Mandrill: A Solution for your Transactional Email

Essential component of a successful email marketing strategy, transactional emails offer businesses a wide range of opportunities to interact with their customers. Whether it is for sending a receipt, confirmation of registration to a newsletter or an account opening greeting message, each email sent responds to a specific need, while being an additional and subtle occasion to promote a brand and its products or services. Nowadays, many companies offer this type of service. Among them, Mandrill, a platform offered by Mailchimp using cloud computing, can meet this need by offering an API (Application Programming Interface) and an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service.

Mandrill’s Benefits

Compared to using an internally hosted email server for sending transactional emails, Mandrill offers several benefits:

• Being a cloud service, it is efficient and very reliable [1]:
  • 99,9% SMTP uptime.
  • 99,9% API uptime (error rate of 0%).
  • Sending speed below 1 second.

• Provides many tracking statistics, which enables more precise email delivery and thus maximizes your campaign efficiency:
  • Without any changes to your email, Mandrill displays the delivery rate and allows basic searches and results exportation.
  • When activated, Mandrill can detect whether an email has been opened and also compile the number of times a recipient has clicked on a link within it.
  • To facilitate data classification, it is also possible to add tags in order to categorize your mailings.

• Charges for its services based on the number of emails sent. With Mailchimp registration fees (required to use Mandrill) a block of 25 000 emails costs about 40$ per month. Considering the maintenance costs of an internally hosted server and the possible losses incurred by that server’s failure, Mandrill quickly becomes advantageous.

Are There Any Risks Associated With Mandrill?

So far, we have not encountered major problems related to the use of the service, but an email turn down has been experienced by our development team. For one of our clients, it was very important that a confirmation email be received by their staff. Unfortunately, their anti-spam filter was relying on sites generating black lists and one of those was listing Mandrill. With over one million users, it is possible that one of their servers was temporarily on this kind of list. This situation can occur when a large amount of emails is sent to the same domain. On the other hand, in the case of an internally hosted server, the problem may come from email services (Gmail, etc.) because the number of mailings is important for the server’s reputation.

What Is The Impact Of Moving To Mandrill?

Two changes should be expected during the transition to Mandrill:

1. Two entries must be added to the DNS server to identify Mandrill as the authorized sender. The service will then send an email to one of your domain’s addresses to validate that you have proper access. This minor change allows Mandrill to keep its high email delivery rate.
2. Applications would have to be adapted for email sendings. If the login information to the SMTP server is configurable and centralized in your application (which is a good practice), this change will be made quickly.

Good And Bad Practices

Using Mandrill since October 2014, GTI’s software solutions team highlighted some good and bad practices. Here are our recommendations:

1. Create and use as many API keys as possible. These keys also serve as passwords for email sendings. This will facilitate research among your deliveries and help retracing corrupt sendings.
2. Use tags. These will help in the collect of statistical data and with research by grouping emails together by category.
3. Do not use Mandrill as an email campaign management tool. Indeed, it could be tempting to use the information in an application and thus directly manage a campaign. Unfortunately, this will slow down the sending process and increase the amount of work on your servers. It is therefore much more appropriate to use Mailchimp for this type of work.

With its many advantages and the low level of risk associated with its use, Mandrill’s service is undoubtedly an interesting option for your company’s transactional emails. At GTI, it is one of the options we propose to our partners who are looking for this type of service. With very few changes and following some good practices like those mentioned earlier, you will be able to take advantage of a reliable solution to interact effectively with your customers. If Mandrill interests you, do not hesitate to contact us to see how GTI's team is able to integrate this service into your daily operations! Laurent Grondin-Hétu, Programmer