In short
- Deliverability control: can you own the sending domain and SMTP?
- Data ownership: can you export everything, always?
- Pricing model: contacts or sends, and what happens at 5x growth?
- Reporting: per-recipient truth, not just averages.
1. Deliverability control
- Own or bring your SMTP, or at minimum a dedicated authenticated sending domain.
- In-product guidance for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
- Configurable send rate and warm-up behaviour.
2. Data ownership
Your contact list, campaign history, and delivery logs should all be exportable. If a platform makes leaving painful, its pricing has leverage over you later.
3. Pricing model
Model the cost at today's size and at five times today's size. A platform that is cheap now and punitive at scale is a migration you have merely postponed.
4. Reporting honesty
Open tracking has become unreliable as mail clients pre-fetch images. Weight your evaluation toward accepted/failed counts, SMTP responses, unsubscribes, and click data, and treat open rates as a soft signal.
5. Support when it matters
The test is not the sales conversation. It is what happens at 9pm when a campaign is failing. Check the support channel and the response expectation before you buy.
Checklist
- Confirm domain and SMTP control.
- Export a test list and a test report.
- Model cost at 5x your current size.
- Read a real delivery log, not a dashboard demo.
- Test the support channel before paying.
Run these checks now
Questions people ask
Is a bigger platform automatically better at deliverability?
No. Deliverability follows your domain reputation, list hygiene, content, and sending pattern. A large shared platform can even be a disadvantage if its shared infrastructure is abused.
How important is open rate?
Less than it used to be. Mail privacy features pre-fetch images, which inflates opens. Use accepted and failed counts, clicks, replies, and unsubscribes as your primary signals.
Should I run a trial or a pilot?
Run a pilot with a real campaign to a real segment. Trials with sample data prove nothing about deliverability.