Postmark Review 2024: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for business owners. Regardless of industry, size, or target market, emails have proven worthwhile in delivering the message and converting potential customers. How we plan, design, and execute our marketing strategies differs. Postmark, a leading Philadelphia-based email marketing firm, specializes in these campaigns and knows a thing or two about effective emails. 

On its website, Postmark says that business owners must “stop worrying if emails reach the customer’s inbox and focus on what matters—building great products’. Indeed, effective marketing should always highlight what matters: the products and services. Unfortunately, many business owners and marketers spend more work on the process and not so much on the actual product or service. Postmark aims to remove the worries and work that come with email marketing, at least based on its advertising.

To help its clients, Postmark boasts a basket-full of services and features, including but not limited to email API, SMTP service, message streams, transactional emails, and email delivery. Also, the team provides support services, including email templates, security, and analytics.

On paper, Postmark seems to be the perfect fit for business owners looking to address their email woes and redirect attention to their products and services. But does Postmark deliver on its promise? How does Postmark compare to similar companies, including MailGun and Maileroo? Our review will focus on Postmark’s features, its services’ pros and cons, and a recommendation for alternative email providers.

Postmark Overview

Founded in 2009, Postmark is a leading SMTP email service provider that boasts industry-leading reliability and deliverability. Specifically, the company specializes in transactional emails like password resets, welcome emails and templates, and newsletters. Postmark’s branding rests on its capability to deliver emails to customers’ inboxes in seconds. The company’s services are highly scalable and can meet the needs and requirements of all businesses of different sizes and industries.

On its homepage, Postmark has worked with hundreds of customers and delivered billions of emails, and some of its customers include Minecraft, Faire, 1Password, and Betterment. In 2022, the company was acquired by ActiveCampaign, a Chicago-based company with a valuation of $3 billion.

Postmark’s integration into ActiveCampaign benefits both organizations. Transactional emails are the focus of Postmark’s operations and are a feature that ActiveCampaign has been looking to add to its portfolio. Postmark runs under ActiveCampaign today, giving potential customers a full lineup of services and features.

Postmark User Interface and Customer Experience

Postmark offers its potential customers and partners a seamless and stress-free way of signing up and enjoying its services. As part of this review, I browsed its official website and explored its registration page to get a first-hand experience of some of its tools and features.

Registration Process

Like other email marketing service providers, Postmark offers a convenient registration process and an opportunity to test-drive the service for free. On its registration page, you’ll be asked to provide your full name, work email, and preferred username and password. Note: You must provide your work email to complete the registration process.

Pricing Plan and Options

Postmark’s pricing depends on the volume of email. Like other service providers, the company also features a Free Trial that allows up to 100 test emails monthly. What’s interesting about Postmark’s welcome offering is that this test service doesn’t expire, and you can use it for as long as needed. Once you exceed the allowable number of emails, you’ll be charged at the end of the billing cycle.

The tables below show the different tier levels and the covered number of emails, features, and tools available. For example, the basic tier costs $15 monthly and allows up to 10,000 emails monthly. The top-tier, at $1,295 for the enterprise, needs to send at least 5 million emails monthly.

Pros and Cons of Postmark

Let’s take a closer look at the services and capabilities of Postmark by looking at its pros and cons:

Pros:

• Offers the best email delivery rates in the business
• Offers a Free Trial for all new members, up to 100 emails monthly; use of free account doesn’t lapse
• Transparent pricing with no hidden fees
• It also offers dedicated IPs for enterprise and high-volume senders
• Accepts payments using Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Diners, and JCB
• Excellent customer support through phone and online messaging

Cons:

• Currently, there are no add-ons for SMS services and digital marketing
• The data retention policy is limited to 45 days for all tiers
• Pricing starts at $15 per month for 10,000 emails
• No annual pricing is available
• Does not accept PayPal or Purchase Orders for payment

Overall User Experience

Postmark offers a professional-looking website. At first glance, you'll notice its use of striking yellow color, and plenty of sections and shortcuts to different features, tools and resources. Here, you can easily access its outstanding features, including the setting up transactional emails.

A quick review of this service reveals that Postmark lets you draft and send account detail changes or password reset emails, shipping and delivery information, and purchase confirmation and receipt logs. As a relatively new marketer, I was looking for helpful tools and resources, and I’m glad that Postmark covers the basic requirements of many marketers. For example, there are email templates to use that are content-ready and optimized for marketing.

There are analytics tools that can help you study and understand your performance metrics as well. For example, you can check the bounce, open, and click rates, which you can use to tweak your sending campaign.

The process is convenient if you’re using an old provider and want to transfer and use Postmark. The transition is smooth since the company offers a migration guide on transferring from one provider to Postmark, and they also explain the differences. Also, in our experience, updating the code to use the Postmark’s API is easy.

Alternative to Postmark: Maileroo

Postmark remains one of the top transactional email providers and other specific email delivery services. The deliverability rate is one of the best in the business, with API libraries that fit into most programming languages. However, the service is costly, and beginners or those with limited coding skills and knowledge will need help with some Postmark features, such as servers and sender signatures. If you’re looking for an email delivery service with an affordable price and friendly service, then check out Maileroo. 

Maileroo offers a Free Plan that allows you to send up to 5,000 emails, with no credit card required. It also offers a custom plan to meet your business's size and specific email requirements. Like Postmark, Maileroo gives you access to all features and tools, regardless of the plan.

Wrap Up

Emailing potential customers remains an integral component of any business’s marketing efforts, and it works. However, running an email campaign should be friendly and shouldn’t be expensive. What matters to entrepreneurs and business owners is the product or service.

Regarding important email-sending metrics, Postmark remains one of the best in the business. After being acquired by ActiveCampaign, the company now offers an impressive range of services and features, such as email API, SMTP service, message streams, email templates, webhooks, and access to analytics, among others.

But based on our initial impression, the pricing is costly, and it doesn’t offer annual plans or provide customers with some flexibility during ‘lean months’ or when they only require lower volumes. If you’re after the same service but at a friendly pricing, check out Maileroo. You can try Maileroo’s service for free or contact them with specific requirements.