Choosing the right transactional email provider is pivotal to ensuring that these messages are delivered promptly and securely. This post will further define WordPress transactional emails, provide a list of server options, and explain how you can use Solid Mail to connect your transactional emails.

What are WordPress transactional emails?

Transactional emails are triggered by specific actions or events on your website and are crucial for effective communication. These emails include server-related messages, notifications, and other informational emails sent by your sites or plugins.

Examples of WordPress transactional emails include:

• Order confirmations
• Payment informations
• Shipping and delivery confirmations
• Notification emails (such as order status, password changes, etc.)
• Cart abandonment 
• New account registration

Given both the importance and repetitive nature of these emails, reliable and effective delivery is a must.

Why use an outside transactional email service when your server could just as well send those emails for you?

Some people may be tempted to use the built-in mail function on the server. For example, WordPress uses the PHP’s built-in mail function to send emails such as password reset requests, order invoices, and more. However, PHP Mail is only as good as your server and most hosts don’t have dedicated PHP Mail monitoring. 

Even hosts that focus on WordPress often lack email services or don’t actively monitor for deliverability. Spam and scams can result, negatively impacting the server’s reputation with email service providers (ESPs) like Google, Yahoo, and Outlook. This means your emails may not even make it to the inbox.

As you can see, without an outside transactional email service, emails can fail in their intended purpose. By choosing a dedicated transactional email provider that offers robust deliverability features and monitoring tools, you can safeguard against issues and ensure that your messages reach their destination as intended.

Using an SMTP plugin combined with an email service provider instead of PHP Mail on the server leads to more reliable, secure, and efficient email communication for WordPress websites. Its main goal is to deliver quality transactional emails, which helps eliminate spam and scams.

What are my options for transactional email service providers?

You have many options for a transactional email service provider, including the following options:  

1. Mandrill

A popular WordPress transactional email option is Mandrill, a paid MailChimp add-on. To use this product, users need a MailChimp account. Paying for MailChimp and managing another account are drawbacks to using Mandrill.

FREE level

• This is a paid product, so no free version is available.

PAID level

• The paid plans ranges from at $10/block to $20/block depending on how many emails per month.

2. Mailjet

Mailjet seems to focus itself around the flexibility of using templates for all their emails, including transactional emails. Mailjet also has its own API for customization and even a simple way of creating SMTP relays. The premium levels also have an easy to use comparison A/B email testing system.

FREE level

• You can send up to 200 emails a day and there is a cap of 6,000 emails a month.

PAID level

• The paid plans start at 15,000 monthly emails for $17/month and then it goes up from there.

3. Brevo (formerly SendinBlue)

Brevo can do most of the basics (even on the free level). There is a full API that opens the door for complex integration and the generation of detailed reports. You can handle your marketing emails, drip campaigns, transactional emails and even SMS messages.

FREE Level

• Brevo allows you to send up to 300 emails/day.

PAID Level

• Paid plans start at 5,000 emails/month for $9/month and go up from there.

4. Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid seems to have a lot of large companies using their service (Uber, Airbnb, Spotify). So the services they offer are quite robust along with the flexibility of their API.  SendGrid also has a number of video and written tutorials to help you get started.

FREE Level

• You can send up to 100 emails/day with the free level.

PAID Level

• The paid plans start at $19.95/month for up to 50,000 emails.

5. Amazon SES

The amount of free emails you get with Amazon SES may make it worth it to go through the hassle of setting up and verifying all your domain details.  It could be the perfect tool for your WordPress site to send transactional emails due to the pricing structure that is so friendly to small businesses.

FREE Level

• You can send 3,000 emails/month through Amazon SES a month for free.

Paid Level

• You pay for only what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage.The cost starts at $0.10/1000 emails.

6. Mailgun

Mailgun seems to have an approach that mirrors SendGrid but is at a cheaper price point. If you only need to send transactional emails from your WordPress site, the API and integration of Mailgun may be the easiest to use.

FREE Level

• You can send 100 emails/day for free.

PAID Level

• Plans are priced at sending up to 10,000 emails/month for $15/month.

7. Postmark

Postmark focuses on the tracking and analytics of transactional emails.  In fact it only does transactional emails so once you verify your email/domain information you can be on your way to 100% inbox delivery rates.

FREE Level

• You can try Postmark for free with 100 emails a month. 

PAID Level

• The plans begin at 10,000 emails a month for $15 a month.

How Do I Connect One of These Transactional Email Services to WordPress?

The easiest way to make sure your WordPress site starts sending all the transactional emails generated from WordPress and plugins is to use Solid Mail. 

Solid Mail is an easy-to-use, set-it-and-forget-it SMTP Plugin for WordPress. Enjoy fast connection to popular SMTP email service providers, an intuitive user interface, and flexible mail logging. 

Solid Mail builds upon the robust foundation of WP-SMTP, a highly trusted and widely used plugin with an impressive 4.5-star rating and active installations on over 80,000 sites. Our team has taken this reliable tool and made significant enhancements to improve both its functionality and user experience. By refining its features and interface, we’ve ensured that Solid Mail is not only more intuitive and user-friendly but also continues to deliver dependable performance.

Don’t just take our word for it. Try Solid Mail today!