SendGrid offers two types of pricing plans –Marketing Campaign Plans and Email API Plans. The Email API plan is highly development- and tech-oriented, which makes it difficult to understand for marketers and business owners. For these reasons, we will be focusing on the Marketing Campaign plans. These are designed for businesses that need to automate their email marketing efforts and streamline processes through automation and the elimination of redundancy.
There are three different Marketing Campaign plans – Free, Basic, and Advanced. Let’s have a more detailed look:
With the free plan, users can send up to 6000 emails to 2000 contacts every month, completely free of charge. On top of that, you get access to the design editor, segmentation, A/B testing, email insights, 3 email testing credits, 1 signup form, ticketing support, automation, and the ability to involve a single teammate in all processes. This plan is ideal for small business owners and individuals.
The Basic plan starts at $15/monthly and grows with the number of contacts and/or emails you send each month. The price ranges from $15/monthly for up to 5000 contacts and grows up to $200/monthly for up to 100,000 contacts. On top of that, you get 10 email testing credits, 5 signup forms, and ticketing and chat support. However, you lose access to valuable automation features, which makes the plan a lot less attractive.
The Advanced plan starts at $60/monthly and grows up to $900 monthly depending on the number of contacts and/or emails you send each month. In addition, you gain access to 60 email testing credits, 15 signup forms, guaranteed fast support via ticket, chat, and phone, automation, adding up to 1000 teammates, and dedicated IPs. This plan is highly recommended to both medium and enterprise-level companies.
SendGrid is very easy to use. The software doesn’t have a steep learning curve and any person can use it effectively from day one. Drag and drop functionality allows users to create virtually any kind of email using pre-designed templates. The reports are also very easy to understand, compare, and help decipher which areas need improvements.
SendGrid offers customer support across multiple channels including phone, ticket, and live chat. However, both the communication channels and the speed of customer support depend on your pricing plan. Prioritized and guaranteed fast support is only available to the Advanced plan users.
SendGrid offers tons of functionality across all pricing plans, including the free ones, which is extremely rare for cloud-based apps. It will easily satisfy both advanced and inexperienced users. Here are some of the most notable features:
Data Centralization
SendGrid helps you centralize all your email communication with all customers and leads in a single place. This allows easier access and management to all past communications, insights, analytics, reports, and statistics. Furthermore, with everyone using the same tools and data you streamline collaboration. Finally, data centralization offers practically endless scalability for growing businesses.
Reporting and Analytics
The reporting and analytics tools offer an in-depth statistical analysis regarding engagement (open rates and click rates), deliverability (Inbox vs Spam), and audience insights across all email campaigns. You can also dive into recurring email details, as well as transactional email data reports, and make changes when appropriate. Lastly, the reports and data are easy to understand, track, and use in your everyday work.
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation allows users to eliminate redundant tasks. For example, you can create onboarding emails for newly acquired customers, nurture leads and attendees both before and after an event, and follow up with leads that interact with your content. Customizable automation allows you to create email workflows that trigger events, depending on your strategy. Finally, you can track your automation over time to identify best-performing emails, make appropriate changes, and easily update subject lines and contents in real-time.
Email Design Editor
The email design feature offers a design and code editor that allows you to create beautiful email templates via drag and drop functionality, or to access and edit HTML without breaking structural code. You can create any type of email including newsletters, receipts, no-reply emails, and password reset emails.
Email Templates
SendGrid provides a free, constantly growing library of email templates. The templates are customizable – you can easily add your brand logo, colors, and content, and save them for future use. There are multiple industry-specific templates for all kinds of emails including traditional, recurring, newsletters, transactional, financial, etc. In addition, all the templates are responsive, meaning that they will be comfortable to view on any screen size and device. You can also import your existing email templates and use those freely.
Overall, SendGrid is a great email marketing tool. The brand offers a robust set of features that can be comfortably used by both beginners and advanced users.
The practically limitless scalability makes the tool suitable for small, medium, and large enterprises alike. Furthermore, the free version of the tool doesn’t have an end date, which makes it ideal for individuals or small companies. That being said, there are a few downsides, like the complicated pricing strategy and limited support (unless you’re an Advanced plan user). However, these drawbacks are negligible considering the overall experience and numerous benefits that you receive.
