7 is a lucky number.
There’s 7 colors in the rainbow. 7 wonders of the ancient world. 7 notes in a musical scale. 7 seas, 7 continents, and 7 days in a week. Even the periodic table of elements is organized into 7 rows.
That’s why we’re celebrating one of Twilio SendGrid’s greatest email milestones yet: 7 trillion processed emails. What’s crazy to think about is that we processed 5 trillion emails just last year and 3 trillion in 2020. That means we’re processing more emails each year and we only expect these numbers to grow with time.
Processing 7 trillion emails is no easy feat. It takes a team of greater than 7 to hit record processing times for the likes of Shopify and Glassdoor. In honor of hitting lucky number 7, here are 7 ways our customers iterated and maximized their email output, thus pushing SendGrid to 7 trillion processed emails.
Top 7 email priorities for peak performance
Let’s take a look at the top priorities for email program performance.
1. Deliverability is everything
This milestone wouldn’t have been possible without the customers who built their email programs with us. Using SendGrid’s deliverability-first infrastructure, Klaviyo sends 10 billion emails per month on behalf of its customers. SendGrid can handle 15,000 email transactions per second, with an average email delivery speed of 1.9 seconds. Klaviyo can have peace of mind knowing they can reliably support their customers’ email needs with SendGrid.
Shopify receives aggregate event data from SendGrid thanks to key features like ISP monitoring, event webhooks, and expert services. Shopify receives aggregate event data from SendGrid webhooks and the Courier platform, their internal mail service, then customizes a key email statistics list for merchant dashboards, allowing them to stay on top of their deliverability rates and resolve issues as they arise. Shopify partners with SendGrid’s Expert Services team to sharpen its email deliverability strategy. Their in-house team of email specialists leverages this partnership with internal tools to seamlessly onboard merchants and offer deliverability expertise.
2. Scaling up and up
Growth is impossible without scalability. SendGrid’s powerful infrastructure processes 134 billion emails per month on average. Businesses trust SendGrid to provide an infrastructure that can evolve with their business needs. SendGrid provides a variety of applications that seamlessly integrate, thus saving time and strategically planning ahead for high volume email sending as the business scales. We are trusted by lead senders like Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify to fit scalability and reliability needs.
3. Email security is brand security
Customers can maintain a peace of mind with a trusted partner. Twilio SendGrid solves difficult email authentication, data protection, and mail delivery problems, so you can focus on great content without worrying about privacy and security issues. With our partnership with DMARC, BIMI (Vailmail), professional services, and email certifications and policies, customers can easily protect their brand reputation and improve deliverability in the process.
4. Adapt like a pro
As customer bases grow, so does email volume. Over the past eight years, Glassdoor’s email program has grown tremendously because of market changes and shifting business priorities. In the previous three years alone, Glassdoor’s email volume tripled (angel number 3 is associated with growth after all…) as the worldwide leader of job and company insights delivered highly personalized email recommendations, like job alerts and interview tips, to recipients’ inboxes.
We can’t direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails, which is exactly what Glassdoor did with updates to secure onboarding and sender reputation scores. Advanced algorithms and systems are continuously evaluating sender performance based on how recipients interact with your email and mailbox provider feedback. Understanding and implementing feedback is key to adapting your email program to meet ever changing email standards.
“Deliverability is more of an art than a science—the landscape is constantly changing,” explained Nonso Maduka, Director of Product Management at Glassdoor. “We’re a lot more confident knowing we have someone in our corner at the leading edge of what’s happening in the deliverability space. SendGrid is an extension of our team—their deliverability insight lets us focus on delivering great content and experience to our users. ” Thanks, Nonso!
5. We’re nothing if not reliable
Our customers choose us because we’re reliable.
SendGrid processed over 50 billion emails throughout the week of November 21 to November 28 for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2022. SendGrid’s sending volume grew 30% and 26% YoY respectively for the hottest annual retail holidays. Moreover, we processed 4.2 million emails per minute during peak hours—the time when our customers needed us to connect them to their customers the most.
6. Flex with our email integrations
SendGrid provides multiple API integrations that allow customers to be flexible with how they create their email programs and integrations.
As a leading commerce platform, Shopify simplified the merchant’s email experience from beginning to end with our API integrations. A long requested feature from merchants, SendGrid’s DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing gets shop owners up and running faster after they purchase domains through Shopify. Additionally, at the scale and frequency Shopify adds IPs, SendGrid’s IP pool management has streamlined the IP warmup process, protecting merchants’ sending reputations for their most important emails.
With the focus on hyper personalization and support, SendGrid allows customers to customize our RESTful APIs for intuitive formatting with validation upfront, and straightforward SMTP relay to create your individual email integration and standardized email sending.
7. Email marketing is resilient
Despite difficult economic conditions and an unending chain of major world events, SendGrid experienced extreme resilience from its customers. We saw exceptional growth in emails sent compared to 2021, with an increase in email volume anywhere from 10% to 22% YoY for many clients.
We saw a peak of approximately 620,000 emails sent per minute from one customer, and many others with 2 second end-to-end times and 99% deliverability rates. In fact, our largest email customer sent 2.8 billion emails on Black Friday and 2.4 billion emails on Cyber Monday last year. That’s a 62% increase in emails delivered in 2022.
In the face of uncertainty, one thing still rings true: email is not going anywhere.
Lucky number 7
You know how slot machines have 777 to symbolize hitting the jackpot? Well, we definitely hit the jackpot with our wonderful clients. You’re the ones delivering the important messages, we’re just here to help facilitate the journey.
Whether you’re a current customer or newly looking for ways to scale your email program, Twilio SendGrid is here to help. With a professional team of email experts, a multitude of email API integrations, and world-class infrastructure, we can help you reach your customers effectively. Reach out to our Expert Services team today or check out our 2023 Email Deliverability Guide for more tips, news, and trends.