'Best way to send email to clients from e-commerce website?
I'm building e-commerce website that will sell all kind of items, what is the best way to send emails to clients?
Our selling department will send a lot of emails to customers, emails like delivery, newsletters, coupons, and etc..
I don't want to use mail() function because the customers will receive emails to spam box, what is the right way to do it?
There is a companies like benchmarkemail, icontact, mailchimp, do i need to use them?
Solution 1:[1]
It's important that you understand the difference between "transactional" and "non-transactional" email.
Sending a order invoice, password-reset or welcome aboard email is transactional. It is send from you (your website) to one specific email address.
A news letter is usually non-transactional in that the same email is send to multiple people at the same time and many countries have strict laws about how these emails can be send and how people should be able to unsubscribe from them.
For transactional email I would suggest to use a third party service such as Mandrill or Postmark. They will make it easy for you to make sure that email arrives in your customers inbox.
For news letters I would suggest you use a third party service such as Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp. They allow you to set up sophisticated campaigns and see reports on how well your marketing email performs.
Solution 2:[2]
I would suggest using SendGrid and they also have PHP libraries. They have a free plan which you can try out. They also support creating email templates on your account which really simplifies the mails you send. All your mail formatting and related code is no longer in your application. I've used it and been quite satisfied so far.
Edit and disclaimer :-) I don't work for SendGrid, just had a good experience using it that is all.
Solution 3:[3]
It wont go to the spam box if you use mail(), you just need to make sure you send your emails from a registered domain. You should also sign each email and make sure the SPF records are set up.
Links: http://www.emailquestions.com/help-desk/2418-why-do-my-own-emails-go-into-spam.html http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=spf+records http://www.techtalkpoint.com/articles/setting-up-spf-records-in-cpanel-whm-and-namecheap/
Sources
This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | |
| Solution 2 | Arun Ramakrishnan |
| Solution 3 | DrRoach |