Email marketing can take over from search advertising as the main way to sell e-commerce products. Many senders start small, around 1,000 emails a day, and grow toward a million. At that scale the work is real: data has to be collected, cleaned and split into relevant groups before any campaign goes out, and the bill for the sending tool grows with the list.
The choices fall into a few groups: hosted email marketing services such as Mailchimp and Sendgrid, and transactional email providers such as Sendgrid and Mailgun.
Searching for email marketing companies in India or Bangalore turns up plenty of one-stop agencies, and digging further leads to SMTP servers. Expect persistent follow-up from sales representatives once you leave contact details on those sites.
| Product | Best for | Price | Rating | Active installs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | ||||
| Mailerlite | ||||
| Interspire Email Marketer |
Mailchimp: Easy Campaigns, Rising Bills
Mailchimp is an easy-to-use email marketing service. It lets you bring in your own subscriber list and set it up for regular campaigns.
The free plan caps the number of subscribers, so a growing list soon needs a paid account. Paid plans unlock features such as separate campaigns for different subscriber lists, and the campaign editor is one of the friendliest available to marketers.
Where it falls short: every new batch of subscribers to email pushes the bill higher.
Because pricing follows list size, a fast-growing list means more emails sent and a steadily rising monthly cost. Marketing teams may also find the editor restrictive over time, which is usually when cheaper tools start to look attractive.
Mailerlite: A Cheaper Alternative With Limits
A lower-cost option is Mailerlite, often listed as a Mailchimp alternative. Its email editor is similar to Mailchimp’s and works well for building campaigns. The catch is a limited, point-based subscription that can make the service hard to keep using as a list changes.
Larger senders tend to outgrow it: the plan restricts how freely subscribers can be added or pruned, so an in-house setup becomes the next step.
Interspire Email Marketer Software: Full Control, More Upkeep
Interspire can run on a shared SMTP server bought through a local reseller. That arrangement carries a known risk: after a few campaigns, Gmail may start filing every message as spam. The usual cause is the reseller and its shared IP address rather than the software.
For a marketer able to fund and maintain a private SMTP server, the Interspire Email Marketer Suite has every tool needed.
Running the suite on your own SMTP server avoids the reseller problem but asks far more of you. Sending around 1,500,000 emails a month means paying for a VPS server and IP addresses, installing PowerMTA and dealing with DMARC and EHLO, plus practices such as IP rotation and IP warm-up.
How Sendy Works on Amazon SES
A setup that holds up well at high volume is Sendy, a self-hosted PHP application that sends bulk email through Amazon SES (Simple Email Service).
A common worry is that messages sent via Amazon SES go straight to spam, since the service is cheap enough to attract spammers. That reputation is a reason to set up the sending domain with care, as described below, rather than a reason to skip the service.
Setup is quick. After a license is bought on the Sendy site, the app goes onto a cloud host in roughly 20 minutes; a DigitalOcean SSD server is one choice.
With Sendy running on a $10 cloud server, the Sendy Get Started Guide walks through adding SPF and DKIM records for the domain. If DKIM will not verify with your DNS host (DigitalOcean’s DNS service is known to cause this), moving DNS to Cloudflare is one fix.
Sendy is straightforward to install.
Once the domain passes DKIM verification, bounce and complaint handling is set up through Amazon SNS, and Sendy’s PHP files are entered in the Amazon SES domain notification settings so bounced and complaining addresses are handled automatically.
- Sendy can be ordered through this link. [Affiliate link]
- DigitalOcean SSD servers are available through this link at a low price. [Affiliate link]
Price: $10 per 100,000 emails, plus $10 a month for the server.
DigitalOcean users can follow a detailed walkthrough of the Sendy install, linked here. Each Sendy order comes with a license plus the official Get Started Guide delivered by email.
Amazon SES sets a sending rate for each account. At 140 emails per second, a million messages take roughly 8 to 9 hours to go out.
At a million emails: about $100 to Amazon SES, and $20 a month for hosting.
Drawback: the setup calls for strong technical knowledge.
How to Scale Toward 1 Million Emails Daily
A new Amazon SES account with production access starts with a daily limit of 25,000 emails and a rate of ten emails per second. As your lists grow, you can ask AWS to raise both the daily quota and the per-second rate.
Before a very large send, such as a holiday campaign to more than 1 million subscribers, get confirmation that Amazon SES has raised your daily quota.
Open rates also depend on authentication. Publish correct SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for the sending domain, register that domain with Google Postmasters, and add a properly configured tracking domain; together these help more of your emails get opened.
Email Marketing Tips That Keep Your Account Safe
Amazon takes the use of Amazon SES seriously. A new account can be put on probation in its first week, and getting full access back means explaining the business clearly: why recipients opted in to email, and how subscriptions and unsubscriptions are handled. Once those details are spelled out, Amazon restores full access.
Before sending through Amazon SES, check this list:
- Monitor your bounce rate closely.
- Do not use the service to send email advertisements.
- Watch for messages being marked as spam; that is risky for your account.
- Authenticate the sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- Google Postmasters and Microsoft SNDS should both list the domain you send from.
- Links in templates should run through a tracking domain that belongs to you.
- Avoid spam-trigger words and heavy use of symbols, both of which hurt deliverability.
- Keep a sensible balance of text to images and text to links.
- Keep external links to a minimum in your campaigns.
Staying out of the spam folder and improving inbox delivery are larger topics that deserve guides of their own.
For installation details, the official Sendy Get Started Guide is the place to start.
Note: On a properly authenticated setup, open rates tend to climb slowly over time.
Prices and limits are as originally published; check current rates before planning a budget.
