Chances are if you are the kind of person who thinks you should be sending an email newsletter (or sends one as part of your business or non-profit work), you’ve likely heard of services like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Services like this make sure the marketing emails you send as a business are legal.
More Info: CAN-SPAM Act
That said for ‘big senders’ there is email software too like Aweber and Sendgrid. And having heard about Sendgrid (and our Mailchimp costs creeping up to almost $90 without much in the way of additional features), we decided to give Sendgrid a shot for our coworking spaces, which have two separate newsletters.
Experiment: Compare three months of data for the same two lists on Mailchimp and Sendgrid.
My questions were:
Does Sendgrid increase deliverability?
Does Sendgrid decrease bounce rate?
Does Sendgrid make links more clickable?
Now our test was not perfect. We did not try to duplicate the template/layout in Sendgrid that we have in Mailchimp. We did not duplicate content. We compared data for the same months but obviously one year apart, which means the list got bigger and a 5% bounce rate on a 400-person email list is different than a 100-person list.
While not perfect, we thought it was a worthwhile test.
Here are our results is here: https://www.canva.com/design/DAFGZvcx9Rs/leOUfhdAEtTGhTa820OQtw/view?utm_content=DAFGZvcx9Rs&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton
Right away, we’ll say we noticed the giant jump in bounce rate in June too.
https://www.capterra.com/p/204113/SendGrid/reviews/
https://www.softwareadvice.com/email-marketing/sendgrid-profile/reviews/
But overall, deliverability and bounce rate do seem slightly better in SendGrid.
Sendgrid’s price is also $20 a month for us, a noticeable savings month-to-month.
That said, it is not perfect. The interface is more programmer-y and takes some getting used to. You have to make the unsubscribe option work by enabling the option in the settings menu. The stats look like you trying your best in 1995 Microsoft Excel graphs (that said there are A LOT more stats in SendGrid). It will not let you make landing pages or payment forms or anything else. It just does the email thing well.
But the good news is if you want your email marketing software to be less bloated or in general are looking around at your options, there are more now than ever before. So run your own experiment and let us know how it goes!
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