SMTP services, like Amazon SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun etc are a great cost-saving option for sending out emails but most SMTP relay services often only provide a limited user interface. 

Email service providers (ESP) like say ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit are great for email marketing but their price, however, is also on another level!

It could cost you $300 or more for 100,000 monthly emails! These ESPs also send emails through SMTP infrastructures, usually their own, but they offer enhanced UI, making it more user-friendly for non-technical people to easily manage all core email marketing tasks.

So while you can save hundreds of dollars by using an email SMTP service, the problem with SMTP services like say Amazon SES is that other than the ability to deliver emails to your customers, these SMTP services typically don't have advanced, built-in email marketing features such as: list management, segmentation, tracking, bounce handling & list cleanup etc.

Good news for DAP users is...  

We're planning on adding user-friendly email interfaces in DAP so DAP will sort of becomes your ESP!

Our goal is to build powerful and user-friendly interfaces in DAP (and leverage 3rd party SMTP services like Amazon SES, Mailgun etc) to help you save hundreds of dollars in cost on these ESPs!

As you probably know, we've just released a new "Email Stats/Tracking" feature in DAP that will allow you to track emails stats such as: opens, clicks, bounces, delivered, unsubscribed etc. Now our goal is to take DAP's built-in email broadcast feature to an entirely new level! Here are the two specific areas that we hope to improve:

=> Send Emails in Batch

Currently DAP uses "an hourly" cron job to send out emails. If you send an email broadcast via a 3rd party SMTP service like say Amazon SES or Sendgrid, DAP will send out these emails one-at-a-time. It connects to the SMTP service for each email. As a result, if you want to send out an email broadcast to say 10,000 users on your list, it could potentially take about 10 hours for these emails to be delivered!

We're currently doing some research on the best ways to "batch" these emails and submit as "one-job" to the SMTP relay services like SES, Sendgrid etc. This will allow us to offload the data to the SMTP providers so they can do the heavy lifting as it costs more time, money and resources to do this one-at-a-time.

This will allow us to considerably speed up the email delivery time and at the same time, use less server resources! So you could potentially have your email sent to say 10,000 users in just 1 hour instead of 10!

=> Schedule Emails

Currently you can't schedule broadcast emails in advance in DAP.

So if you want to schedule broadcast emails say 2 days in advance or want to send it out at a specific time / day, you can't do this currently... but we're looking to change this as well!

We hope to add an "email scheduling" feature in DAP that will allow you to schedule your broadcast emails!

So while DAP is NOT an ESP and will never be one, our goal is to improve our email interfaces so you can just use DAP + an SMTP service for your email needs thus saving up a ton of money on these expensive email platforms without losing a lot of key features and benefits ! 

How does that sound? :-).

I would love to know your thoughts!

Let me know in the comments section below!