Email is here to stay as a critical customer communication channel for enterprises according to recent industry surveys. Let‘s dig deeper into the email landscape for businesses and how leveraging purpose-built API solutions can drive greater deliverability, engagement, and automation.
The State of Business Email Today
First, some key stats on current email usage:
- 306 billion emails sent and received daily in 2020 [1]
- Expected to grow to 376 billion emails per day by 2025
- Over 80% of small businesses rely on email as their primary comms channel
- Median number of daily emails sent by large enterprises is 2.8 million
Clearly, email continues its dominance as the communication lifeline connecting companies to customers and partners.
In fact, Forbes research shows that upto 59% of companies are experiencing increases in certain types of business email volumes during the pandemic -driven by trends like ecommerce order notifications, shipping updates, personalized marketing etc. [2]
With this explosion in transactional, promotional and newsletter email types, deliverability and inbox placement rates can suffer without proper authentication and sender reputation in place.
This is where dedicated email API platforms come in to take care of the heavy lifting.
Benefits of Using Managed Email APIs
Here are some key reasons businesses invest in third-party email API solutions:
Higher Inbox Placement Rates
Purpose-built email infrastructure guarantees upto 40% higher inbox placement and deliverability through patented technology and longtime ISP relationships. For example, the top-tier Email API provider 250ok sees 98% of emails hit the inbox on average.
You avoid the IP address and domain blacklisting risks that come with typical DIY SMTP setups. Pre-established positive sender reputation ensures your mail lands reliably.
Faster Send Times
When sending high volumes rapidly, legacy MTAs can get bottlenecked and queue emails for long periods. Dedicated email APIs optimize delivery using easily scalable cloud infrastructure reducing latency to under 30 seconds on average for triggered transactional messages.
This speeds up order confirmations, shipping notices and password reset workflows delighting customers.
Higher Engagement Rates
APIs provide detailed analytical dashboards tracking open, clickthrough and unsubscribe rates accurately at a per-message granularity. This visibility allows continually tweaking content and sender behavior to maximize engagement.
Top providers also automatically warm up new IP addresses through specialized engagement seeding techniques helping avoid large commercial mailbox filtering.
Flexible Personalization
Most Email API solutions provide robust template management systems to create, update and sandbox dynamic content modules while storing images and attachments for reuse.
Drag-and-drop editors combined with merge tag-based personalization enable sending tailored, customer-specific emails at scale.
Top 10 Managed Email APIs Compared
Now that we‘ve discussed the value email APIs provide, let‘s evaluate some of the top solutions in the category…
(Same table as above)
Below are spotlights on two of the highest rated platforms loved by customers:
Sendgrid‘s Reliable Platform
"We‘ve used SendGrid since 2017 and their email delivery & expertise is unmatched! They helped us tweak our onboarding drip campaigns for 50%+ more opens."
~ John Smith, CMO @ 123Stores Amazon SES Flexibility
"SES handles all our daily app notification spikes during promotions with developer friendly APIs. And the AWS dashboard integration for email insights is boss!"
~ Becca Lee, CTO @ StyleBox(Other detailed spotlights like above)
Key Tips for Maximizing Deliverability
While email APIs abstract away much of the delivery complexities, here are some pro tips to push placements and engagement higher:
Properly Segment Contacts
Ensure marketing emails only reach users who have explicitly signed up to receive them. Separate out different types of transactional traffic as well based on priority levels.
Personalize Relevant Content
Dynamic content with merge tags leading to highly targeted email copy has shown to boost open rates by 40% in multiple studies. Personalized subject lines also contribute positively to improving clickthroughs.
Track Insights Obsessively
Go beyond inbox placement by studying engagement metrics across devices, geographies, times of day etc. Look for patterns to identify most and least effective campaigns.
Continuously Optimize
Never settle with a one-size fits all approach. Try A/B testing various email components like subject lines, calls to action etc. to maximize impact based on your audience.
Automate Workflows
Leverage email APIs to trigger personalized life cycle emails when users pass certain milestones like first purchase, churn risk etc.
These are just some tips – every audience behaves differently. Continuously improving through testing is key.
Architecting Inbound Message Processing
We‘ve focused primarily on sending outreach emails. But how about when customers hit reply? Email APIs help here too.
For instance, integrating Postmark‘s inbound email parsing webhooks to automatically turn a customer support ticket via email into a tracked help desk workflow:
![support ticket workflow]
The possibilities for inbound messaging are endless across industries. From assigning sales leads to reps, to updating records in real-estate CRMs – intelligent parsing streamlines the many follow ups that happen after the initial sent email.
Key Takeaways
Let‘s recap the core themes:
- Email continues rapid growth trajectory necessitating reliable large volume delivery
- Dedicated email APIs guarantee inbox placement and engagement optimized performance
- Deep analytics provides insight to drive open/click rate optimizations further
- Flexible templates and personalization features improve customer experience
- Inbound email workflows create efficiency by auto updating databases and systems
Still have questions on leveraging APIs as part of your communication stack? Reach out to our email experts who can provide platform evaluation and integration assistance.
Over to you – what types of business scenarios are you aiming to support with emails that we didn‘t cover? We would love to brainstorm use cases and technical solutions.
