Powering Email Delivery for Software Vendors


February 03, 2021
Written by
SendGrid Team
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Twilio contributors are their own

Powering Email Delivery for Software Vendors

The need for businesses to provide differentiated customer experiences online has created significant opportunities for software vendors to break new ground in digital communications. Now businesses can use engagement platforms designed for specific industries, use cases, regions, and target audiences to engage customers in unique ways.

Some examples of these software solutions include email platforms for realtors, a salon-specific appointment booking tool, and a company that provides a multichannel patient engagement platform for healthcare providers, Luma Health

Software platforms like Klaviyo have designed innovative marketing solutions that help businesses build a brand and engage customers online. These solutions provide innovative ways to use email to create differentiated customer experiences. The problem is, sending email is difficult.

"Using digital communications is critical to engaging customers and building a business online. Working with Twilio SendGrid has allowed Klaviyo to focus on building innovative solutions and not on email delivery."Hongbin Yin, Engineering Manager of Email Team at Klaviyo

To manage the complexities of email delivery, software vendors often build solutions using email APIs managed by email service providers (ESP) like Twilio SendGrid.
Selecting the right ESP for your software solution is essential to ensuring emails reach the inbox.
This allows the developers to focus on building creative solutions rather than managing email infrastructure. At Twilio SendGrid, we refer to these partners as independent software vendors (ISVs).

Selecting the right ESP to power email for your software solution is essential to ensuring emails reach the inbox. The question is, what should you look for in an ESP?

Finding the right email service provider 

Email delivery depends on the ability of your ESP to reliably scale with your solution. However, not all ESPs are architected for software vendors, making some tools better than others.

Learn about how Twilio SendGrid partners with software vendors in the video below. It’ll cover topics like:
  • ESP characteristics
  • Intelligent email handling
  • Message and data security
  • Scale and performance
  • Expertise and software vendor migrations
  • Account architecture
  • And more!


Twilio SendGrid: Architected for ISVs from Twilio on Vimeo.

Want to read instead of watch? Here are a few key takeaways:

What should a software vendor look for in an ESP?

These are the 3 main things you should look at when making your decision:
  1. Architecture planning: Is the ESP reliable or prone to outages? What are the security policies? Are they transparent? What kind of APIs exist so that you don't have to recreate the wheel entirely?
  2. Scale and speed: As your business grows (and your customers' businesses grow), will this ESP keep up with the email volume you need to send? Can it offer a competitive advantage with email delivery and processing speed?
  3. Expertise: Will your ESP help you with migration and initial setup? Once the setup is over, how will it work with you to help you and your customers succeed?

Why Twilio SendGrid fits the needs of most software vendors

Twilio SendGrid is uniquely architected for software vendors. Everything from our APIs to our Expert Services team makes building, scaling, and maintaining your software solution as easy as possible.

API parity

You can use our APIs to replicate all of Twilio SendGrid’s functionality in your solution. For example, if you wanted to create real-time sending statistics dashboards, you could use the GET statistics API endpoints.

Hybrid architecture

We host servers across the world, so if there’s ever a geographic issue, we can failover to the nearest available data center. Additionally, we only rely on hosting providers (primarily AWS) for a very small percentage of our architecture. We’re also largely self-hosted, meaning we aren’t at risk of third-party issues.

Intelligent handling

Our email delivery focuses on maintaining and improving your sending reputation. We do automatic retries, which means if there’s ever a soft failure (like blocks), we’ll put your email into a 72-hour retry period. Additionally, we’ll automatically queue your emails to send your messages as fast as possible while respecting internet service provider (ISP) limits. Lastly, we have threat detection to identify when an issue happens, so we can re-queue your emails accordingly—helping you avoid penalties and reputation damage.

Security

As the steward of your customers’ data, you’re responsible for protecting it—and that means working with ESPs who’ll safeguard your messages, accounts, and data. Twilio SendGrid provides everything from authenticated APIs and account access to encrypted message delivery and data protection to ensure your information stays safe.

Scale

Twilio SendGrid sends more than 70B emails a month on average. On Black Friday 2020, we sent 5.8B emails in a 24-hour period with no service disruptions—that's scale you can trust. Our scalable API can easily handle 15K transactions per second, taking our median delivery speed down to 1.9 seconds.

Professional expertise and software vendor migration

To build your platform on top of Twilio SendGrid, you'll need a well-architected foundation—our experts are here to help. From authentication to IP pooling to troubleshooting, our Expert Services team is ready to lean in and help you get the job done.

Interested in partnering with Twilio SendGrid on your software solution? Check out our Twilio Partner Program to learn more about becoming a Twilio SendGrid partner.

Recommended For You



Most Popular


Send With Confidence

Partner with the email service trusted by developers and marketers for time-savings, scalability, and delivery expertise.