Do you want to avoid inconsistent email delivery and high bounce rates?
Look no further! We’ve done the research and investigated the top 19 transactional email services.
From delivery rates to spam scores, we’ve evaluated every aspect to bring you the most reliable and efficient options on the market.
In this article, we will review the 19 best and most reliable transactional email services for 2023 that will take your business to the next level. Let’s dive right in!
What Are Transactional Emails, And Why Do You Need Them?
Transactional emails are automated emails triggered by a specific action or event, such as a purchase confirmation or password reset request.
These emails are typically sent to individual recipients, and their main purpose is to inform the recipient of a specific transaction. They may also include relevant information such as confirmation numbers, shipping details, and account updates.
Transactional emails are essential for businesses because they provide a way to communicate important information to customers promptly and efficiently. These emails can help to increase customer engagement and satisfaction by providing real-time updates and confirmations.
Transactional emails can also help to reduce customer support inquiries by providing clear and detailed information about specific transactions. They provide an essential way to improve the customer’s trust and loyalty by showing that the business is professional and responsive.
Evaluation Criteria
Delivery rate and Spam score: The best email services in 2023 deliver the messages to the recipient’s inbox reliably. Their messages rarely get marked as spam, and they measure the percentage of emails successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
Features: The best email services are able to manage and segment email lists. They provide advanced features such as A/B testing for the automation of email campaigns.
Integrations: The best email services of 2023 have built-in integrations for most of the popular marketing and sales tools. These integrations make it easy for businesses to connect their email service with other tools they are already using, such as CRM, eCommerce platforms, and web analytics.
The Top 20 Transactional Email Services
The following list (in alphabetical order) includes those email services we feel are reliable, offer a good range of features, provide the right integrations, and have a proven track record.
1. Postmark
Postmark is a transactional email service that delivers emails, and claims to be 4x faster than the competition. It offers a variety of features, such as an email API, SMTP service, message streams, email templates, inbound email, analytics, and a variety of integrations.
Pricing: Plans start at $15/month for 10,000 emails, and you can pay an additional $50/month for a dedicated IP address.
Postmark also offers detailed open and delivery tracking for every email, responsive templates for sending transactional emails, and customer support. You can use a web dashboard to track bounced emails and webhooks to notify the app of any issues.
2. Amazon SES
Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a cloud-based email service from Amazon Web Service. It offers a scalable email delivery service for sending high-volume email campaigns.
Pricing: AWS is famous for having complicated pricing plans. There is a free tier available, but once it’s exhausted, your total spend will depend on several factors – including the number of emails sent, emails received, network bytes transmitted, and more.
Amazon SES integrates well with the rest of the AWS ecosystem and supports a variety of deployments, including dedicated, shared, or owned IP addresses. It also provides reports on sender statistics, and a deliverability dashboard to help businesses make every email count.
It’s suitable for many use cases, such as automated transactional messages, delivering marketing emails, sending timely notifications to customers, and sending bulk email communications.
3. SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid is an email marketing service that allows businesses to manage email campaigns, design emails, automate messages, and achieve high deliverability rates. It claims to have an average inboxing rate of 96%.
Pricing: The free plan offers 100 emails per day. Paid plans start at $19.95/ month for 50,000 emails.
The SendGrid email platform has a modern UI, and provides visibility into the entire email lifecycle. It also provides add-ons such as 30 Days of Email Activity History, Dedicated IP Address, Twilio Products and APIs, Personalized Support, and Twilio Segment products to maximize email marketing.
4. Customer.io
Customer.io is a marketing and custom management platform that can send transactional emails along with sms and in-app notifications. It is well suited to send password resets, order receipts, and other similar transactional messages. It has a separate infrastructure for sending transactional emails reliably and claims to have a 99.5% uptime.
Pricing: There are three different pricing options. Their Essentials plan starts at $100/month and allows sending email, push, in-app and SMS notifications to 5,000 users.
Customer.io has a unique feature that makes it stand out. You can get the entire messaging journey of a user – this allows you to see all the messages that the user has received over a period of time, whether it be password reset instructions or a marketing promotion.
5. Bento
Bento is a new and upcoming email marketing company that provides transactional email API to small and medium businesses. It has a separate infrastructure for sending transactional emails, which are prioritized over other traffic. This means it uses separate IPs for sending transactional emails, which offers better deliverability.
Pricing: Bento offers a 30-day trial. After that, you need to pay $0.01 per user per month with a minimum charge of $30/month which includes 3000 users.
It has integrations for popular CMS such as WordPress, Webflow, WPFusion, and LearnDash. It can also be integrated with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify, and Magento to send emails directly. They also provide customer support over Discord (in addition to email and call), which can’t be said for any other tool in this list.
6. Courier
Courier is a transactional notification platform that unifies notifications across teams, products, and channels. It supports multiple channels such as email, SMS, push, in-app, and chat – all in a single API, allowing you to launch new channels easily.
Pricing: You can send up to 10,000 notifications/month for free. Businesses get charged based on the number of monthly active users.
It also offers a Preferences API that allows users to choose which notifications they want to receive. It allows for easy integration with existing communication APIs, and can build a notification template in minutes.
7. Elastic Email
Elastic Email is an email marketing platform offering various tools for businesses to create and send effective email campaigns. The platform includes features such as a drag-and-drop email designer, customizable templates, personalization options, advanced scheduling, automation, and detailed statistics and reports for continuous learning and development.
Pricing: There are different pricing plans for using the email marketing and email API feature. The Marketing plan starts at $18/month and allows sending unlimited emails to 5,000 contacts. The API feature costs $0.10/1000 emails, and a fixed fee of $0.50/day.
Elastic Email also offers tools for building a contact list, including subscription forms, popups, and landing pages. The Elastic Email WordPress Sender can connect your WordPress server with the Elastic Email API to maintain all your email campaigns.
8. GetResponse
GetResponse is a comprehensive email marketing automation platform that provides powerful tools to grow online businesses. It offers a variety of features such as email marketing, autoresponders, send-time optimization, newsletter templates, marketing automation, web events, advanced triggering, multichannel engagement, signup forms, A/B testing, list management, lead magnet funnels, eCommerce marketing automation, and more.
Pricing: You can use the free plan to send 2,500 emails per month to 500 contacts. Paying $19/month removes this limitation and allows you to send unlimited emails to 1,000 contacts.
You can use it to communicate with customers efficiently and effectively, build a mailing list, and promote and sell your products online. Additionally, it integrates with popular eCommerce platforms such as WooCommetce, Magento, and Shopify, and there is a free plan available – with a demo for large businesses.
9. Mailgun
Mailgun offers a powerful email-sending infrastructure through its Email API and SMTP relay services. The Email API allows for easy integration and sending transactional or bulk emails, with a 99.99% server uptime.
Pricing: You can sign up for a free plan that offers 5,000 emails per month. The Foundation plan starts at $35 per month, and allows the sending of up to 50,000 emails.
You can use the simple mail transfer protocol to send marketing and transactional emails with authentication protocols such as SPF, DMARC, and DKIM. They also offer inbound email routing and send time optimization – a feature that delivers your email when the recipients view their inbox.
10. MailerSend
MailerSend is a transactional email service designed for collaboration across teams. It offers features such as an intuitively-designed user interface, dynamic email templates, a robust RESTful API service with 99.5% SLA (service level agreement), and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor for creating responsive email templates.
Pricing: The free plan offers up to 12,000 emails per month, and 1,000 additional emails can be sent for $1. Paid plans start at $25/month, offering up to 50,000 emails per month.
MailerSend has a library of pre-designed dynamic email templates that can be easily personalized and integrated with the user’s preferred programming language. It also provides tools for improving email deliverability, such as email verification and analytics.
11. Moosend
Moosend is an email marketing and email automation software that offers features such as email sending, newsletter editing, personalization, audience management (segmentation, CRM tools), marketing growth (landing pages, subscription forms), automation (marketing automation, e-commerce AI, product recommendations), tracking and reporting.
Pricing: Once the 30-day free trial is over, the cheapest plan will cost $9/month, which allows the sending of an unlimited number of emails to 500 contacts.
Moosend also offers a variety of resources, such as a marketing blog, an academy, templates, webinars, and CRM tools. It also allows users to compare it with other email marketing software products such as MailChimp, Convertkit, Constant Contact, and ActiveCampaign. The built-in integrations for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento make sending emails right out of the box easy.
12. Netcore Cloud Email
Netcore Cloud also offers an email marketing platform to businesses and enterprise customers. The platform uses AI to make every email impactful with predictive segmentation, predictive engagement, send time optimization, and subject line optimization.
Pricing: The Basic plan costs $349, the Scale plan costs $589, and the Growth plan costs $899. A free trial is also available.
The platform also provides actionable insights for better decisions, and offers personalized customer journeys. It also offers resources and tools for email marketing, including A/B testing, email collection, and four types of email marketing.
13. Omnisend
Omnisend is a comprehensive eCommerce marketing platform that offers powerful email and SMS marketing functionality. It includes email campaigns, automation, segmentation, popups and forms, reporting, and multiple channels.
Pricing: You can send up to 500 emails per month for free. The standard plan costs $16/month and allows sending 6,000 emails to 500 contacts.
Omnisend offers resources such as migration tools, and multi-store accounts. It also integrates with 80+ popular services such as WooCommerce, Shopify, and Wix. This integration makes it easy for businesses to create on-brand, shoppable emails, automate sales, fully leverage customer data, capture and convert new subscribers, track and learn what’s working best, and tap into omnichannel marketing.
14. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is an all-in-one platform that provides businesses with a variety of digital marketing solutions. One of their main focuses is providing reliable transactional emails with a 97% deliverability rate. They have a decade of experience in email deliverability, and offer dedicated IPs for high-volume sending.
Pricing: The free plan allows sending up to 300 emails per day. Paid plans start at $15/month for 20,000 emails and an additional cost of $10/month to remove the Sendinblue Branding from the bottom of emails.
They also offer multiple setup options, such as SMTP relay, email API, webhooks, and a plugin. These features allow businesses to connect to their transactional servers in a way that best fits their existing tech stack. They support several integrations for major CMS tools and eCommerce platforms, as well as a free inbound parsing service to make transactional emails two-way.
15. SendLayer
SendLayer is an email delivery platform that provides a reliable and easy-to-use service for sending transactional emails. It offers detailed email logs, open-and-click analytics, mailing lists, API and SMTP email relay, and email analytics.
Pricing: The cheapest plan starts at $5/month and allows sending up to 1,000 emails.
SendLayer is suitable for small businesses that are just getting started. Some of its key features include unlimited mailing lists and event-based webhooks, which automatically trigger actions based on specific events, such as an email being opened, or a link being clicked.
16. SendPulse
SendPulse offers a transactional email service that allows users to send email campaigns through SMTP or API. The service offers a free plan that allows up to 12,000 emails to be sent per month.
Pricing: The free plan allows sending 12,000 emails for free. Paid plans start at $8.85/month for 25,000 emails. Alternatively, you can opt for the pay-as-you-go plan, which costs $15/year for 10,000 emails.
SendPulse supports multiple channels such as SMS, push, in-app, and chat. Their service includes automation, dedicated IP addresses, SPF and DKIM authentication, a list of unsubscribed contacts, open and click tracking, custom tracking domain, and webhooks for tracking email status. Additionally, they offer a variety of tools for sending transactional emails, including a drag-and-drop editor, subscription forms, email templates, and a Chrome extension.
17. SMTP
SMTP is an email delivery solution that enables businesses to send and track high-volume emails effortlessly. It is named after SMTP, an abbreviation of simple mail transfer protocol – the underlying technology used by all email service providers. This company and the protocol are two completely different things – they just share the same name.
The company offers various services such as email relay API, transactional email, SMTP for developers and marketers, and managed delivery.
Pricing: Plans start at $25 per month for 50,000 emails from a shared IP.
SMTP is one of the most reliable and trusted senders on the internet, with over 22 years of experience in the industry. They claim to have more than 99% uptime and 95% customer satisfaction. Their services offer scalable sending, reliable delivery, secured sending, and easy integration. The company also offers 24/7 expert support and detailed reporting data for up to 90 days.
18. SocketLabs
SocketLabs is an email delivery service that provides technology, infrastructure, and expertise in order to help businesses improve their email deliverability. The company offers a range of solutions, including SMTP service, email APIs, and tailored solutions.
Pricing: You can use a developer account to send up to 2,000 emails per month for free. The cheapest paid plan starts at $39.95/month and offers 40,000 emails per month.
They also provide detailed reporting, automatic bounce processing, and advanced analytics to help customers understand and improve their email delivery performance. Additionally, they offer a free trial, with migration tools for customers looking to switch from other email service providers. It supports DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and MTA-STS. It also constructs smart delivery rules based on the ever-changing rulesets of mailbox providers.
19. Sparkpost
SparkPost is an email deliverability platform that focuses on successful deliverability to recipients’ inboxes – avoiding spam filters. The platform offers a variety of tools, such as real-time insight into email delivery health, Adaptive Delivery technology to optimize email delivery, and access to industry experts for technical account management and proactive reporting.
Pricing: The starter plan costs $30 for 100K emails per month.
The company also provides resources such as whitepapers, webinars, and infographics to help customers improve their email deliverability. It offers a unique service called Taxi for Email, an email design and productivity collaboration platform that helps enterprise and agency teams improve their email marketing. The platform aims to save time and improve team collaboration, reducing miscommunication and allowing them to be more strategic.
Conclusion
Transactional emails are a crucial part of any business’s communication strategy. They provide a way to communicate important information to customers promptly and efficiently, increase customer engagement and satisfaction, reduce customer support inquiries, and improve customer trust and loyalty.
The best email service provider depends on your specific use case and business needs. It’s important to evaluate the features and pricing of different providers to find the best fit for your business.
If you’re looking for a robust, flexible, and cost-effective way to manage your servers, sign up for a free trial of Runcloud, which offers a range of server management solutions tailored to your business needs.
