Mailjet vs Gmail: Which is a better fit?

Kathryn W.: Hi, my name's Kathryn. I'm the CEO of an online marketing company, and I give Mailjet a one out of five. Originally, we were with Sailthru as our ESP, because we're sending a volume of emails, sending around a million emails twice a day. We met Mailjet at an expo and it looked like they could do everything that Sailthru could do and for a lot less money, so we switched over to Mailjet. At the same time, we considered Selligent and making our own emails and sending them with AWS, which would mean a lot more work on our part but would have been more of a cost saving, but instead we decided to use something like Mailjet that allows you to build the emails in there and send them from the same place. We ended up choosing Mailjet mainly for a cost saving. They also seemed to have some really good editing software that meant you could lock down certain parts of a newsletter you were building and then allow other editors to come in and just change certain parts of it that weren't locked down. They also seemed to have very good reputation in terms of deliverability and we were really assured at the time that we were going to be really well looked after. I have to say, the salesperson was fantastic at his job, so that's what made us leave Sailthru through and go to Mailjet in the first instance. As with any software, when you change it internally, there's a bit of learning to be done. Especially with email service providers, they all seem to have their own language. Sailthru has Zephyr and Mailjet similarly had their own coding language for their emails. That's really to make it so the HTML is lighter and that the emails get into your inbox. There was a bit of learning from the developers' side to learn the new language that they were going to be coding in to make these emails, but in terms of integration for the newsletter builders and the content creators, that was quite straightforward. If you've ever used something like MailChimp, you wouldn't have a problem with using Mailjet. It's a very similar user interface. For anybody considering moving to Mailjet, I think it's really important that you consider how much control you want to be able to have over your own lists. Something very strange that Mailjet does is if they get a soft bounce too many times from somebody on your list, an email contact, then they blacklist them. What we found, after several months of being with Mailjet, is it all of a sudden our email list was shrinking at a massive rate. Now, with someone like Sailthru, they continue to ping an email address because sometimes people, their email inbox is full or perhaps the email is just being throttled by their internet service provider, which we see with some of the smaller domains. Then all of a sudden on switching to Mailjet, we were seeing the situation, literally, we're talking about 30,000 users a month, which for anybody who knows how difficult and how costly it is to get somebody to sign up to an email list and especially an engaged list, we were losing these engaged people really quickly. I think if what you're looking for is something that's automated, maybe you want to send transactional email automatically, you can set up different web books and say, "When somebody signs up, send them a welcome email," maybe when they purchase something you want to send them a receipt and another transactional email, I think it would still be suitable for that. If you're using email as your primary source of income for e-commerce or email marketing, I would seriously look at using something that's specifically designed for that and not Mailjet.

Kayla B.: My name's Kayla. I'm a communication and speech coach and a solopreneur, and I give Gmail a rating of five out of five. Before using Gmail, I used Yahoo Mail, which was a much messier experience, from a business perspective. And I had a lot of issues with spam, people not receiving my messages, and my business emails weren't perceived or taken as seriously, which is why I made this shift eventually over to Gmail. Gmail was super easy to categorize and label different sections of groups that I have to communicate with. I have a lot of recurring coaching clients that go into specific tabs or labels, so it's very easy to communicate with them very quickly and efficiently. I also find just the user-friendliness of Gmail is much, much easier, and it's very neat. I was very distracted by Yahoo Mail visually, with a lot of the things that would pop up on the screen. And with Gmail, I never get distracted or off-focus. Gmail was very easy to get started with, but it probably wasn't until a couple of years after using Gmail that I realized there were a lot more settings that I could take advantage of. So, after playing a little bit more with some more advanced settings, I was able to take a lot more advantage of more services that Gmail offers. I would recommend watching a couple of YouTube videos about the best recommendations you could do with Gmail for your business and see some of the other hacks that other entrepreneurs have used to make their Gmail much more organized and to create a very professional look within their emails, especially within their signatures. That was very helpful for me.