Put together to combine a Twilio SendGrid e-mail utility

Creating a new Twilio SendGrid email application can feel complicated. If you’re not an expert on email, all of the new concepts and jargon can be overwhelming. However, if you have a little bit of email knowledge and expertise, you might be tempted to dive right in.

Our onboarding experts at Twilio SendGrid work with teams of all e-mail skills – from absolute beginners to decades-old professionals. We guide teams through a strategic onboarding process that helps clients develop the right application for their needs.

In the following, we will guide you step by step through the process of how we prepare teams to develop the right solution right from the start – regardless of specialist knowledge.

In this blog post you will learn:

• What you should consider when setting up your e-mail program
• Here’s how to create a Twilio SendGrid email account that meets your needs

These are steps you can take before logging into your Twilio SendGrid account, laying the foundation for your optimized and scalable success.

Define the requirements of your email account

First, let’s define what success looks like for your email account. Many clients fail to set goals and expectations from the start and often cause extra work later when they need to rebuild their account or start over.

We want to help you avoid this setback.

Here are some logistical questions you need to answer in order to set up your account quickly and easily:

Migration or new e-mail program

Considerations: Are you migrating e-mails from another provider or your own system, or is it a new e-mail program / program?

Why it matters: Answers to these questions can affect your ability to predict volume when this mail stream is brand new.

Mail streams

Considerations: Will you be sending marketing emails like newsletters and promotions or transactional emails like account updates and billing notifications? Or both? Do you send mail directly to your customers (e.g. B2C / direct model)? Or will your customers use your platform to reach their customers (e.g. B2B / ISV model)?

Why it matters: Answers to these questions will help you determine your sub-user strategy.

Email volume

Considerations: How many emails do you want to send in a day? A month? If in doubt, provide an estimate based on the size of your customer base and expected growth over the next 3 months.

Why it matters: Answers to these questions will help you identify a suitable one Domain warm-up plan and IP warm-up plan.

Domain and subdomains

Considerations: Which domains and subdomains will you use for sending?

Why it matters: Answering these questions ahead of time will help you start building your application and mean you don’t have to abandon these decisions with your team (and possibly your IT organization).

record data

Considerations: How would you like to ingest data from Twilio SendGrid?

Why it matters: Answers to this question will help you ingesting data from Twilio SendGrid through the Event webhookas you need to have developer resources on your side to set up this endpoint to receive the email events appropriately.

Email template design

Considerations: Are you designing your email templates or using Twilio SendGrid?

Why It Matters: Answers to these questions will help you decide if this is what you want Create and design your templates in Twilio SendGrid with our Dynamic template editor or design library.

Team access

Considerations: Who on your team need access to your Twilio SendGrid application? Note: You will need to work with a Domain Name System (DNS) administrator (possibly in IT) to enter key elements into your DNS host before you begin sending.

Why it matters: Answers to this question will help you compile the names and email addresses of the people you want to invite to collaborate on your account, which speeds up the active induction phase.

Indicators of success

Considerations: What are your key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that will help you measure success?

Why it matters: Answers to this question ensure that everyone on your team aligns with your goals for the email application and implementation process.

Create a plan for your account

Now that you’ve answered the above questions, it’s time to create a plan for your Twilio SendGrid account. First off, you should identify yourself either as a direct sender, meaning you send B2C email, or an ISV, meaning you are a B2B company whose customers use your platform to send email to their customers.

Direct brand architecture

If you are sending emails directly to your customers, we recommend setting it up Sub-users for your various mail streams. Sub-users allow you to segment them Deletions and statistics. If you can also include separate IP addresses and different subdomains for each sub-user, you can manage your sender reputation independently for each mail stream.

Below is an example of an email architecture suitable for a direct brand that uses sub-users for their various mail streams:

ISV architecture

We often recommend creating a sub-user for each of your customers when providing a platform for your customers to send email to their customers.

Below is an example of an email architecture suitable for an ISV model using sub-users for each customer:

Another consideration as an ISV broadcaster is this IP assignment. By assigning a dedicated IP address to each of your customers, you separate the sender’s reputation from the other customers and give them more control over their deliverability.

However, having multiple dedicated IPs can get more expensive ($ 30 per month per IP), and if some clients are sending on low traffic, they likely don’t have enough traffic to keep their IP address warm.

Below is a general guideline for how many IPs you might need in relation to your volume:

If you have multiple senders with lower volume, this is probably something you should consider IP pools. We usually recommend engagement-based IP pooling with 3 separate pools:

• Great, highly committed senders
• New senders and average senders
• Lower reputation senders who are likely to need more filters

Here is an example of creating engagement-based IP pooling:

Below is an example of how you can monitor and adjust which customers fit into different IP pools:

Conclusion

Once your team has completed the implementation and discovery process and decided on an ideal architectural model, you can begin Create it in the Twilio SendGrid console! Congratulations on making it through the onboarding prep process!