Email Marketing Service Questions - High volume sender

[WayneRooney]

Currently i am developing a site that has minor social network features built into it meaning it will sends massive amount of emails everyday. For example,
Autoresponder will send an email when:

1. to user B when User A follows user B
2. to user B when user A likes user B photos
3. to user A when user B has uploaded a new photos
4. Other email marketing newsletter

I want to ensure that all emails are not ended up in Spam folder, what should i do in this case? IS Mailchimp good enough? It seems pricey in the long run?

Thanks

[bruce_werdschinski]

Hi Edmond,

We evaluated a number of email delivery providers just over a year ago and found that many of them offer tips on how to avoid ending up in the Spam folder. http://documentation.mailgun.com/best_practices.html and http://go.sendgrid.com/rs/sendgrid/images/SendGrid_Deliverability_Guide.pdf being great places to start.

MailChimp has a lot of extra features such as list management and templates. Because you're managing your own user lists and have a trigger for sending individual emails you may be better off using a service that just sends emails. Mailchimp have a subsidiary called Mandrill that does just that (http://mandrill.com/), but other big players include Mailgun (http://www.mailgun.com) and SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com/).

We ended up using Mailgun and have grown with them from sending 2 million emails a month to 10 million emails a month, and while every situation is different I can highly recommend them.

Hope that helps!

[WayneRooney]

Hi Bruce

Thank you for your answer. What do you think of using Amazon SES instead of mandrill as it's cheaper overall?

We are planning to use Amazon SES for all outgoing emails, Sendy app (sendy dot co) for Newsletter sending and Zendesk for sending support emails.

Thoughts?