, send times, sales, and everything in between. So, it’s not a type of email marketing, but a strategic choice to inform all your campaigns.

You rely on numbers and percentages to define how people interact with your emails, what they click, when they engage, and even what they ignore. Every customer action becomes a clue to what they want, helping you make smarter, evidence-backed decisions.

For example, if a particular age group tends to open your emails on Thursday mornings, send them at the given time. Similarly, if a subscriber keeps clicking product recommendations but skips your newsletters, maybe it’s time to switch up the content you’re sending them.

The goal of data-driven email marketing is to provide customers exactly what they want at precisely the right time.

Importance of data-driven email marketing

According to HubSpot’s 2025 Marketing Industry Trends Report, 31% of marketers say data-driven strategies primarily help them understand campaign effectiveness.

But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Data plays a role in every step of your email strategy. It helps with everything from audience segmentation and personalization to something as granular as optimizing send times and measuring success.

Here’s why it matters so much.

Provides valuable customer insights

First rule of email marketing? Know who you are talking to.

Every open, click, scroll, and purchase tells you what the customers care about (and what they don’t). Tools like Google Analytics or your ESP’s built-in tracking help capture and interpret these signals.

If someone opens your email but doesn’t click, your subject line probably did its job, but your content or call-to-action fell flat.

If they haven’t opened the last five emails? Well, they’re either bored or busy, and that means you can start sending them re-engagement emails instead.

Over time, this data gives you a clearer picture of who your audience is, what captures their attention, and how to communicate with them effectively.

Helps you build better campaigns

According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization 2021 Report, 71% of customers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when brands don’t deliver that.

Can you blame them? A generic email saying, “Hey there! Check out our new arrivals,” often rings “Hey, we’d like to take your money, but we don’t care.”

However, with a data-driven, personalized email saying, “Hey Erin! Noticed your team’s been exploring workflow automation. Our latest update helps you automate approvals 2x faster. Want a quick walkthrough?” you’re making headways. 

Simply,  the first one feels like a broadcast, and the second feels like a proper service. The better you know your customers, the more targeted your campaigns and messaging will be.

Here’s a post by Kath Pay, Founder of Holistic Email Academy, where she talks about how best practices are not enough to guide your email strategies.

And I agree. Email marketing trends and best practices are great starting points, but your target audience is unique. Only the data can tell you what the best practices are for the audience’s preferences.

Improves deliverability and sender reputation

Inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook pay attention to how people interact with your emails. If your campaigns consistently earn clicks and low unsubscribe rates, it tells them you are a sender worth trusting. This improves your chances of landing in the primary inbox instead of spam or the promotions tab.

That kind of performance is a result of tracking email marketing metrics like opens, bounces, and click rates, and optimizing accordingly.

Similarly, sending irrelevant or poorly timed emails can damage engagement and your sender reputation, not just for one campaign, but across the board.

Improves customer loyalty

Selling is just the start. You want customers who stick around and advocate for your brand. And that means engaging them after a purchase, too.

You can’t send the same message to a new subscriber and someone deep into the email marketing funnel. The right data helps you segment your list, tailor content for each stage of the customer journey, and make every message feel relevant.

Let’s look at one of the best examples of a data-driven campaign that keeps users hooked.

Every December, there’s a recurring trend all over social media: The Spotify Wrapped. You get to see your top artists, the number of hours you spent listening to music, and maybe a personalized video from your favorite artist.

Everyone shares it. Everyone looks forward to it. That is a data-driven campaign done right.

Helps with resource management

Email marketing relies heavily on experimentation and A/B testing different strategies, which can become expensive, particularly when you factor in the human resources. 

Do it without data, and you’re just guessing what to experiment with. A risky business, to say the least.

Therefore, instead of spreading email marketing efforts evenly across all campaigns, use data to prioritize high-impact messages and formats. This helps you make smarter use of marketing budgets, creative resources, and team bandwidth, which increases the chances of a higher ROI.

How to collect data for email marketing campaigns

Collect data across multiple touchpoints. This could include tracking browse behavior on your website, purchase history from your store, and engagement metrics from your email..

Why does that matter? 

Because email is just one part of your larger digital marketing strategy. Each channel influences the other, so having the full picture leads to smarter, more effective decisions.

However, don’t forget that one of the challenges of email marketing is navigating legal implications at every step. And data collection, storage, and management are at the core of this challenge..

Let’s break down the smart (and compliant) way to collect data.

Compliance

Is sending emails to your customers illegal? No, but there is a line you don’t cross.

You can send marketing emails to your customers as long as you comply with the email marketing laws of each country you have customers in. I know that seems overwhelming, but hang on. I’ll also walk you through ways to avoid penalties.

First, let’s look at the four main email marketing laws related to data collection.

1. CAN-SPAM Act (USA)

This act doesn’t require you to have prior consent to send emails. However, you do need to follow a basic code of conduct, like using honest subject lines, making it easy to unsubscribe, and including a valid postal address. The law also holds you accountable for emails sent on your behalf by third parties (like agencies or automation platforms).

Violations can cost up to $53,088 per email. So, if you mass email 1,000 contacts without proper disclosures…well, you get the picture.

2. GDPR (European Union)

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives EU citizens control over their data, like their browsing behavior, IP addresses, preferences, and purchase history. They can also control how their data is collected, stored, and used.

If you’re sending emails to anyone in the EU, even just one subscriber, GDPR applies. The penalties go up to €20 million or 4% of your global annual turnover, whichever is higher. In short, they don’t play around, so follow the law to the T.

3. CCPA (California)

Californians have the right to know what personal data is collected, why, and who has access to it. They also have the option to opt out or request deletion.

While it is similar to GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) only applies to businesses that meet certain thresholds (e.g., $25M+ revenue or 100,000+ users’ data).

You have 30 days to tackle the issue before facing a $2,500 fine, or $7,500 if intentional.

4. HIPAA (USA)

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applies to healthcare providers, insurance companies, and any business handling electronic medical records.

HIPAA categorizes compliance violations by intent and correction. Fines range from $100 to $50,000 per violation, with repeat offenders potentially seeing up to $250,000 penalties.

But this is just the financial damage (not that it is not serious). These violations further damage your brand reputation and customer trust. Follow the best practices below to keep your emails within legal bounds.

• Build (don’t buy) your email list: Use subscription forms, gated content, and double opt-ins.
• Get explicit consent (even if it’s not mandatory): Keep records of how and when a user opted in. Your CRM or email marketing tool should help with this.
• Have a visible opt-out button: Don’t hide the ‘unsubscribe’ link. Better yet, offer email preference center.

• Honor opt-outs ASAP: The CAN-SPAM Act gives you 10 business days to process unsubscribes. Don’t procrastinate, automate instead. Most email marketing tools will handle this for you.
• Introduce yourself properly: Use a name familiar to the recipients. It can be a brand name or a personal name + brand name.  Add your contact information and logo in the footer so your email feels legit.
• Don’t clickbait with subject lines: ‘RE: Your Invoice’ might get opens, but it also attracts legal attention and unsubscribes. Keep subject lines honest, clear, and connected to the email content.
• Include your physical address and privacy policy: This is about trust. A real address and a link to your privacy policy help subscribers feel safe and also keep your emails out of spam folders.

Most email service providers (ESPs) provide built-in features for compliance, like double opt-in options, easy unsubscribe links, and data handling tools.

However, you are ultimately responsible for how you collect and use the data. They provide the tools, but you must implement the practices correctly. Always review their terms of service regarding data privacy.

Tools

The right stack helps you track behavior, segment smarter, and automate campaigns that convert. 

Let’s walk through the key tools that help.

Opt-in forms

As we discussed earlier, it’s best to get explicit consent from users before sending marketing emails. Opt-in forms are the most straightforward and legally compliant way to do this.

Create an effective opt-in form and ask only for necessary information. A name and email are usually enough. If you need more context (like job title or company size), capture it later through progressive profiling, behavior tracking, or surveys.

Avoid asking too much upfront. According to the 2023 IAPP Privacy and Consumer Trust Report, nearly 68% of consumers are somewhat or very concerned about their online privacy. 

This means they hesitate to share their information online and might share dummy emails instead.

But there is a way around it.

Avoid placing a form the moment someone lands on your website. That’s the equivalent of a salesperson trying to bill you the second you enter the store. Let users explore, build trust with valuable content, and then ask.

Instead, place your forms strategically. Here are a few places that work best:

• High-intent pages, like pricing pages, product comparison pages, or integration pages.
• Exit-intent popups to re-engage abandoning visitors.
• Blog footers to turn content consumers into subscribers.
• Slide-ins or sticky bars. They are less intrusive and effective.

Tip: Start with one placement and then A/B test email design, copy, and timing. But don’t overdo it. You don’t want to scare customers away by asking for information at every scroll.

Don’t forget to optimize for mobile. The latest 2025 projection from StatCounter shows that 64.35% of website traffic comes from mobiles.

Now, let’s talk about how to create opt-in forms.

Most email marketing platforms (like Mailchimp, Brevo, ConvertKit, etc.) come with built-in form builders or embeddable HTML snippets. These are perfect if you’re on a budget or just starting.

If you want granular targeting, design flexibility, and advanced triggers, tools like OptinMonster and ConvertBox offer more control. That said, some of these might not natively integrate with your CRM, so you may need Zapier or custom code to bridge gaps.

Finally, enable double opt-in. It sends a confirmation email after sign-up to verify the address and the user’s intent. It may slightly lower your subscriber count, but it improves list quality and engagement from day one.

Email marketing platforms

Email marketing platforms usually come with built-in analytics to track email open rates, click-throughs, bounces, unsubscribes, and basic engagement trends.

If you’re using email tools that come with a CRM layer like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho, you also get insights, such as lead scoring, lifecycle stages, and multi-touch attribution.

Most of these platforms integrate with Google Analytics, so you can access post-click behavior like how users navigate your site after clicking a link in an email.

And yes, I know,  it’s a bit more work to set up and integrate everything so the data flows smoothly across the sources. But after the initial setup, it’s mostly maintenance and tracking. 

Email analytics tools

While most email platforms come with basic tracking, standalone email analytics tools offer data-driven insights across multiple campaigns, channels, or tools.

The two kinds of tools that can help here are pre-send testing tools and post-send analytics tools.

Pre-send testing lets you inspect emails even before you send them, often using a fake SMTP server. You can check headers, validate content, and make sure the setup behaves exactly the way you want.

It’s especially handy during QA testing or when you’re debugging tricky templates. I’ve found it helpful in staging environments or when managing multiple ESPs, basically any time you want peace of mind before hitting send.

Also, there are post-send analytic tools that let you monitor inbox placement, analyze email heatmaps, and catch rendering issues across devices and clients.

These are useful when you manage high-volume sends or need to optimize every part of your email workflow.

Website analytics tools

Google Analytics is the go-to for tracking what happens after someone clicks your email. You can monitor page visits, bounce rate, time on site, conversions, and more. It gives you a clear view of how emails drive real business results.

If you’re using SMTP or tools like Amazon SES to send campaigns, GA is your best option. Just add UTM parameters to your links manually or through Google’s Campaign URL Builder, and track email performance in the Acquisition report. Segment by ‘email’ to isolate your campaign results.

GA4 also supports event-based tracking for deeper funnel analysis. You can even build custom dashboards to compare email traffic with other sources like search or social.

Data enrichment tools

Sometimes your email list just doesn’t have the full picture. That’s where data enrichment tools help.

Clay is a great option here. It pulls in missing info like job titles, company names, social links, and even intent signals from sources like LinkedIn, Clearbit, Apollo, and Hunter.

You can set it up to send this data straight to your CRM or email platform, and build simple, logic-based workflows without having to code anything.

This helps you understand who you’re reaching out to, segment better, personalize more, and ultimately send emails that make sense to the person reading them. It’s useful if you’re working with cold email leads or minimal form data.

Survey and feedback tools

You don’t always have to go digging for data. Sometimes, the best way to understand your subscribers is to just ask them. Survey and feedback tools help you collect direct input about your content, products, or overall customer experience directly from the subscribers.

Typeform is a solid pick for creating engaging, mobile-friendly surveys that don’t feel like a chore to fill out. Google Forms is also good if you want something free and fast. Other great options are Jotform and Tally. They give you plenty of templates and automation options to work with.

These tools also integrate with both CRMs and ESPs, so you’d have no trouble pulling that data in to refine email marketing strategy.

E-commerce platforms

If you’re running a D2C brand, the chosen e-commerce platform is where most of your customer data resides. Tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce help you manage products, orders, payments, and the respective data.

With the right setup, you can automate everything from welcome emails and post-purchase flows to abandoned cart nudges and product recommendations.

Most of these platforms support event tracking, dynamic content, and list syncing out of the box. However, features like advanced segmentation, A/B testing, or customer lifetime value analysis might need add-ons or third-party integrations.

Just make sure your store and ESP are tightly connected so that the data flows both ways. That ensures relevant and timely emails.

CRM systems

A CRM stores all your customer relationship history. It brings together contact info, sales activity, past email interactions, and customer notes in one place, all ready to be used for smarter marketing.

This helps you segment customers by where they are in their journey. You can target better, send emails at the best times, and tweak your messaging to fit their interests. Of course, they integrate with ESPs too.

Platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce give you built-in dashboards to track performance across sales and marketing. But you don’t need a big setup to start.

Numerous free or affordable tools do the job well. HubSpot’s free plan is a good place to start. It’s clean, reliable, and also connects with Mailchimp and Constant Contact. If you’re running a lean team, Zoho CRM or Freshsales work well and offer basic automation.

Examples of data sets

Email platforms and analytics tools provide various metrics. Here are the key data points that you should pay attention to.

Demographic data

This is basic user profile information like name, age, gender, location, language, income level, and occupation.

It’s useful for personalizing subject lines, segmenting by region, or targeting specific age groups.

Psychographic data

This is a more advanced dataset that covers interests, lifestyle, personality traits, values, and motivations. You can use it to tailor content to resonate emotionally.

Example: Sending eco-friendly product emails to environmentally conscious users.

Performance and deliverability data

This is the most important dataset to track because if you aren’t sure your emails reach your customers, every strategy is a shot in the dark. Here’s what it includes.

• Email deliverability rate: These are emails that reached primary inboxes. An excellent deliverability rate is 95% or higher, but anything above 85% is acceptable.
• Bounce rate: Emails that failed to deliver. Keep this under 2% to avoid being flagged as spammy.
• Sender reputation score: This rates IP addresses, and it shouldn’t go below 80%
• Spam complaint rate: This shows how many subscribers marked your emails as spam. Should be below 0.1%.

Engagement data

After deliverability, these are the data metrics you cannot ignore. They tell you how users interact with your emails:

• Open rate: The percentage of recipients who opened your email. According to Campaign Monster’s 2022 Email Marketing Benchmark’s Report, the average across all industries is about 21.5%, with top sectors like education and financial services reaching between 27% to 28%.
• Click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link. A healthy CTR in most industries is above 2%.
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR): This is the percentage of email openers who clicked on a link. The average range across industries in 2025 is 2.93% to 10.71%.
• Email reading time: Tracks whether your email was skimmed, glanced at, or read in full. It’s an auxiliary metric, often outside the scope of email providers. 
• Frequency of interaction: How often users engage with your emails over time (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Again, an auxiliary metric that doesn’t come out of the box. 
• Unsubscribe rate: Tells you if your content is turning people away. The industry average in 2025 is 0.08%.
• Revenue per email: Calculates the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign. And one more auxiliary metric, often calculated manually. 

Device and platform data

This tells you how and where users open emails:

• Device type: Reveals mobile vs. desktop usage and helps guide responsive design.
• Browser, email client, OS: Useful for spotting rendering challenges and ensuring cross-platform compatibility.
• Platform-specific open rates: Shows how different devices and clients impact the customer engagement rate.

Transactional data

Tracks the actual buying behavior of customers:

• Past purchases: What they’ve bought before.
• Average order value: How much they usually spend per order.
• Purchase frequency: How often they buy (monthly, seasonal, etc.).

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

An estimate of the total revenue you can expect from a customer over the long term. This helps you prioritize loyal and high-value audience segments for retention-focused campaigns.

Zero-party data

This is information that users voluntarily share with you over time, such as:

• Email preferences: Frequency, topics of interest.
• Birthday or special dates: For timely offers or greetings.
• Survey responses: Valuable for personalization.
• Product preferences: Shared through quizzes or sign-up forms.

How to use data in email marketing: strategies

I’m sure that by now, you’ve realized that there’s a lot of data to track. You also need to use the data to improve your strategies.

So, how do you do that?

According to Coupler.io’s 2024 research, most (55%) of the email professionals do their data analysis every week.

That is a solid habit, especially if you are a beginner in email marketing. But even with regular check-ins, the sheer volume of numbers can get overwhelming.

I don’t want you to get a brain freeze and decide to quit. The trick is to know which data to focus on at a particular time. To use the marketing lingo, you need to match the right insight to the right goal.

For instance, psychographic data isn’t relevant for re-engagement emails because the subscriber has already stopped interacting. Behavioral signals like last-click dates are far more useful here.

But if you’re personalizing content for active subscribers, knowing what they care about (psychographic data) would make all the difference.

Now, let’s see how to apply different data points across key email strategies.

For analytics

This is where you step back and assess how your email strategy has been performing so you can identify what is wrong and fix it. Check the curated guide on how to do it.

Deliverability and inbox placement

Email deliverability tells you whether your email successfully reached your subscriber’s inbox. Inbox placement refers to where exactly it landed, in primary, promotions, or spam.

Here’s how to use data for better deliverability and inbox placement.

• Clean your email list regularly. Keep a close eye on bounce rates and remove invalid or unengaged addresses. High bounce rates can damage your email sender’s reputation and worsen your deliverability and inbox placement.
• Monitor engagement across domains: Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook all have different filtering systems. Check domain-specific performance data to identify hidden deliverability issues.
• Track unsubscribe and spam complaint rates: Email feedback loops alert you when emails are marked as spam. If you notice more unsubscribes or complaints, revisit recipient targeting, adjust send frequency, and ensure your opt-in process is solid.
• Verify authentication protocols: If data shows frequent blocks or your emails being flagged as suspicious, ensure your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols are correctly set up and compliant. These are foundational elements of a healthy email infrastructure.
• Test your email: If you consistently see poor inbox placement, use Email Sandbox to test your emails before making them live. This simple step would reveal whether it’s your subject line, content, or send reputation that’s causing the problem.

Metrics monitoring

Once your emails land in the primary inbox, it’s time to track how they perform. Use these data to evaluate and refine your strategy:

• Track subject line performance: Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is also in the picture, club open rates with click-to-open rate to measure performance.
• Use click-through rates to evaluate content relevance: A low CTR usually signals weak CTAs or unengaging content. Try changing your offer, layout, or messaging one at a time so you can determine what works.
• Measure click-to-open rate for message effectiveness: This shows how compelling your content is after an open. A low CTOR means your email isn’t delivering on its promise.
• Check device and location insights: If most users open emails on mobile or in certain time zones, adapt your design and send time accordingly.

KPIs achievement

Your KPIs reflect the goals of your email strategy. Here’s how you can use data to stay on track and make smart adjustments when needed.

• Define the right KPIs: Align data metrics with the goals you want to achieve. If you’re aiming for more conversions, track post-click activity like purchases or downloads.
• Align KPIs with campaign type: Newsletters aim for engagement (opens, clicks), while promotional emails focus on conversions. Remember, your goal guides the metrics.
• Track performance over time: Use data trends to see if you’re improving or plateauing. A declining trend signals a need to revisit your strategy.
• Compare against benchmarks: Use industry or past campaign results to understand what ‘good’ looks like for you and set goals accordingly.
• Use attribution data: If your email is one of several touchpoints, look at assisted conversions or multi-touch attribution to assess its true impact.
• Set realistic targets: If your previous CTR was around 3%, don’t aim for 10% overnight. Use your historical data to set achievable goals and scale from there.

For campaign optimization

The goal of campaign optimization is to make every email better than the last. That’s only possible when you know what data to consider.

Check some ways you can use data to optimize your email campaigns.

Segmentation

Every subscriber is unique, and so should be your emails. Segmentation helps you group users by shared traits to send more relevant content.

You have many options when it comes to segmenting your list.

• Demographics: Use age, location, or language to tailor tone, timing, and offers. For example, send emails based on time zones, not one global email blast.
• User behavior: Track how users interact with your product or website. Someone exploring help docs or integrations may be evaluating a tool. This is the perfect time for onboarding tips or case studies.
• Purchase behavior: Consider plan type, renewal cycles, or feature usage. New users might need guidance, while loyal ones could get upsell offers or beta invites.
• Email engagement: Reward your most engaged users with exclusive offers or sneak peeks. For inactive users, trigger re-engagement sequences to win them back.
• Signup source of intent: Tailor campaigns based on where users signed up. A webinar lead expects different content than a pricing page visitor.

This is how you move from a spray-and-pray approach to giving customers exactly what they need in a particular customer journey stage.

Personalization

No, personalization doesn’t mean simply adding ‘Hi [First name].’ It is more about leveraging data to understand what your customer will need next and being proactive with it.

Here’s how you can personalize your emails based on the data you have:

• Match their journey stage: Use funnel data to understand if someone’s new, exploring, or ready to buy and customize emails accordingly.
• Speak their language: A CTO wants scalability, while a marketer looks for integrations and performance metrics. Send emails that directly solve their exact problems and maybe even offer something extra, like a gift card.
• Act on behavioral signals: Track metrics like pages visited, products viewed, or time on site to send contextual follow-ups.
• Time it right: Use open and click-through rates to send emails when users are most active, and reduce sends to low-engagers.
• Use AI to refine: Let AI pull insights from your past subject lines, CTAs, click behavior, or segment responses to optimize future sends. A/B test what resonates most.

Automation workflow

Not automating your emails is like owning a car but choosing to walk in the heat. Automation saves you time, yes. But more importantly, it uses data in real-time to ensure your message lands when it matters most.

This plays a significant role in nudging a subscriber toward a desired action.

Here’s how to use data to automate emails.

• Start with a trigger: Every workflow needs a reason to fire, like a signup, a download, or a cart abandonment. Use event data to define this.
• Map the journey, not just steps: Think beyond a welcome email. Consider what users need in 3 days, a week, or a month based on their behavior and drop-off points.
• Add logic with conditions: Use engagement metrics (opens, clicks, site visits) to branch flows. For example, if they clicked, send an offer. If not, resend with a new subject.
• Use delays intentionally: Base this upon behavior and average conversion times to add delays that feel natural, not robotic.
• Test and optimize flows: Monitor key metrics like CTRs and conversion rates at each step. Experiment with different subject lines and content to improve results.
• Don’t forget exits: Set clear exit conditions so users aren’t stuck in irrelevant loops once they convert, churn, or respond.

When in doubt, follow the data

This guide isn’t theory. It’s what I’ve used to lift open rates, improve conversions, and re-engage entire segments. If your emails aren’t driving results yet, it’s not because email is dead. It’s because your strategy isn’t smart enough, yet.

When you use data, your campaigns get sharper, and your growth becomes predictable, scalable, and repeatable.

And when things stall or feel unclear, go back to the data. It rarely lies.

Ready to implement data-driven email marketing?