Choosing an email platform: eight criteria
Most email platforms do the same thing: compose a message and send it to a list. The difference lies in what happens afterwards — whether the message arrives, whether you can check what became of it, and what happens when it goes wrong. These are the eight criteria on which platforms genuinely differ.
For each criterion: what it means, why it matters and which question to put to a supplier. We deliberately name no other providers: their pricing and features change outside our control, and an outdated comparison misleads more than no comparison at all.
Where platforms genuinely differ
Who watches your deliverability?
Every platform sends; not every platform checks whether it arrives. Setting up authentication, building reputation on a new domain, following blocklists and stepping in when a score drops is work somebody has to do. On one platform that somebody is you, on another it is part of the service.
Question to ask: Who configures SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and who warns me when my reputation drops?Are marketing and system mail separated?
Spam complaints on a campaign must not drag down the delivery of order confirmations and password resets. Platforms that route both over the same path let one disappointing mailing damage your critical messages.
Question to ask: Do my campaigns and my system emails run over a separate, separately warmed-up route?What is the price based on?
Pricing per contact, per sent email or per volume tier produces very different bills for the same activity. Per-contact pricing penalises a large but rarely-mailed list; per-email pricing penalises frequency. Work out your own scenario before you choose, not after.
Question to ask: What do I pay at my current number of contacts AND my current sending frequency?Where does your data live?
An address list is a collection of personal data. Where it is processed and stored determines which regime applies and what you must be able to explain to your own customers. Processing outside the EU adds further obligations.
Question to ask: In which country are the servers, and who are the subprocessors in the chain?How does it connect to your own systems?
A platform with only a web interface serves your marketer, but not your webshop or accounting package. Support for plain SMTP means every application that sends mail can plug into it, without custom work. An API on top gives more control, but requires development.
Question to ask: Can I connect my existing software over plain SMTP, or does something have to be built?Can you trace one specific message?
When asked "did that customer receive their invoice?", you want an answer, not an estimate. That requires per-message logging — sent, delivered, bounced, refused — and a retention period long enough to answer a support question from last week.
Question to ask: Can I see exactly what happened to one email address, and how long is that kept?What does the platform do with your list?
Processing unsubscribes, disabling hard-bouncing addresses and merging duplicates is maintenance that protects your reputation. If it does not happen automatically it becomes manual work — and manual work nobody owns does not get done.
Question to ask: Are unsubscribes and bounces processed automatically, or do I have to clean my list myself?Who will you reach, and when?
A delivery problem is rarely solvable alone: it requires reading logs and sometimes contacting a mailbox provider. The difference between a ticket system with a multi-day response time and someone who knows your case shows up exactly when it matters.
Question to ask: Who handles my question, in which language, and within what time frame?When 2mail fits — and when it does not
2mail suits you if…
…delivery is the problem you want solved. You send order confirmations, invoices, system alerts and periodic campaigns from your own domain, you want them to arrive, and you want to be able to check what happened to an individual message. Belgian infrastructure, separated traffic streams, authentication and bounce processing are part of the service, and you speak to someone who knows your case.
Choose something else if…
…your centre of gravity is marketing automation: visual customer journeys with branching, lead scoring, extensive forms and landing pages, or deep integration with a CRM suite. Those are features of a full marketing platform, and we do not build them. If that is what you need, take such a platform — and still consider keeping your transactional mail separate, because that is exactly the traffic you do not want to leave to a campaign channel.
Work out your own situation?
Tell us what you send today — how much, how often, from which systems — and we will tell you honestly whether 2mail fits. If it does not, we will say so too.
