Sendgrid vs Mailgun vs MailGenius: Choosing Your Email Champion
Email remains a powerful tool for businesses to reach their audience. However, the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns hinges on one crucial factor: deliverability. With a plethora of email marketing tools available, it can be challenging to choose the one that best suits your needs.
In this comprehensive guide, we pit three of the industry’s heavyweights — SendGrid, Mailgun, and MailGenius — against each other. We delve into their features, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and provide you with the insights you need to choose the tool that will ensure your emails land right where they should — in your audience’s inbox.
Let’s get started.
MailGenius
MailGenius shines as a powerful email tester tool designed to optimize your email campaigns and ensure your messages land right where they should — in the inbox.
Let’s explore the features that make this tool a valuable asset for any email marketer.
Content is king, even in emails. MailGenius’s content assessment feature scrutinizes the content of your emails, HTML coding, and any potentially problematic links. This feature helps you avoid common pitfalls that can trigger spam filters or lead to poor user experience, ensuring your emails are not only delivered but also read and engaged with.
MailGenius understands how major email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook interpret your emails. This knowledge is invaluable, allowing you to tailor your campaigns to meet the specific requirements of each provider, thereby increasing the likelihood of your emails landing in the inbox.
Improve Your Deliverability With MailGenius
The email tester is another gem in the MailGenius toolkit. This feature allows MailGenius to conduct comprehensive inbox placement tests, simulating real-world scenarios to fine-tune your campaigns for optimal deliverability.
Think of the email tester as a personal trainer for your emails. It analyzes your emails, providing a score and a diagnostic report suggesting improvements. This feature helps you fine-tune your emails, ensuring they’re in the best shape to engage your audience and drive conversions (we’ll look at how to run inbox placement tests below.)
Being blacklisted can spell disaster for your email deliverability. MailGenius’s blacklisting check feature helps you avoid this fate by checking if your domain or IP address is blacklisted. By proactively addressing these issues, you can maintain a clean sender reputation and ensure your emails reach their intended recipients.
Trust is the cornerstone of email communication. MailGenius helps you build that trust with its guidance on best practices for authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These protocols act as digital signatures, verifying your emails’ authenticity and protecting against spoofing and phishing attacks. With MailGenius’s guidance, your emails gain the trust of ISPs and land safely in your recipients’ inboxes.
MailGenius also offers advanced analytics and reporting features. These provide detailed insights into the performance of your email campaigns, from open rates and click-through rates to bounce rates and conversions. This data is crucial for understanding what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve your email marketing efforts.
For those who need a more hands-on approach, Troy Ericson offers email deliverability consulting services. Him and his team of experts at MailGenius can work with you to develop a comprehensive strategy to improve your email deliverability. This personalized service can be a game-changer, helping you navigate complex deliverability issues and optimize your email campaigns for success.
Lastly, MailGenius is committed to continuous improvement. It provides regular updates and recommendations to adapt to changing email deliverability trends. This commitment ensures your emails stay at the forefront of inbox deliverability and that your email campaigns remain effective and relevant. Analyze our email deliverability checklist to make sure you hit all the marks before you send a test placement test.
That said, running inbox placement tests with MailGenius is a straightforward process that can significantly improve your email marketing campaigns. Analyze our email deliverability checklist to make sure you hit all the marks before you send a test placement test.
Let’s delve into each step in more detail:
Step 1: Start Using the Tool
Start by navigating to the MailGenius website. As a warm welcome, MailGenius offers three complimentary inbox placement tests to new users. This lets you directly experience MailGenius’s benefits for your email campaigns. After these tests, you can evaluate their impact and consider subscribing for more advanced features.
Step 2: Crafting Your Test Email
Next, MailGenius hands you a unique email address. This is your target. Craft a test email that mirrors your typical campaign emails, complete with similar content, subject line, and sender information. This ensures the test is a true reflection of your usual email practices, setting the stage for accurate and relevant results.
Step 3: Check Your Score After Sending the Email
Having dispatched your test email, it’s time to return to the MailGenius dashboard. Click on the ‘See Your Score’ button, and watch as MailGenius springs into action, analyzing your email for potential deliverability issues.
Step 4: Deciphering the Inbox Placement Results
MailGenius then presents a comprehensive report detailing the results of the inbox placement test. This report includes an overall score and specific scores for different aspects of your email, such as content, reputation, and authentication. This granular breakdown helps pinpoint exactly where improvements can be made.
Step 5: Unmasking Deliverability Issues
The report also shines a spotlight on any issues that could be lurking in your email’s deliverability. These could range from problematic spammy content and poor sender reputation to a lack of proper email authentication. Each issue is explained in detail, helping you understand the potential pitfalls and how they could affect your email’s deliverability.
Step 6: Apply Insightful Recommendations
Finally, based on the identified email deliverability issues, MailGenius provides actionable insights and recommendations for improving it. These could involve adjusting your email’s content, enhancing your sender’s reputation, or setting up proper email authentication.
MailGenius features
Email Deliverability Audit: Assess email performance and deliverability (you can run a manual audit here)
Spam Testing: Tests emails against common spam filters.
Blacklist Checking: Checks if your domain is blacklisted.
Content Analysis: Evaluate content for potential spam triggers and optimize emails for better deliverability.
Authentication Checks: Verifies SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records.
Link and Image Checking: Ensures links and images are valid and safe.
HTML Validation: Checks for errors in email’s HTML.
Server Configuration Checks: Assess email server setup.
Detailed Reports: Provides a comprehensive report with improvement suggestions.
MailGenius Pricing
Free Tests: New users can access three tests at no cost, allowing them to try out MailGenius’ features.
Paid Subscription: After using the free tests, users can opt for a paid subscription to continue leveraging MailGenius’ services.
Monitoring Prices: Pricing for domain monitoring is tiered based on the number of domains:
1 domain: $99/month
2 domains: $198/month
3 domains: $297/month
4 domains: $396/month
This pricing structure allows users to choose a plan that matches their specific needs and the number of domains they wish to monitor.
Try MailGenius at no cost today and see why were at the top of premier email testing tools.
MailGun
Mailgun — a leading provider of email API, validation, and deliverability services — allows you to send, validate, and receive emails through your domain at scale.
Serving over 225,000 businesses, Mailgun has proven its ability to handle email services at scale. Whether you’re a small business just starting with email marketing services, or a large enterprise with complex email needs, Mailgun has the infrastructure and features to support your goals.
Mailgun’s powerful APIs are a cornerstone of its service, allowing users to send, receive, and track emails with ease. This feature is a game-changer for businesses looking to automate their email processes. By integrating the API into your systems, you can automate the sending of transactional or bulk emails, track email performance in real time, and even handle inbound emails. This level of automation can significantly streamline your email marketing efforts, freeing up time for other important tasks.
Strengths of MailGun
A key strength of the email platform is its high uptime. With a 99.99% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), it ensures that your email services are reliable and always available. This is crucial for businesses that rely on email for communication, marketing, and customer service. Any downtime can lead to missed opportunities and frustrated customers, so a high uptime SLA is a significant advantage.
Mailgun’s Email API & SMTP Relay is another powerful feature that allows seamless integration of your applications with their email-sending service. This means you can automate the sending of transactional or bulk emails directly from your apps, websites, or email marketing tools. The importance of this feature lies in its ability to streamline your email-sending process, making it more efficient and reliable.
Next up is Mailgun’s Email Routes & Forwarding feature. This allows you to set up rules to route incoming emails to a destination of your choice, or even forward them to another email address. This feature is crucial for managing inbound emails, ensuring that important messages are directed to the right place, and can be particularly useful for things like sales inquiries.
Send time optimization is a feature that uses data to determine the best time to send email marketing campaigns to maximize open rates. This is particularly useful for email marketers as it takes the guesswork out of deciding when to send emails, increasing the likelihood of your emails being opened and read.
Webhooks, Analytics, and Logs provide valuable insights into your email performance. You can track deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, and more, helping you understand how your campaigns are performing and where improvements can be made.
For businesses that need to send a large number of emails in a short period, Mailgun’s burst-sending feature is a lifesaver. Whether you’re launching a time-sensitive promotion or sending out a critical announcement, burst sending ensures that your emails get delivered quickly and efficiently.
The transactional email service also offers a feature for list segmentation, allowing you to divide your email list into parts and send the right message to the right audience. For example, you could segment your list based on purchase history and send personalized offers to each segment. This can significantly boost engagement and conversions. Additionally, you can consult with an expert on list management issues or technical API support, or IP and domain reputation management, ensuring your email marketing is as effective as possible.
The bulk list validation tool is another standout feature; it makes it super easy to clean out inactive emails from your list. Simply upload your contacts as a CSV list, and Mailgun will identify and remove invalid accounts. This not only saves you time and money but also helps maintain your sender reputation, which is crucial for email deliverability.
Validating email addresses in real time ensures that your messages reach the intended recipients and reduces bounce rates. Mailgun’s email verification API performs comprehensive checks, verifying email address format, existence, and deliverability.
Finally, the email tool offers a wide range of integrations with various categories of services. Built through Zapier, these integrations allow you to connect the platform with over 65 popular tools like Asana, Airtable, Amazon, and more. You can find more about the best Mailgun alternative here.
MailGun Features
Developer-Focused Service: Powerful APIs for seamless integration and email automation.
High Uptime: 99.99% uptime SLA for reliable email service.
Wide Customer Base: Provides email services to over 225,000 businesses.
Mailjet for Marketing: Separate tool for managing marketing emails.
Email Validation API: Services to check email address format and deliverability.
Burst Sending: Supports sending of large email volumes in a short period.
Inbox Placement Prediction: Features to predict and improve email deliverability.
Mailgun pricing plans
Mailgun offers a variety of pricing plans to cater to different needs:
Free Plan: For those new to the service, Mailgun offers a one-month free plan. This includes 5,000 free emails, with any additional emails costing $1.00 per 1,000 emails.
Foundation Plan: Priced at $35, this plan includes 50,000 emails and provides access to basic features such as reliable email delivery, analytics, and basic support.
Scale Plan: This plan offers more email volume (100,000 emails), dedicated IP addresses, and advanced support. The price for this plan is not specified in the provided information.
Custom Plan: For organizations with specific needs, Mailgun offers a customizable plan. This includes personalized email and verification volume, priority phone support, comprehensive onboarding, and early access to new features and products.
SendGrid
SendGrid, a key player in email marketing, provides a comprehensive suite of features to optimize your campaigns and ensure your emails reach the inbox.
SendGrid’s marketing workflows offer a balance of efficiency and flexibility, with a variety of responsive templates and design tools catering to all skill levels. Its user-friendly email marketing automation allows for quick setup of impactful automation, ideal for recurring emails and time-based drip series.
The platform’s email validation feature helps maintain a clean email list by identifying misspelled, inactive, or disposable addresses, improving delivery rates and engagement. SendGrid also offers In-App Spam Testing, Email Rendering Previews, and Link Validation, ensuring your emails are ready to succeed before sending.
Its simple contact management allows effective subscriber management and data collection for personalized campaigns. Its analytics feature provides detailed insights into campaign performance, tracking various metrics including where and how messages are opened.
The tool also excels in Bounce Management, stopping emails to addresses that have bounced twice and adding them to a suppression list. Bounce Forwarding also notifies you of each bounce, aiding in list health maintenance.
A unique advantage is SendGrid’s integration with Twilio’s Services, allowing the creation of powerful, automated, multi-platform customer communication experiences. Additionally, SendGrid’s compatibility with 320 other tools, including Zapier, Drift, and Litmus, enhances its versatility.
Lastly, SendGrid offers add-ons like 30 days of email activity history, additional dedicated IP address, and personalized support, further boosting your email marketing capabilities.
SendGrid Features
Transactional Email Tool: Enables reliable delivery of transactional emails like receipts and notifications.
Email Marketing Features: Tools for creating, managing, and tracking email marketing campaigns.
Design Templates: Pre-designed, customizable email templates for the quick creation of professional emails.
Sign-up Forms: Customizable forms for collecting email addresses and audience data.
Trusted Delivery Service: High deliverability rates trusted by over 80,000 customers.
High Volume Sending: Capable of sending over 70 billion emails monthly.
Twilio Integration: Integration with Twilio’s communication platform for multi-channel strategies.
SendGrid’s Pricing
Email API pricing is based on the number of emails you send monthly. Here’s the breakdown:
Free Plan: Send up to 100 emails per day at no cost. Ideal for testing Mailgun’s services or for minimal email needs.
Essential Plan: Designed for moderate email volumes. Costs $19.95/month for up to 100k emails, and $34.95/month for 60k – 100k emails. Suitable for small to medium businesses. You get ticket and chat support.
Pro Plan: Ideal for larger businesses or those with intensive email marketing campaigns. Each plan is designed to match different user needs, ensuring cost-effectiveness. Pricing tiers are:
$89.95/month for up to 200k emails
$249/month for up to 650k emails
$449/month for up to 1300k emails
$749/month for up to 1500k emails
MailGun vs SendGrid vs MailGenius: Which One Reigns Supreme?
While SendGrid and Mailgun offer a broad range of email services, MailGenius emerges as the champion when it comes to email deliverability. With its laser focus on ensuring your emails reach the inbox, MailGenius provides a suite of features designed to optimize your email campaigns. From comprehensive deliverability testing to insightful analytics, MailGenius equips you with the tools you need to maximize your email performance.
So, if you’re looking to boost your email marketing campaigns and ensure your messages land right where they should, it’s time to give MailGenius a try. But don’t just take our word for it — experience the MailGenius difference for yourself today by taking a free test.