SendGrid is making big moves in the tech industry and it continues its explosive company growth. This Colorado based company is handling the email delivery and marketing for some of the biggest names in the tech world. They are not the cheapest SMTP provider out there but they boast some impressive delivery rates and have great features and robust reporting. If you are shopping around for a new delivery and SMTP partner you shouldn’t leave out SendGrid.
They also make it very easy to integrate with Interspire Email Marketer although there are a couple simple drawbacks. One of the challenges is that there is no way to setup automatic bounce integration with SendGrid without a custom developed addon for Interspire. You can (as you will see below) manually export CSV files of bounces and manually add them to your Interspire Email Marketer account but that takes time. If you want to use SendGrid you need to be in the market for a custom developed solution that will handle the bounces. There are developers who have made that available already.
Since SendGrid has already provided a great tutorial I’m going to paste it below for your review.
First things first, you’ll need to log into your Email Marketer account. Once you’ve done that you can set the application’s outbound mail server to point to SendGrid, allowing you to send the mail to us so we can send it to the end recipient.
Navigate to Settings > Email Settings in the upper right corner of the Dashboard. Once inside the Email Settings page you’ll see the “Mail Server Details” header near the bottom of the page.
In order to set Email Marketer’s outbound mail server to point to SendGrid, click the “Let me specify my own SMTP server details” bubble. From there, input the following authentication details:
- SMTP Hostname: ssl://smtp.sendgrid.net or tls://smtp.sendgrid.net
- SMTP Username: [your SendGrid account’s username]
- SMTP Password: [your SendGrid account’s password]
- SMTP Port: [the port of your choosing, the options for which can be found here]
Once these settings changes have been made within the Email Settings page within your Email Marketer account, all mail from the application will be sent to SendGrid so we can send it to the end recipient. Simple as that.
Bounce integration
A bounce event occurs when mail is not able to be handed off to the mail servers at the end recipient’s address. This could happen for a number of reasons such as a full mailbox at the address, or the address not existing at all. SendGrid generates a Bounces suppression list when you send mail to addresses that end up bouncing. We suppress subsequent mail to these addresses unless you tell us otherwise in the Email Reports tab within your account. There are two primary ways you can integrate these bounces, generated by SendGrid’s system, with Email Marketer. You can download a .CSV file of bounced addresses by navigating to Email Reports > Bounces within your SendGrid account. You can then upload this list into Email Marketer’s system in order to mark “subscribers” as “unsubscribed.” You can also handle bounces more programmatically by using our Event API to capture POSTed events and then unsubscribing subscribers in the Email Marketer system by making calls to their XML API.