A month from now, I will be in Toronto discussing the benefits of having tunable control over your email sending. Join me at the Canadian Email Summit on September 24th for a deeper dive into why I think controlling your own infrastructure offers significant advantages.
For thousands of volume email senders, SaaS email relays are a more than adequate tool. I helped to build one of the biggest ones in the world, so I know their value. I also know their limitations. You cannot build a single configuration that is ideal for everyone, but that is really the whole premise of SaaS email platforms. One standard config that allows minor switches and profile edits, but no radical individualizations. The term I have heard used in that space is "No Snowflakes". Providing support for one unique customer amid a sea of thousands of identical patterns is a nightmare, so they just refuse to do it.
Running your own infrastructure may seem daunting, but it is really not as complex as you might think, and the benefits of a tuneable architecture can be a powerful argument. There are a number of services that will set up and manage a server for you if you don't want to do it yourself - the value is in the tuning, not the owning.
Tuning your email sending isn't just more valuable the more you send. A few important use cases require sending less, or a precise amount of email.
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You have a call center team, or an inbound order processor, that can only handle a thousand messages an hour. Sending 10,000 invitations and leaving most people waiting would be a critical mistake.
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You have third-party users who pay you based on volume sent - but your SaaS provider needs to send it all at the same rate.
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Certain markets may require mail delivery during very specific windows to respect cultural norms. You can easily ask Outlook or Gmail to delay an email until 9 AM Monday morning, but try scheduling 100,000 emails to deliver between 9 AM and 5 PM local time on weekdays only.
Many non-standard use cases like this aren't typically serviceable by outsourced solutions like SaaS email relays. Are they rare? Yes. Are they likely to be a source of high-revenue mail streams? Also yes. Being able to shape your mail in highly customized ways like this can give operators a significant competitive advantage.
It really comes down to your willingness to step off the easy mainstream path and support the edge cases that can make a real difference. You can be just like the thousands of other email senders using the same SaaS platform sending in the same patterns to the same customers, or you can make the choice to tune your email individually and gain an advantage.
The choice is yours.
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