Most people know the Twilio name in relation to the application programming interface (API) products it’s developed across a variety of technologies, including not just email and messaging, but also the Internet of Things (IoT), voice over IP (VoIP) , and video. That API portfolio is where SendGrid Marketing Campaigns (SendGrid) was born, but the company has since worked to turn the platform into a fully rounded email marketing tool.
SendGrid is designed for midsized companies looking to deliver email marketing campaigns at scale, since Twilio differentiates itself largely through its ability to handle very large email volumes. According to the company, Twilio SendGrid sent out 1 trillion emails in 2020, which Twilio claims is the largest volume of any cloud demand-side platforms (DSPs). Twilio anticipates increasing its email volume to 4 trillion in 2021, and says it’s currently delivering approximately 90 billion emails a month.
That volume is impressive, and it’s not present in several of our other email marketing contenders. That’s because SendGrid acts as a cloud-based SMTP (the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) provider in addition to its front-end email marketing tools. SMTP providers are high-volume email delivery services for which most other digital marketing tools require a third party, such as J2 Global’s own SMTP email relay.
The Advantage of an Integrated MTA
Email relay services allow you to send a huge number of emails without the cost and complexity of maintaining your own servers and wide-pipe internet connections. With this part of its service, Twilio SendGrid handles all the technical details for you, like infrastructure scaling, ISP outreach, real-time analytics, and especially reputation monitoring.
As part of its SMTP delivery service, Twilio houses its own Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs). With in-house, Twilio can manage MTA performance itself, instead of being beholden to another vendor. According to the company, this means less of the performance fluctuations that are possible with competing solutions, and it also means Twilio can provide customers with additional benefits, like an independent IP address, at its higher pricing tiers. This reduces the potential for getting lower reputation ratings because the address isn’t shared with other senders.
SendGrid’s MTAs provide other advantages, too, notably an additional layer of email expertise you can mine easily through a single professional services arm rather than across two providers. So SendGrid’s consultants can help not only with training and one-time campaign design, but also long-term mail and list management strategies. However, these are services the company says it commonly provides for customers sending between two and five million monthly emails, so beginners or even small to midsized businesses (SMBs) with more modest marketing needs may be out of luck. Aside from mail management, Twilio can also help with authentication, DNS configuration, and link-tracking for more advanced or customized analytics.
To evolve SendGrid into a full blown email marketing solution, the company has added web-based tools that include a design editor, email and list management, as well as analytic features that vary by pricing tier. Along with additional marketing automation tools, those analytics can measure success rates across list segmentation, email conversions, and click-through rates, too.
That’s a fairly good breadth of features, but the question remains: Even with its own API, MTA, and marketing stack, how does Twilio SendGrid fare against the competition as an overall email marketing solution?
Twilio SendGrid Pricing and Features
You can get Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns using four separate pricing plans. There’s a free plan that can send 100 emails each day so it should be fine for very small businesses or even individuals trying to figuring out if email marketing can really help them. A Marketing Campaigns Essentials Plan, the plan we reviewed, starts at $14.95 per month and allows you to send up to 40,000 emails monthly, which is a good starting point for SMBs. The Essentials plan also comes with API access for customization and the SMTP relay service. There’s support for webhook alerts, delivery optimization, a dynamic template editor, basic analytics, and guaranteed support response times via email tickets and chat.
The next level up is the Pro Plan, which jumps to $89.95 per month and can manage 100,000 emails on a monthly basis. It has everything you get with Essentials, but adds dynamic templates with testing features, up to 2,500 email validations, a dedicated IP address, and subscription management. Beyond the Pro Plan is Twilio’s Premier Plan, but this requires considerable consultation with the company’s professional services experts as its feature set is tailored to every customer. To get access to this tier, you’ll also need to talk to a Twilio sales rep, since it’s pricing is custom, too.
So even with the addition of its relay service, Twilio presents a nice range of subscription pricing that seems competitive with the other players we’ve reviewed. For example, Editors’ Choice selection, Campaigner, stands out for its affordable starting price, which comes in at $19.95 per month for up to 1,000 contacts. Mailchimp, another Editors’ Choice pick, also has a free tier, which works well for up to 2,000 contacts and up to 10,000 monthly email sends. However, Mailchimp’s paid plans start at just $9.99 per month for its Essentials package, and this adds a quality website builder and customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, which SendGrid lacks. It also provides A/B testing at that tier and handles up to 50,000 contacts with a notably wide range of templates and customization options. SendGrid is definitely weaker in its design tools, but for many customers the advantages of integrating the email relay service may make up for that.
Campaign Design and Functionality
Signing up gets you immediate access to SendGrid’s web console. As far as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) dashboards go, this one is fresh and well organized. The left-side menu has links to Dashboard, Email API, Marketing, Design Library, Stats, Activity, Validation, Suppressions, and Settings. Also prominent is your Reputation Score, which presents your current rating using a percentage indicator.
That last feature is a clever and useful metric that we’ve not seen on any other email marketing or marketing automation solution so far. Having your reputation score visible at all times is helpful to anyone, but especially novice marketers because maintaining a good email reputation means enjoying higher email success rates and having a lowered chance of being labeled as a spammer.
The fastest way to upload your contact lists into SendGrid is via CSV files, and you’ll need to do that not just for delivery, but list organization and segmentation. You’ve got the ability to send test emails, which is necessary if you want to see how your emails fare across different audiences as well as device types (PCs versus smartphones, for example). However, this is as far as SendGrid goes in terms of customer management, which is serviceable, but lacks the more advanced CRM capabilities you can find with some of the other players we tested, like the above-mentioned Mailchimp or the HubSpot Marketing Hub.
Building a SendGrid Email Campaign
When it comes to designing your marketing email, SendGrid has six basic email designs, which is a bit sparse. These are slanted towards either lifestyle or retail campaigns, and you can do light tweaking easily enough if you need to tailor them to a particular audience. You’ll use a basic design tool for this that’ll initially look similar to what we’ve seen from many of our other contenders in terms of drag-and-drop functionality. But once you’re using it, you’ll quickly bump into limitations that most of its competitors don’t impose, like when when you try and drag in an image that’s not pre-sized to fit the template’s dimensions or when you try and change the deeper details of the template’s formatting. While it’s certainly usable, this editor definitely lags behind more design-oriented offerings, like GetResponse.
If you just need to send a quick newsletter or promotion to subscribers, these templates should work in a pinch. But with only a few template choices and limited design capability, even most small business marketers will quickly feel constrained, and the templates aren’t well suited for follow-up emails, either. Even if you’re a high-volume sender, a branding-sensitive business, or just an organization with more specific design requirements, you’ll be much better off creating your templates elsewhere and then importing them into the SendGrid Design Library. But even this process will require a fair bit of tweaking and could prove frustrating if your company doesn’t have any in-house design talent; and, of course, it’ll require an additional third-party tool as well.
Once you’ve got your template worked out, Twilio SendGrid has a helpful Setup Guide on its dashboard that’ll help users create a sender identity and then determine how they’re going to send out marketing communications. The fork in the road here is between using SendGrid’s campaign creation and design tools or simply opting for Twilio’s web API and its SMTP relay service, since these can ostensibly be integrated with those third-party applications you’ll probably need anyway for email and template design. Since we’re comparing SendGrid to other email marketing platforms, we opted to use the in-app design editor. Once we selected this option, we chose Single Send campaigns, which presents SendGrid’s Design Library pre-populated with appropriate templates and any images you might have already uploaded.
Using the Design Library means building your email either with the drag-and-drop features described above or (more likely for experienced marketers) you can jump into the HTML code editor. This path gives you much more precise design control as long as you’ve got a good grasp of HTML. However, here too, SendGrid comes up a little short in terms of HTML coding niceties with this editor being little more than a text window.
But again, you can also do your HTML coding in a more well-rounded tool and then import into SendGrid’s HTML interface to see how it looks on the fly. While not ideal, this option does add some much needed flexibility to Twilio SendGrid’s overall design capabilities even if it doesn’t come from the tool itself. However, again, you’ll need to be HTML-savvy to take advantage here.
Novices do get some other tools, such as the ability to crop, flip, or filter images inside the SendGrid dashboard. However, we also found these features slow and cumbersome. Similar to the HTML coding capability, a better approach is to resize using a third-party image editor and then import the images back into SendGrid.
Overall, we hope Twilio will do some significant work on SendGrid’s design capabilities down the road, because it’ll have to if it wants to remain competitive as a full-on email marketing platform and not just a high-volume delivery service.
Integrated A/B Testing
While design may need improvement, SendGrid does provide a number useful tools when it comes to initiating and measuring your campaign’s success, like personalization options. This can help make form emails and newsletters appear customized to specific users. While it’s good to see this as part of SendGrid’s tool set, it’s something you’ll find in most of our competing email marketing solutions, too.
A nicer touch is that SendGrid has A/B test functionality available even at its lower pricing tiers. With this, you can test multiple versions of an email to see which one gets the most eyeballs, click-throughs, and engagements. SendGrid lets you do A/B testing either on the email’s subject line or it’s content.
If you’re testing a subject line, you can do so for up to four different versions. If you select a content A/B test, tabs will appear at the top of the screen with each allowing you to test different content elements aimed at different audiences or perhaps the same content element tweaked in different ways so you can see what resonates best with a single audience. Once you’ve set up your test, SendGrid checks after an hour to determine which version was more successful, and then sends the rest of the email load in that format for higher success rates.
Building an A/B test starts with setting the time for the test. For example, you could select one hour to test on 50% of your initial audience. You can send out multiple variations of your email and SendGrid will aggregate the click rate to determine which variation is having the most success. In this example, once SendGrid figured out the best version, it would send the winning variation to the remaining 50% of your audience. You can leverage Twilio’s pre-built integration with Google Analytics and other business intelligence tools to track other factors, like conversion rates, that will provide more understanding of your customer’s overall marketing journey.
We found SendGrid’s A/B testing to be somewhat more functional that its design tools, though again, it could use a little more sophistication, like what you’ll find in MailChimp or HubSpot. Still, it’s definitely adequate for most SMB marketers, and if you need more, remember Twilio’s professional services arm can help, too.
Solid Sending Mechanics, Weak on Design
Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns is notable as a new extension of Twilio’s API and email delivery platform. With these features, it has excellent delivery performance at very high scales. That’s something that will definitely suit marketing-focused SMBs and larger businesses looking to ramp up their email marketing activities.
However, SendGrid doesn’t compete as well as an email and digital marketing design tool. It’s drag-and-drop templates offer only rudimentary and limited options that will hamper smaller businesses who might not have access to design experts or HTML coders. Most such businesses will be better off creating their designs elsewhere and then using Twilio SendGrid’s sending, segmentation, and A/B testing functionality to deliver their marketing campaigns. While this scenario plays to Twilio SendGrid’ strengths, it also means this isn’t a one-stop digital marketing shop.
(Editors’ Note: SMTP and Campaigner are owned by J2 Global, the parent company of PCMag’s publisher, Ziff Davis.)
