9 Best Transactional Email Services for Better Email Deliverability

Transactional emails are one of the most common visitors to our email inboxes. According to statistics, three of ten businesses send over 100,000 transactional emails every month!

How do they send this huge volume of transactional emails effectively and on time?

Well, transactional email services are the perfect way to do so. These service providers can send thousands of emails swiftly and if you’re looking for a good transactional email service, we’re here to help. In this article, we’ve rounded up the best transactional email service providers on the market.

Explore our list and make your choice!

What is a Transactional Email Service?

Transactional emails are emails that a customer receives after performing certain actions on a website. Transactional email services assist you in automatically sending transactional emails in response to any action taken by your clients.

Assume you recently created an account on a website or purchased a product from an e-commerce website. In most cases, this website will immediately send you a confirmation email. These emails are known as transactional emails.

Transactional email is a type of automated email that is delivered to the recipient’s inbox based on their actions. Although any action can be turned into a transactional email, depending on their popular uses, we can refer to the following types of emails as transactional emails for your better understanding.

• Welcome emails
• Password reset request 
• Order & payment confirmation 
• Log in notifications

Importance of Transactional Emails

“Communication to a relationship is like oxygen is to life. Without it, it dies.” 

Tony A. Gaskins Jr

Let’s put our personal lives aside and talk about business. Wouldn’t you choose to purchase something from someone you know rather than someone you don’t?

Transactional emails will assist you in building an everlasting customer relationship, increasing engagement and brand recognition, and ultimately increasing your sales.

• Better relationship: Sending a welcome email to your subscriber or client immediately after their subscription will definitely make them feel good. The same thing will happen after they receive product confirmation emails.  Customers want to feel involved in the entire purchasing process, and if you continue to send them information, they will feel connected to you.
• Better engagement: Will you enjoy being alone in a desert, no matter how beautiful it is? The same applies to your relationships with your customers. You simply cannot make them feel excluded. So, how do we solve this problem? Well, transactional emails will help you in this regard by increasing engagement with your clients!
• Brand acknowledgment: Transactional emails will not only help you sell a product but will also keep the possibility of future purchases open. It will assist you in leaving a long-lasting impression on your customers, and they will not hesitate to purchase a product from you in the future. Maintaining a good relationship with an existing customer is more difficult than acquiring a new one. However, it is more profitable too!
• Improve sales: Isn’t your ultimate goal to increase product sales? It’s fairly common for customers to be perplexed when making a purchasing decision. It is even possible that they will change their minds at the very last minute. Your transactional emails will assist them in making their decision and sticking to them. Thus, transactional emails will assist you in increasing your sales.

Things to Consider Before Purchasing a Transactional Email Service

When it comes to transactional email service providers, the difference between good and great is ridiculously small. A perfect solution will solely depend on your requirements. That is why we recommend that you first understand your needs. However, we won’t disappoint you. By evaluating all the features, these service providers offer, we have figured out some features that your transactional email service provider must have.

Think about the following before you purchase a transactional email service:

• Excellent email deliverability: A transactional email is far more important than a marketing email. Failure to send a marketing email may only increase your bounce rate, but failing to send a transactional email on time will cast doubt on your organization’s reputation. That is why selecting a transactional email service provider with high email deliverability is essential.
• Better email delivery speed: Imagine you sent a password recovery request to a website, but they did not send you a confirmation email on time. Isn’t it disturbing? If you do not send the required email on time, your clients will experience the same emotions. So, it is vital to pick a transactional email service with better email deliverability and delivery speed.
• Simplicity: Nothing is more frustrating than counting on a transactional email service provider that is difficult to use. Prioritize simplicity when selecting a transactional email service. Examine their doc files to see how simple they are to use.
• Clear price plan: Transactional email service providers frequently offer confusing pricing plans. At first glance, you might be amazed by their free services however, you may find it costly in the long run. That is why it is critical to carefully consider every detail, such as how many subscribers you can add, how many emails you can send, and so on. We recommend comparing different price plans for various products before making a purchase.
• Good analytics: Analytical data keeps you on track; without it, you’re blind. That is why selecting a transactional email service that provides you with all the required data is crucial.
• Customer support:  It’s understandable that you aren’t an expert in every field. Even if you believe you know everything there is to know about these tools, it is possible that you will become confused at some point. In this regard, excellent customer service will make identifying and resolving issues easier. Therefore, we recommend that you think about customer support before selecting a transactional email service provider.
• User reviews: User reviews are another thing that can help you in your purchasing journey. Before purchasing one, try listening to what their customers say about them.

9 Best Transactional Email Services in 2024

With so many transactional email service providers offering similar features, compiling a list of the best of the best is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, we attempted to compile a list of the nine best transactional email services based on our prior experience with them.

Remember, this is not a ranking post. We only considered the features mentioned above when creating this list of the best transactional email service providers. You still have to go through the individual tools to find out the best fit for yourself.

SendGrid

SendGrid could be your ideal solution for sending transactional emails and running an effective email marketing campaign. As we discuss transactional email service in this article, we will concentrate solely on its transactional emailing capability.

SendGrid outperforms most of its competitors thanks to its numerous unique features. It includes a wide range of pre-made email templates that will save you time. It also allows you to customize these templates to meet your specific needs. You can also add your company’s logo to each email.

Regarding analytics, SendGrid is the market leader, providing comprehensive data such as email deliverability, insights reports, bounce rates, and many more. Its email testing capability will assist you in ensuring maximum email deliverability.

In terms of email delivery time, each message takes 0 to 603.03 seconds. What’s more? SendGrid supports several frameworks, including Python, Java, C#, and PHP. If you need both transactional and marketing email services, we recommend SendGrid.

Pricing

SendGrid is free for up to 100 emails per day. To send more, you must move to the essential plan, which begins at $14.45 per month. The Pro plan starts at $89.95 per month.  

Brevo

Brevo is yet another excellent transactional email service provider worthy of inclusion on any list of the best transactional email service providers. It began its journey in 2012 and has since dominated the email marketing arena!

Like SendGrid, Brevo is an all-arounder in this field. It provides excellent transaction email service and makes your job easier by providing services such as email marketing, email segmentation, email automation, and many more. Brevo helps you create your personalized landing page and assists you in keeping your team members up to date by organizing all emails in a shared inbox.

When it comes to time effectiveness, Brevo outperformed the majority of its competitors. You can reach your customers’ inboxes more efficiently and on time. Furthermore, you can always keep your transactional emails on track by evaluating the detailed statistics it provide.

What else? Brevo allows you to track your contacts directly and maintain a direct relationship with them!

Pricing

Brevo is entirely free for up to 300 emails per day. You must purchase the basic plan to send up to 40k emails per month. It will cost you $65 per month. For the premium plan, you have to pay $65 monthly. 

Postmark

Postmark started its journey in 2009 as a solely transactional email service provider. Although it has progressed significantly since then and now serves you in marketing email sending as well, it has never deviated from its primary focus. That is why, if you are looking for a transactional email service provider, Postmark is an excellent choice.

PostMark’s lightning-fast email delivery must be mentioned first when discussing Postmark’s most notable features. Do you want to know another interesting Postmark fact? It is the only transactional email service provider that publicly discloses its email delivery time!

Even though Postmark has been sending marketing emails since 2020, it has never blended these two services. It uses two entirely different infrastructures to send these two types of emails. Postmark also provides a large number of pre-designed transactional email templates. As a result, you can quickly and easily create automated transactional emails like welcome emails, password reset emails, etc.

The best part? Postmark’s pricing structure is super straightforward!

Pricing

Postmark charges different rates depending on how many emails you want to send. It will cost $10 per month for 10,000 emails. You must pay $200 monthly for up to 30,000 emails and $535 for 1 million emails.

Mailtrap

Mailtrap is an email delivery platform to test, send, and control your email infrastructure, all in one place. But, as the focus of this article is transactional email services, we’ll talk mostly about Mailtrap’s sending solution and its transactional stream.

Mailtrap Email Sending sets itself apart from its competitors by not just offering a reliable and hassle-free email API/SMTP service but also providing high deliverability rates by design, ready-to-use integrations for major programming languages, actionable in-depth analytics, and other features/benefits.

Included in the actionable in-depth analytics are a helicopter view dashboard, drill-down reports, up to 60 days of email logs, and deliverability alerts, all intended to help you control how your email infrastructure works and performs.

Need more email-sending features? Well, you’re in luck, as with Mailtrap, on top of your transactional emails, you can also send bulk emails. And since the bulk emails are sent from a separate stream, your deliverability doesn’t get affected. Once you’re ready to give Mailtrap email sending a try, all you need to do is complete a smooth and secure setup with all DNS records provided.

Pricing

Mailtrap offers separate pricing plans for its testing and sending solutions. For Mailtrap Email Sending, you can choose between a free plan and four paid plans, which are priced depending on the number of emails you want to send each month. The cheapest plan starts at only $10/month for 10k emails. A custom plan is also available, with pricing determined based on your needs.

SparkPost

The email marketing industry is fortunate to have SparkPost. It includes most of the features that an email marketer usually looks for in a transactional email service.

When it comes to features, Sparkpost’s great analytics will always come first. You can easily obtain important data such as open rate, click rate, and click-through rate and use it to design your entire email campaign by analyzing it.

Not only that, but SparkPost uses these analytics to track ISP responses, bounce rates, spam traps, and other metrics. In a nutshell, SparkPost does everything possible to keep your transactional email from going to spam and boost your deliverability.

PowerMTA assists you in gaining the trust of your recipients. Besides, its great API integration lets you incorporate an email into your app, website, or product. What’s more? Well, SparkPost provides a plethora of pre-built and customizable templates. 

Pricing

SparkPost offers three different pricing plans. The starter plan starts at $20 per month. You must pay at least $75 per month for the premier plan. In comparison, the enterprise package is completely customizable.

Elastic Email

Elastic Email is another transactional email service provider to consider because of its super user-friendly interface, useful analytical data, quick deliverability, and top-notch performance.

Elastic Email includes a wide variety of ready-made templates that you can use at any time to reach out to your clients’ inboxes professionally and productively. Even these templates are divided into categories. As a result, you won’t have to waste much time looking.

You can easily design your email marketing campaign using Elastic Emails and engage your customers immediately with engaging transactional emails. If you want to use your coding knowledge to produce better results, Elastic Email’s simple HTML editor will assist you.

Pricing

Elastic Email’s pricing is based on the number of contacts you have. All plans include unlimited email sending capacity. The unlimited price plan costs $15 per month for up to 5000 contacts. In contrast, the Pro unlimited price plan is required  $50 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.

Amazon SES

Who in this online world hasn’t heard of Amazon? That is the primary advantage of using Amazon SES. At the very least, they’ll constantly strive to provide you with better services.

Amazon SES is an excellent choice for both transactional and marketing emails. Amazon employs flexible IP deployment, which improves the deliverability of transactional emails. Furthermore, you can easily evaluate your email campaign because this transactional email service provides you with all the data required to run your campaign effectively. You can track not only email deliverability and bounce rate but also click rate and click-through rate.

What is more enticing?

Amazon SES is the most cost-effective transactional email service provider on the market. When compared to other services’ pricing plans, you may discover that it is literally charging you nothing! However, note that Amazon SES is a bit complicated to get started. So if you’re a newbie, it can be hard to set up Amazon SES. If you need help setting up Amazon SES, you can check out this step-by-step guide.

Pricing

Amazon SES is free for up to 62,000 emails per month! You will be charged $0.10 per 1000 emails if you exceed this limit (Yes, you see it right!)

Mailgun

Mailgun is an excellent choice for those already involved in email marketing and has a large email list to manage. It is an excellent choice for developers looking for a transactional email service to send transactional emails quickly and easily.

Mailgun provides an email builder tool for creating your own email format easily. You may not have any professional skills, but still, you will be able to write professional and quality emails.

Because of it’s super-efficient SMTP integration, sending bulk emails will no longer be a problem. You can evaluate your email campaign using A/B testing features, and its amazing analytical data will help you keep your transactional emails on track.

Consider Mailgun if you need a transactional email service provider and also want some extra features.

Pricing

MailGun offers somewhat complicated pricing tiers. They offer free service for up to 5000 emails, but only for three months. After that, you must upgrade to the premium plan. You will be charged $35 per month for sending up to 50,000 emails and $80 for sending 100,000 emails.

Pepipost

Pepipost, a transactional email service provider with exceptional email deliverability capabilities, maybe the answer you’ve been looking for. It not only ensures 100% email deliverability, but it also sends them on time.

Pepipost’s ultimate goal is to create a spam-free email community, which is why it closely monitors your emails and ensures that they do not trigger the spam flag. As a result, Pepipost creates an environment in which your transactional email has the best chance of being delivered successfully.

Pepipost’s setup process is very simple, and its dashboard is very user-friendly. However, we believe it is best suited for experienced developers when it comes to using this tool effectively. It was built by the developers for the developers!

Keep in mind that this transactional email service provider is not for everyone. We’d rather say Pepipost is ideal for a team that has a developer do the coding.

Pricing

Pepipost’s pricing structure is extremely straightforward. It provides a completely free service for the first 30,000 emails. Furthermore, even after exceeding this limit, you can still send 100 emails per day for free. However, you will be charged $17.50 monthly for sending up to 150,000 emails.

Which is the Best Transactional Email Service in 2024?

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably noticed that there is no master of all features.

• If you are looking for a low-cost option, Amazon SES may be a good option for you but it’s not beginner-friendly
• Postmark can sometimes win the race as a better transactional email service provider due to its very simple and obvious pricing plan
• Sendinblue is a better choice if you want a transactional email service provider who can also help you with email marketing campaigns
• Similarly, the rest of the aforementioned transactional email services are superior with their respective distinguishing features

Look how puzzled we are! How can we make a call on your behalf, then? That is why we recommend that you first understand your requirements and select a transactional email service accordingly.

We hope this article helped you choose the right transactional email service. Let us know which transactional email service you’re using and what aspect of it you like most!

Start Sending Marketing Emails from WordPress!

Transactional emails are just one type of email that helps you engage with customers. Real money is in marketing emails. Newsletters, promotional emails, customer retention emails, etc., are often more beneficial for building long-term relationships and boosting revenue. Thus, most businesses utilize an email marketing platform for these.

Unfortunately, these platforms usually charge based on the number of contacts and they can go up by thousands of dollars with each milestone. With the help of a WordPress email marketing automation tool like FluentCRM, you can eliminate the need for such tools. and save thousands of dollars on email automation. Don’t forget to give our free email automation plugin a go.

Cheers!