Email delivery, integration and usage are important tools in modern business. When used correctly, email can be a potent form of marketing and also help boost customer retention and satisfaction. SMTP.com is a company that offers an extensive email delivery services. This includes transactional emails, reliable email delivery, and email API. In this SMTP.com review, we take a detailed look at what the company has to offer, and how you could benefit from their services.
In This SMTP Review…
SMTP.com Overview
SMTP.com offers reliable SMTP-based relay and email delivery services. This company has operated for over 22 years and has provided email services for over 100,000 businesses. They have offices in Canada, the USA, England, and the Ukraine.
Their main offering is the SMTP.com email delivery suite. This is essentially a one-stop-shop for all your email needs. This includes an email API that allows you to integrate SMTP.com with your business. It also includes support for transactional emails, and seamless email delivery. The SMTP.com email delivery suite could be considered somewhat similar to other email services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mailchimp Transactional Email, and Mailjet.
The service is suitable for all types of businesses including developers, marketers, and even startup businesses. They also have a flexible range of price plans that essentially scale depending on the size of your business, and your expected email output.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Easy to integrate with your existing business setup
- Generally easier to understand and use than services like Amazon SES
- Great security and data protection for inboxes and emails
- Have higher results for email deliveries and not hitting blacklists
Cons
- Some may find the price plans a little expensive for smaller businesses
- You could experience issues if you want to cancel the service
Features
- A robust API to integrate SMTP.com into your existing infrastructure
- Four different price plans to suit different business sizes
- Expert in-house customer support
- Reputation Defender
- Inbox placement management
SMTP.com Review
To give you a clear understanding of this email marketing and management solution, we have broken this SMTP.com review into different sections. This includes a general overview of it’s features, plus important sections like pricing, customer support, and the actual products.
Features
SMTP.com email delivery service has a decent range of features. We have listed some of the main ones below:
- Email Relay API
- Detailed reporting and analysis of emails
- Migration service to move your operations from an existing provider
- Templates for common transactional emails
- Account managers to help monitor daily email operations
- Support for transactional emails
- 98% delivery rate and 99.99% uptime
The delivery rate and uptime are incredibly important. With a 98% delivery rate, you can expect virtually no emails being bounced-back, or rejected to recipients spam folders. Also the 99.99% uptime means that you should always be able to access your inboxes and manage your email solutions.
The reputation defender is also an important feature. This service runs in the background and actively vetts bad emails and prevents them from being sent. If an email has the potential to be rejected or damage your reputation (for example by being marked as spam), the reputation defender will stop it from ever being sent.
Pricing
SMTP.com has a relatively simple price structure that is split into four different plants. You effectively pay a different amount based on your expected email volume. The current price plans are listed below:
- Essential: $25 per month
- Starter: $80 per month
- Growth: $300 per month
- Business: $500 per month
Essential
Small businesses and startups would most likely use the essential plan. This gives full access to the SMTP;com suite, and accommodates up to 50,000 emails per month. Other features include:
- Shared IP
- Email Relay API
- Reliable Expert Support
- Detailed Reporting
- Reputation Defender
- Access to all the SMTP.com tools
- 50,000 emails per month
Starter
The starter price plan is effectively exactly the same as the essential plan. The main difference is that it accommodates up to 100,000 emails per month and thus doubles your capacity. However, the comparative price jump is large – from $25 to $80 which some many find too expensive.
- Dedicated IP
- Email Relay API
- Reliable Expert Support
- Detailed Reporting
- Reputation Defender
- Access to all the SMTP.com tools
- 100,000 emails per month
Growth
Moving on we have the growth package. This again provides no additional features or utility. The difference is that it bumps your email allowance to 500,000 per month. The downside is that there is again a large bump in the price at $300 per month.
- Dedicated IP
- Email Relay API
- Reliable Expert Support
- Detailed Reporting
- Reputation Defender
- Access to all the SMTP tools
- 500,000 emails per month
Business
The last price plan is for large businesses with heavy email usage. It has the exact same features, but accommodates up to 1,000,000 per month.
- Dedicated IP
- Email Relay API
- Reliable Expert Support
- Detailed Reporting
- Reputation Defender
- Access to all the SMTP.com tools
- 1,000,000 emails per month
As you can see, the price plans don’t offer much in terms of varied features and improved utility. You are essentially paying more for more email traffic. Some businesses could find that large price increase too expensive, particularly for the starter price plan.
Transactional Email Support
Transactional emails are an type of email that facilitates a commercial transaction in some way. This includes things like order confirmations, order updates, subscription confirmations, and email invoices.
SMTP.com provides support and a full delivery platform so your business can easily create and send this type of email. This includes things like account creation emails, payment confirmations, and email platform notifications. This could be a great tool if you have an eCommerce business and want greater control/features for your order processes.
The SMTP.com support includes the initial triggering and sending of transactional emails. This has virtually no lag and emails should reach inboxes quickly. Also, SMTP.com has a great reputation for reliability and all emails are SSL encrypted for the best levels of data protection.
Other features of the transactional email support include the ability to send account related emails, shopping event notifications, billing notifications, and more.
Email API
If you want to integrated your business with an email relay solution, SMTP.com has their Email API. This API infrastructure is easy to use and can allow you to integrated with your business within 5 minutes.
On the SMTP.com website, you can find a complete API documentation. This explains how to integrate the API with your apps. It also explains how to use the service including sending emails and managing email accounts.
The email API is great if you want to use SMTP.com as part of your business but also control how it works, looks, and integrates with your other existing solutions and apps.
Delivery Services
SMTP.com offers a managed email delivery service. This allows you to greatly improve the effectiveness of your emails and look at increasing the potential revenue generated from emails. A managed email delivery service includes:
- Consultations from experts to improve email campaigns and delivery.
- A dedicated account manager who actively monitors your email setup.
- An initial migration service that will not disrupt your business operations.
- Transactional email templates optimized for all major mailboxes.
Essentially, if you want a robust email service, but don’t have the staff or time to dedicated to operating it, a managed email delivery service could be a good option from SMTP.com.
Customer Support
The customer support is great both on the SMTP.com website, and for SMTP.com customers. Via the website, you can use the live sales chat to talk to the sales team. This should only be used if you want to know more about the products and are considering subscribing to SMTP.com.
Customer support for paying customers is excellent. The support is all-human and in-house with no third-party support centres. You can gain support in various areas including initial integration, account management, and delivery consultants.
Whether you are experiencing problems, or want to get the best out of the platform, customer support is readily available either via a live chat or telephone service.
SMTP.com Review Summary
We hope you have benefited from this SMTP.com review. You should have a solid idea of what this company has to offer in terms of email delivery and management. For small businesses, the price plans could be a little expensive as the minimum cost is $25 per month.
However, for medium to large-sizes businesses, the plans scale well and offer decent value for money. If you are looking to boost the ROI from your emails, SMTP.com could be a good choice. Compared to services like Amazon SES, SMTP.com is generally easier to use, and offers excellent integration with your existing business infrastructure. The tools for transactionals are also great and can help boost the flow of information and effectiveness of your eCommerce transactions.
