What is SendGrid? The Ultimate Guide to Transactional Email for Developers

Email remains one of the most effective ways to engage users and drive business results. Consider these statistics:

• There are over 4 billion email users worldwide, and that number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025 (Statista)
• The average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing (Litmus)
• 49% of consumers said they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis (Statista)
• Transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email, and can generate 6x more revenue (Campaign Monitor)

As a developer, you have an incredible opportunity to leverage email to improve user engagement, conversion, and retention. But building an email infrastructure from scratch is no easy task. Deliverability in particular is a challenge, with over 20% of legitimate email not making it to the inbox.

That‘s where SendGrid comes in. SendGrid is a cloud-based email service that provides reliable email delivery at scale. Whether you‘re sending transactional emails like password resets, or powering an email newsletter to thousands of subscribers, SendGrid abstracts away the complexities of email so you can focus on your core product.

Why SendGrid for Transactional Email?

While you can certainly find open source SMTP servers like Postfix or Sendmail, configuring and maintaining them is a full-time job. Transactional email services like SendGrid provide key benefits:

• Scalability: SendGrid can handle massive email volume with burst rates over 14,000 requests per second. No need to worry about scaling your own infrastructure.

• Deliverability: SendGrid maintains relationships with major ISPs and inbox providers to ensure high deliverability rates. Their constantly-evolving sending algorithms adapt to prevent emails from being marked as spam.

• Ease of Integration: With official libraries for major languages and frameworks, plus a robust HTTP API, adding email capabilities to your app is straightforward. No need to manage SMTP servers and ports.

• Analytics: SendGrid provides real-time analytics on email delivery, opens, clicks, bounces, and more. Gain visibility into your email performance without building your own tracking and reporting.

But what really sets SendGrid apart is its developer focus. While competitors like Mailchimp and Constant Contact primarily target marketers, SendGrid was built by developers, for developers.

Comparing SendGrid to Other Transactional Email APIs

To illustrate this developer focus, let‘s compare SendGrid to a couple alternatives for sending transactional email.

SendGrid vs. Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective option for sending bulk email. But it is missing some key features that developers need, such as:

• No templating engine
• No dedicated IPs (every customer shares the same IP)
• No subuser support
• Limited analytics and reporting
• Minimal documentation and client libraries

SES may be a fit for developers who just need a bare bones SMTP service and want to minimize costs. But most developers will find SendGrid‘s features worth the added expense.

SendGrid vs. Mailgun

Mailgun is another developer-focused email service that is fairly comparable to SendGrid. It has a solid feature set, including:

• Flexible HTTP API
• Detailed documentation
• SMTP relay and sending domains
• Tracking and analytics
• Inbound email parsing

The main differences come down to scale and ecosystem. SendGrid simply offers more — more features like templates and dedicated IPs, a larger support team, and a broader set of integrations. For enterprise-grade email, SendGrid usually wins out. But both are solid options for developer-centric email.

Integrating SendGrid into a Node.js App

Now let‘s see how easy it is to add transactional email to a Node.js application using SendGrid. We‘ll go through some common use cases like sign up confirmations, password resets, and sending a newsletter.

First, install the official SendGrid Node.js library:

npm install @sendgrid/mail

Then, initialize the SendGrid library with your API key (which you can create in the SendGrid UI):

const sgMail = require(‘@sendgrid/mail‘)
sgMail.setApiKey(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY)

Now you‘re ready to send an email!

Sending a Signup Confirmation

When a new user signs up for your application, you‘ll typically want to send them a confirmation email with a link to verify their email address. Here‘s how you can send that with SendGrid:

const msg = {
  to: ‘[email protected]‘,
  from: ‘[email protected]‘, 
  subject: ‘Confirm Your Email Address‘,
  text: ‘Thanks for signing up! Click here to confirm your email: http://example.com/confirm/TOKEN‘,
  html: ‘<strong>Thanks for signing up!</strong> <a href="http://example.com/confirm/TOKEN">Click here to confirm your email</a>‘,
}

sgMail
  .send(msg)
  .then(() => {
    console.log(‘Confirmation email sent‘) 
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    console.error(error)
  })

This sends a simple confirmation email with both a plain text and HTML body. You would replace TOKEN with an actual token generated by your application to confirm the user‘s email.

Sending a Password Reset Email

Password reset is another common transactional email use case. The flow is similar to signup confirmation:

const msg = {
  to: ‘[email protected]‘,
  from: ‘[email protected]‘,
  subject: ‘Reset Your Password‘,
  text: ‘Forgot your password? Click here to reset it: http://example.com/reset/TOKEN‘,
  html: ‘<strong>Forgot your password?</strong> <a href="http://example.com/reset/TOKEN">Click here to reset it</a>‘,
}

sgMail
  .send(msg)
  .then(() => {
    console.log(‘Password reset email sent‘)
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    console.error(error)
  })

Again, TOKEN would be a unique token generated by your application to authenticate the password reset request.

Sending an Email Newsletter

For sending an email newsletter or promotional email to many recipients, you can use SendGrid‘s sendMultiple method:

const recipients = [
  ‘[email protected]‘,
  ‘[email protected]‘,
  ‘[email protected]‘
]

const msg = {
  to: recipients,
  from: ‘[email protected]‘,
  subject: ‘New Features for June‘,
  text: ‘Check out the new product features we shipped this month!‘,
  html: ‘<strong>Check out the new product features we shipped this month!</strong><ul><li>Feature 1</li><li>Feature 2</li><li>Feature 3</li></ul>‘
}

sgMail
  .sendMultiple(msg)
  .then(() => {
    console.log(‘Newsletter sent‘)
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    console.error(error)
  })

To personalize the newsletter for each recipient, you can use substitution tags in your template and provide the substitution values in the API call:

const msg = {
  to: recipients,
  from: ‘[email protected]‘,
  subject: ‘New Features for {{month}}‘,
  text: ‘Hi {{name}}, check out the new product features we shipped this month!‘,
  html: ‘Hi {{name}}, <strong>Check out the new product features we shipped this month!</strong>‘,
  substitutions: {
    name: [‘Joe‘, ‘Mike‘, ‘Sam‘],
    month: [‘June‘, ‘June‘, ‘June‘]
  }
}

This will replace the {{name}} and {{month}} tags with the corresponding values for each recipient.

These are just a few examples of what you can do with SendGrid‘s email API. Be sure to check out the full documentation to learn more.

Choosing a SendGrid Pricing Plan

So what will all these email capabilities cost you? SendGrid offers a few different pricing models depending on your needs.

For low-volume senders, the free plan includes 100 emails per day forever. Paid plans start at $14.95/month for 40,000 emails (about $0.0004 per email).

As you scale up, SendGrid offers two pricing models:

1. Essential Plans are based on email volume and start at $14.95/month for 40,000 emails. These plans include all the core email functionality like the API, SMTP relay, templates, tracking, etc.

2. Pro Plans are based on contacts stored and start at $89.95/month for 10,000 contacts. These plans add more advanced functionality like dedicated IPs, subuser management, SSO, and priority support. Pro plans also include a higher sending limit of 6x your contact count per month.

Most businesses will start on an Essential plan and upgrade to a Pro plan as their email program grows in sophistication. You can see the full breakdown on the SendGrid pricing page.

Case Study: How Zillow Uses SendGrid to Power Rental Marketplace Emails

To illustrate the impact transactional email can have on a business, let‘s look at how Zillow uses SendGrid to power their rental marketplace.

Zillow is the leading real estate and rental marketplace in the US, with over 195 million unique visitors per month. Email is a key communication channel for Zillow, with millions of emails sent to rental professionals and tenants each month. These emails include new property notifications, listing inquiries, application status updates, and monthly newsletters.

In the early days, Zillow‘s email infrastructure consisted of simple PHP mail() calls running on Amazon EC2. As email volume grew, this approach became unsustainable. Zillow needed an email partner that could ensure reliable delivery of their business-critical emails.

After evaluating several email providers, Zillow chose SendGrid for a few key reasons:

1. Scalability: SendGrid‘s cloud infrastructure could easily handle Zillow‘s email volume, which exceeded 100 million emails per month at peak.

2. Reliability: SendGrid‘s email deliverability expertise gave Zillow confidence that their emails would reach users‘ inboxes.

3. Ease of Integration: The SendGrid API allowed Zillow‘s developers to quickly add email functionality into new and existing applications.

But the key differentiator was SendGrid‘s responsiveness and support. SendGrid became a true partner to Zillow, consulting with their team on email best practices, promptly addressing issues, and even developing new features based on Zillow‘s needs.

With SendGrid powering their transactional email, Zillow achieved inbox placement rates over 97%. They also gained much deeper visibility into their email program with SendGrid‘s real-time analytics. By identifying which emails were driving the most engagement, Zillow was able to continually optimize their transactional and promotional emails for higher conversions.

Today, Zillow sends over 130 million emails per month through SendGrid, and email remains one of their most effective channels for engaging their users and driving marketplace activity. You can read the full case study here.

Email Deliverability Tips for Developers

Lastly, I want to share some email deliverability tips from a developer‘s perspective. While SendGrid provides a lot of deliverability features out of the box, there are a few things you‘ll want to implement in your own application to set yourself up for success:

1. Implement Double Opt-In: An email confirmation at signup ensures you have valid email addresses and the user actually wants to receive your emails. This prevents hard bounces and spam complaints down the road.

2. Include Unsubscribe Links: Every marketing email should include an obvious way to unsubscribe, typically in the footer. SendGrid will automatically add unsubscribe links if you don‘t include one, but it‘s best to design your own to match your brand.

3. Segment Your Email Lists: As your email program grows, you‘ll want to segment your list based on user preferences and behavior. This allows you to send more targeted, relevant emails that drive higher engagement. SendGrid‘s contact management features make segmentation easy.

4. Warm Up New IP Addresses: If you do start sending from a dedicated IP address, it‘s important to warm it up slowly to establish a good sending reputation. Start by sending just a few hundred emails per day, then slowly ramp up volume over several weeks. SendGrid has some great guides on the IP warmup process.

5. Monitor Email Engagement: Keep a close eye on your email metrics like opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. If you see engagement start to drop off, it‘s a sign that your emails are becoming less relevant to your audience. Use SendGrid‘s real-time analytics to spot issues early.

6. Authenticate Your Domain: Authenticating your domain with SPF and DKIM records is a must for establishing trust with inbox providers. SendGrid makes this easy with step-by-step guides in the UI.

By following these tips and leveraging SendGrid‘s powerful email platform, you‘ll be well on your way to email success.

Conclusion

I hope this guide has given you a comprehensive overview of SendGrid and how it can level up your email game as a developer. We covered everything from why email is still king for driving user engagement, to how SendGrid works under the hood, to developer-specific tips for ensuring your emails reach the inbox.

At the end of the day, the email delivery service you choose is a critical piece of your application‘s infrastructure. It‘s the direct line of communication to your users. SendGrid has proven itself to be a reliable, developer-friendly partner to thousands of businesses like Zillow, Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb.

If you haven‘t already, I encourage you to sign up for a free SendGrid account and start exploring its powerful email features. Whether you‘re just looking to send a few password reset emails, or you‘re ready to launch a full-fledged email newsletter, SendGrid has you covered.

Have any questions about SendGrid or email best practices for developers? Feel free to drop them in the comments below!