Email Marketing vs. Email Delivery Services: What's the Difference?

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Updated 5 years ago

Are email marketing services and Email Delivery Services one and the same animal?

The answer is they can be, but not always.

There is a difference between Email marketing and Email Delivery Services and their main functions.

I've been learning many new details about their differences on my journey of setting up opt-in forms.

So hopefully this post will dispel the question of, "Email Marketing vs. Email Delivery Services, what's the difference?"

E-Book Free Gift

Let's take the simple example that you have created an opt-in form on your website for someone to give you their name and email in exchange for an e-book or a free report.

You might think an email marketing service like Mailchimp can handle everything including delivering your e-book or Free Report to the subscriber after opt-in.

Technically that's not the case. For instance, if you are using a Free Mailchimp account, Mailchimp (as an email marketing service) cannot deliver your e-book or Free Report (called asset delivery) through an Autoresponder.

Mailchimp can only be used as an email marketing service to subscribe users to your lists. And to send out emails to multiple users.

You would need to pay for a premium service of a minimum $20 per month through their partner company Mandril to deliver your e-book or free report "asset" to your subscribers.

There is a reason for this: any email that involves giving an asset by way of download after a subscriber opts-in is called a Transactional Email.

Transactional Emails

Only email marketing services can be used to subscribe users to your lists, for segmenting, and for bulk email. These are non-transactional emails.

A transactional email is one that is sent from only one sender to one recipient. An email instructing a subscriber to download your e-book or free report is a Transactional email.

Other examples of transactional emails include password reminder emails, purchase confirmation emails, and personalized product notifications.

Transactional emails are triggered by a specific user action, as opposed to marketing emails like newsletters. They are generally handled by email delivery services.

Email Delivery Services don't have lists, tags, or segments, so they can't be used for email marketing just like that.

Email delivery services ensure your emails get delivered and prevents potentially costly and frustrating problems, such as people signing up on your site and never receiving the opt-in offer they signed up for.

Yes, there are some companies that provide both Email marketing and Email Delivery Services, but not all.

In general with a few exceptions, transactional email services (email delivery services) are monthly paid services. These can range from $10 per month into the thousands per month depending on the volume of monthly emails you send out.

Example: First I connect my opt-in form to a Free Mailchimp account. As my email marketing service, they will only handle my list of subscribers but not my asset delivery.

To handle the asset delivery for Mailchimp (e.g., e-book or Free report), I would need to open an account and pay a monthly service fee to partner company Mandril, Mailchimp's transactional email delivery service.

For now, I don't want to pay the $20 per month. Maybe I will later, but for at least the first few months I would like to find a free transactional email service.

Hoila!

I signed up for SendGrid, one of the few FREE transactional email services (email delivery service) and they now handle my asset delivery (e.g., e-book, free report) through their Autoresponder.

Now I use Mailchimp (free account) to subscribe users to my lists, and separately I use SendGrid to deliver my Free Report to them through an Autoresponder.

Summary: Email Marketing Services vs. Email Delivery Services

To recap, here is a Summary of Email Marketing Services vs. Email Delivery Services:

Email Marketing Services:

Sends emails out to multiple recipients

Handles non-transactional emails

Subscribes users to your lists

Provides segmentation and tags

Paid and FREE services available

Email Delivery Services:

Sends emails from one sender to one recipient

Delivers transactional emails

Handles asset delivery (i.e. e-Book, free report, etc.)

Triggered by a specific action

Monthly paid services, very few FREE services available

I hope this post has helped you to gain a greater understanding by demonstrating the differences between Email Marketing Services vs. Email Delivery Services.

Cheers,

Kaju