email deliverability gets easier with APIs

Email Deliverability (And How Email APIs Help)

5 min read
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According to a 2019 study from Demand Metric and Return Path, 37% of survey respondents noted email deliverability as a core email challenge. This fell just behind competing for attention and staffing/resource constraints at 45% and 40%.¹ Deliverability remains a problem in the email realm.

In this blog, we’ll discuss why email deliverability rates are so low with mass marketing/sales platforms, and why implementing a solution like the Nylas email API into your application helps your users reach nearly 100% email deliverability. 

Email Deliverability Issues with SendGrid & MailChimp

The deliverability problem impacts email marketing services that send both transactional and sales/marketing emails. What do we mean by transactional email firms? Think MailChimp, SendGrid, or other similar companies. A bulk of their business involves sending client messages that relate to “transactions” whether it’s an order confirmation, unsubscribe, or a digital signature automated request. 

Mailchimp sends approximately one billion emails per day on behalf of its customers, many of which are transactional emails like:

  • Account creation confirmation
  • Unsubscribe emails
  • Password reset emails
  • Digital entrance tickets
  • Email address confirmation emails
  • Code receipt emails for banking and other two-factor authentications

Transactional emails are typically sent through a web API or SMTP relay (see the key difference between SMTP and web APIs here) that automatically routes the proper message to the recipient. 

The other segment of email business is the sales and marketing blasts of mass email communications sent to users around the world. The IPs these providers use to send out transactional emails are shared by mass email blast campaigns. These emails tend to yield higher bounce and unsubscribe rates, which causes overall deliverability issues for every party using the mass email service – which we’ll dive into next.

Shared Domains and ISPs Yield Lower Deliverability Rates 

Shared transactional and marketing email platforms tend to have a lower sender score because of the sheer quantity of emails sent that are then unsubscribed to or bounced. Users then experience negative impacts on deliverability rates. 

For example, a business selling soccer gear online uses Mailchimp or SendGrid for its email platform. It sends out marketing and sales promotional emails with the same domain and ISP as the receipts, password reset requests, and other transactional emails. If a recipient is tired of the company and marks all of these messages as spam, then the email deliverability rates of all the related messages will suffer.  

SendGrid and other providers recommend segmenting lists between transactional recipients and mass marketing recipients. However, this is a cumbersome and time-consuming process that may still result in your emails landing in the SPAM box. 

If you’re looking to increase email deliverability rates, you’ll want to consider an email API like Nylas which sends emails on behalf of the user from the user’s real ISP – which results in higher email deliverability scores. 

SendGrid’s Email API Is Send-Only

SendGrid offers an email API that allows you to send email on behalf of users – but it’s a one-way action for sending email only. But what happens if you want to also allow users to receive email, or to be able to manage their entire inbox all within your application, including creating drafts, updating, and deleting emails, folders, and labels? That’s where the Nylas APIs come in.

Nylas APIs: Better Email Deliverability + Calendar and Contacts Data

The Nylas API providers users with nearly 100% email deliverability. Emails are sent from the sender’s actual email address and IP, instead of a shared domain or IP. It’s a vital difference for mission-critical email communications, as messages aren’t mixed together with bulk campaigns or tens of millions of transactional messages. Nylas’ solution is ideal for both 1-to-1 and 1-to-many emails and campaigns where personalization and deliverability are important.

In addition, the Nylas APIs unify the data that lives in users’ calendars and contacts. There is a strong relationship between the events on users’ calendar, the contacts in their contacts book, and the recent email communications they’ve been involved in. 

Use Cases and Benefits

The Nylas API is suited for developers and product managers building any kind of relationship management or productivity software like CRMs, Applicant Tracking Systems, Real Estate Software, HealthTech, and beyond, allowing users to access their inbox and calendar data all within these productivity tools. It’s ideal for sales teams going after high-value leads where deliverability and context matters.

With Nylas, you get assurance about email deliverability, performance, and security, including features like:

  • Nearly 100% email deliverability
  • Email analytics to track opens, link clicks, and replies
  • 99.9% guaranteed uptime
  • Stringent TLS standards
  • SOC 2 Certified practices

The Nylas API allows your users to better categorize and manage their email information from within your app, while sending communications from their own actual email addresses/IP. See the API in action by creating a developer account today. 

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