Email service provider

A powerful email service provider built with your business in mind

A service provider targeting your best interests is exactly what you need if you want your email marketing campaigns to succeed. Email service providers power your marketing efforts and ensure your hard work doesn’t go to waste. Push through the fear of hitting “send” and make it into your subscribers’ inboxes with the right provider by your side.

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What are email service providers?

Email service providers (ESPs) are one of the most powerful pieces of software in your sales and marketing tech stack. ESPs enable you to build and send email marketing campaigns, validate your email addresses, and help you improve your deliverability.

In other words, ESPs allow you to send thoughtful, well-designed emails, create personalized messages, and design solid, repeatable marketing strategies to build your business — and make customers happy. Some free ESPs include Gmail, AOL Mail, and ProtonMail. However, these free email services are rarely equipped to operate at an enterprise scale. To send out large marketing campaigns, you’ll need an ESP like Mailgun that’s separate from your personal inbox service provider (ISP). Don’t worry; we’ll explain everything.

ESPs enable you to:

  • Use dynamic content in emails. Personalize your emails to your subscribers at scale with dynamic content that switches out specific segments depending on your target audience.
  • Rely on marketing and email automation. Streamline your workflow, send triggered emails, and start conversations with your subscribers. And see how email automation minimizes supply chain disruptions.
  • Build email marketing campaigns. Create email marketing campaignswith ease through drag-and-drop editors and powerful APIs.

  • Obtain analytics on your email campaign. Use key marketing metrics like your open rate, conversion rate, click-through rate, and click-to-open ratio.

How can I find the best email service provider?

Whether you’re creating bulk email marketing campaigns or responding to user-initiated requests, you want to ensure you’re sending emails from an ESP with your needs in mind.

Some small businesses start off by sending marketing and transactional emails from free email services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Zoho Mail, GMX Mail, and Hotmail. With these free email providers, you get what you pay for (or rather, what you don’t). They have daily email send and storage limits — Google and G Suite are set at 500 — making it challenging for marketers to use these email accounts for large-scale campaigns.

To communicate confidently and consistently with your customers, no matter what email clients they use, you need to use an ESP in tandem with your personal email account.

Mailgun’s cloud-based infrastructure scales with you, so you don’t need to worry about email storage, email authentication, SMTP servers, and storage space. But it’s Mailgun’s RESTful API that sets us apart from other ESPs. Our system seamlessly integrates into your web application and mobile app to get your company’s messaging protocol up and running in no time.

Advanced email tools to boost your campaigns

As a business ESP, Mailgun offers advanced features designed by developers for developers.

Here’s what makes Mailgun the best email service for transactional and marketing emails:

  • Plug in with a flexible email API
  • Ensure your emails make it into inboxes with advanced analytics
  • Send targeted email marketing campaigns with seamless automation
  • Stay compliant with data protection policies
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Plug in with a flexible email API

Think outside the box with our customizable API-based email service. Create domain names, verify email domains, and send both HTML and plain-text formats to mobile devices like iPhone or Android with responsive emails.

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Ensure your emails make it into inboxes with advanced analytics

Use Mailgun to send emails and check email campaign data in real-time. Innovate with our email deliverability experts to ensure your messages avoid the spam filters from major email clients:

What does this mean for you? You’ll need to consider more than just how the email looks in your inbox, especially when it comes to deliverability.

Our dashboard serves as a campaign monitor – offering tools for reporting, email tracking, and A/B testing to monitor your email campaigns and grow your company’s reach. See which messages are sparking customer engagement on social networks and social media. And find out the best times to schedule email messages.

  • Gmail remains the world’s most popular email client (65.3% of users)
  • Yahoo Mail is the second-most popular email client in the United States (14.2% of users)
  • Microsoft Outlook is the second-most popular email client in France, Spain, and the UK (with 19.7%, 20%, and 30.6% of users, respectively)
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Send targeted email marketing campaigns with seamless automation

Your customers expect the best. So why not deliver it? Rather than batching-and-blasting hundreds of emails at once, segment your lists by behavior, interest, account potential, and more. Forget about spreadsheets — take care of it directly in your ESP.

Mailgun has opportunities for endless customization:

Let us help you maintain your IP and sender reputation.

  • Trigger emails automatically based on website behavior, like abandoned cart emails, content downloads, transactional receipts, and more.
  • Send to customers by persona. The mailing list API divides address lists into different segments for varied interest groups or different use cases. Each segmented mailing list contains a group of members which itself has an email address, like developers@mailgun.net.
  • Keep lists squeaky clean. With automatic suppressions and other list management features, you never have to worry about sending emails to unsubscribed users or those who have submitted spam complaints.
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Stay compliant with data protection policies

Mailgun helps you stay in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, and CCPA. We automatically suppress email addresses on your subscriber list when invalid addresses that bounce back messages and people unsubscribe. We have enhanced security and data processing measures to assist customers in their EU data protection efforts.

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Try the best free email solution out there.

See what you can accomplish with the world's best email delivery platform. As you grow, we scale with you, empowering you to send unlimited emails. Need more help? We have deliverability consultants ready to help as part of our managed email service that proactively monitors your email account.

Businesses need an ESP optimized for email marketing and triggered emails. Try Mailgun to see if it’s the best email marketing service for your needs.

Check out our plans to bundle features for better deliverability for businesses that send over 100,000 emails.

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Other features

Everything you need in an ESP

Mailgun delivers powerful features that set your email marketing campaigns up for success. Automate sends, segment your email lists, boost your deliverability, and more. Plus, we’re always here to help with technical support for all your emails.

Products

Extend your tech stack with:
Email parsing software
Bounce management software
Email API

Solutions

Overcome email challenges with:
Email subject line tester
Email spam checker
Email templates

Use Cases

See how Mailgun works:
Email testing tool
Email analytics
Email logs

FAQs

A quick Google search will pull up a list of ESPs, including some familiar, free options like Gmail and some enterprise-ready options like Mailgun, Mailchimp, and Sendgrid. Check with your marketing team to determine which ESP best fits your business needs.
While there are many free email services, they’re not all created equal. Many free ESPs have daily sending caps. Other free services like Mailgun start with a basic plan of 5,000 emails a month and scale up with your business’s needs.
Gmail is a widely used email service operating using SMTP and IMAP protocols. However, Gmail is better equipped to handle personal and business mailing needs rather than email marketing.
Gmail is a free ESP you may be familiar with. In fact, Gmail is connected to other tools like Google Drive that help to supercharge your workflow. Keep in mind Gmail caps you at 500 emails a day, which limits those who need an enterprise-scale email marketing solution.
At Mailgun, we make it easy for you to migrate your emails from one ESP to our platform with our powerful API. Check out our tutorials for migrating your emails from Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and Mandrill.