SendGrid, which began life as a transactional email delivery platform for apps, is today taking another step into the world of email marketing.
The Boulder, Colorado-based company is announcing Marketing Campaigns, a set of mass emailing features for customer retention, customer acquisition, newsletter communications, promos and company announcements.
The new capability is another step in the company’s march toward becoming what it calls “a multi-channel engagement platform.” When it was founded in 2009, its initial emphasis was on transactional email functions for applications, such as for account verification, password reset or purchase receipts.
In October, the company launched Threads, which provides behavior-driven email that is triggered by user actions or conditions. For instance, a new member might receive an email two days after a signup, instead of right away.
“Historically, we’ve been focused on transactions,” director of product marketing Jesse McCabe told me. “Now, we’re building out use cases.”
SendGrid says its cloud-based email platform is the world’s largest, delivering 20 billion emails monthly for about 32,000 paying customers, including Airbnb, Pandora, Hubspot, Uber, Walmart and Costco.
Users of Campaigns can employ the web interface to customize their own workflow and to segment lists for targeted emails. There are also campaign analytics, A/B testing and an API for integration with applications.
In 2013, SendGrid launched its Marketing Email Service, a relatively simple tool that allowed marketers to control email content for applications without having to go through developers for each change or addition. Today’s new release adds automated mass email campaign functions that marketers commonly use.
McCabe acknowledged that the email marketing space is a crowded one, with high-end competitors like Salesforce’s ExactTarget. In the functional set more in line with his company’s, he pointed to MailChimp, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor.
SendGrid’s differentiators, he said, include better tech and customer support, a customizable workflow that doesn’t force a user into a wizard and better pricing than solutions like Campaign Monitor. He also noted that SendGrid is building on a large customer base that has been focused on transactional email and can now add email marketing from the same platform.
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