We have clients with mission critical email messaging usage, some of whom are atypical including publicly listed companies and medical practices utilising email for inter-clinic communications and business critical messaging. As such. we had built an enviable platform in-house for delivery of transactional and person-to-person email.
Our inhouse platform had no deliverability issues, clients were extremely happy with the results and maintenance to date was minimal. Nothing broke, nothing to fix? Maybe so, however looking forward we anticipate significant growth. With our background in email we knew there was much to do if we were to maintain deliverability and ensure scalability (our current inhouse model would be costly to scale). We were concerned about the chance of our morphing into an email company by building up our inhouse platform to meet clients requirements.
So we looked at a variety of options including outsourcing our email infrastructure entirely and a number of hybrid best-of-breed models. With clients concerns around privacy and security GDRP and Australian Privacy requirements we decided it best to maintain client mailboxes and message stores as well as the receipt of clients email within our own virtual infrastructure in Sydney, Australia. However we still wanted to address issues around scalable email delivery. Which is when we looked to other vendors including SendGrid
Uber receipts, Yelp notifications, eBay Marketing messages are all sent via SendGrid in fact they send about 2% of legitimate email worldwide which is a significant share, over 1 billion messages every single day. Our founder having delivered over 150Billion email messages in his career and widely considered a leader in the field of email messaging has a solid understanding of all the key players in the industry. Utilising our experience and knowledge of the players in the industry SendGrid was an obvious frontrunner.
Very few other vendors could meet our very specific requirements for our clients, our exacting standards for deliverability and address all our other concerns about a potential messaging partner. However there were also concerns about the cost. the long term viability of the business, its past business practices and their reputation with current and former clients and employee’s all performing an important part of the elimination process.
Whilst the cost per message certainly isn’t the cheapest in the industry, and comes in at a factor of about 11x our current email messaging delivery cost we believe the improved reporting, 24/7/365 availability monitoring and resolution of issues and the instant scalability meant we still needed to consider the opportunity.
Having factored in the additional benefits, and ability to support our anticipated rapid growth of client messaging requirements we decided some additional overhead was going to be a necessary investment as part of our growth strategy for 2018.
We also prefer to partner with established organisations with solid principles and a positive work ethic. This ensures our selected suppliers and stakeholders have a corporate ethos that gels with our own. Our partners being able to find, retain and keep the best talent happy is something that we believe is important to everyone’s success.
So when we heard that SendGrid was honoured as a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award Winner for 2017/18 it only went to re-enforce our thinking behind making the switch. “At SendGrid, we understand the importance of transparent feedback to help us recruit top talent, learn, improve and even celebrate our successes,” said Pattie Money, Chief People Operations Officer at SendGrid.
That hot on the heels of a successful IPO valuing the company at over a billion Australian dollars and our successful testing over a period of several months meant the decision was made to use SendGrid. Not only that by utilising savings we made with other network improvements and the cost rductions afforded by selecting Google as our preferred infrastructure partner means we are able to absorb the additional costs and not charge our clients a premium for the additional service benefits.
All clients were upgraded at no cost to the SendGrid sending infrastructure today, with no downtime and no configuration changes needed to be made by our customers.
