Email marketing is one of the most effective methods of online communication, especially when it comes to retaining current customers and nurturing new prospects.
Companies such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber and many others take great measures to ensure their sender reputation score stays very high. This in turn, helps ensure the deliverability of their customer’s email marketing messages.
But, when it comes to the types of auto-generated server emails, otherwise known as “transactional” emails there are far fewer services to help make sure your important messages get to their destination.
Mandrill is a third party service that helps ensure deliverability of these types of transactional emails.
Mandrill was born out of a desire to let the “little guy” make sure emails such as password resets, contact form submission notifications, and other important auto-generated server emails could harness the email infrastructure and sender reputation of a big trusted service provider.
Mandrill was formed in 2012 by MailChimp as a separate company, however earlier this year it was integrated into MailChimp's email service as an add-on. Mandrill and Sendgrid, in my personal opinion are probably the only two SMTP services of their kind that are really worth considering.
But thanks to a persistent programmer I’ve had the privilege to work with as of late, I’m pretty much convinced Mandrill is the only choice for me and in turn, our maintenance plan clients.
What is Mandrill?
Mandrill is a transactional email infrastructure service. It was designed specifically to handle transactional emails such as password resets, welcome messages and order confirmations. It is now an add-on for MailChimp that helps improve deliverability of these types of transactional emails, or one-to-one personalized e-commerce emails.
If website notifications have been going to the spam folder, or aren’t arriving at all, there is a strong chance Mandrill may help alleviate those types of issues.
There are some other reasons the above symptoms might appear but we’ve learned at our agency that until Mandrill is set up, the other symptoms aren’t worth spending the time to treat as they are often cured by getting Mandrill in place and configured properly.
Why Use Mandrill?
What if your sales reps were not only missing email notifications that a lead just filled out a form on the website, but also did not even know that they were missing them?
Let’s say your customers maintain login credentials to access certain parts of your website like premium content, or to manage their billing account. Whenever they forget their password and go to use the “forgot password recovery tool” the messages to help them re-claim access to their account might be getting lost in spam filters or blocked by ISP’s.
Mandrill, in most instances, is the magic pill for all of these problems.
As a subscriber to almost all of our website hosting and maintenance plans we even cover the cost of Mandrill for our clients. We enjoy rolling this service up as a value add with our hosting and maintenance service, because we know it helps keep our client’s operations running smoothly.
If you have a WordPress-powered site and are interested in discussing issues such as this amongst others, feel free to Contact Us today for a free consultation. For new customers who join a Vendilli maintenance plan after August 2016: Mention this article to get a credit for your first month… it’ll be on me!
