As a martech provider, you are responsible for the secure delivery of billions of emails each month—so it’s crucial that you have the right email infrastructure in place to protect your brand and your customers.

That begs the question: Is it better for your business to use a cloud email API or plug-in on-prem email infrastructure solution? 

In the early stages of growth, companies often prioritize speed and efficiency, and for martech startups, leveraging readily available cloud-based email API solutions is a quick way to scale. This approach allows for rapid growth and is highly efficient for early-stage martech companies.

However, as you transition from the growth phase to becoming a more sustainable enterprise, your email volumes increase significantly, which can lead to substantial cost hikes. Additionally, managing the intricate details of traffic and maintaining control becomes challenging with an external provider. This shift drives martech firms like yours to seek their own on-prem solutions, offering greater control over your infrastructure and potentially significant cost savings. Thus, for large martech firms with a strong sender reputation and dedicated deliverability resources, an on-prem solution is often the optimal choice. Here are some of the key benefits:

Architect a custom solution

Implementing your own email architecture gives your team the ability to architect your solution to meet your specific business needs, rather than being pushed into a SaaS solution’s existing framework, and running the risk of delays, outages, and security issues that are completely out of your hands. 

When your team has configured your own email server, you can set up customized security protocols, user management options, and other variables that meet your unique demands. You can decide how to deliver email to specific domains, determine how fast and how often to send messages, and implement the security protocols that you choose. 

Additionally, having full control over your email infrastructure allows for more flexibility in terms of customization and integration with other systems. You can tailor your email delivery process to fit your specific needs and seamlessly integrate it with your existing workflows and systems.

Reliability is also a key concern for martech providers. When relying on a third-party solution to manage your infrastructure, your business operations could be disrupted due to unexpected outages. When you’re using on-prem email servers, you’ll always have full visibility into your operations and can rely on your internal team to address issues immediately.

Protect your customers and brand with top-tier security measures

For large martech providers that handle sensitive customer information, data privacy and compliance are top priorities. 

By hosting your own email infrastructure on-premises, you have full control over where your data is stored and who has access to it. You can avoid sharing sensitive data with a third-party cloud-based email API solution, limiting your brand’s exposure to potential data breaches or data misuse. You’ll also be able to build a best-in-class cybersecurity tech stack, setting up your own integrations with the anti-spam and anti-virus tools that you trust to protect your customers.

Managing your own email infrastructure can also help you protect your sender reputation, as you can directly control and monitor the security measures in place. 

Get data insights to drive better business decisions

By using Halon’s on-prem solution, you’ll gain access to a higher level of visibility into your email campaigns than those provided by either cloud infrastructure or alternative on-prem solutions. With real-time access to the server logs and analytics, you can gain valuable insight into how your emails are being handled by the server and how they are being received by your recipients. 

Armed with this unmatched level of visibility, your brand will be empowered to make more strategic business decisions that will help you increase your deliverability rate and boost your sender reputation.

Control your costs

Finally, building email infrastructure is a better investment than using any cloud email API.  You’ll be able to control your costs and ensure that every feature your engineering team builds aligns with your business needs—rather than paying extra for features that you don’t want or need from a third-party vendor. You’ll be able to easily predict and manage the costs of maintaining your hardware, rather than succumbing to annual price hikes for a SaaS subscription.  

Choosing to build and maintain your own email infrastructure can help you forecast your overall business operations costs, as opposed to the unpredictability of partnering with third-party providers who can change their pricing structure or business model at any given time. And best of all, investing upfront in your own email infrastructure will pay for itself over time, making the total cost of ownership far lower than continued reliance on a SaaS provider after a given period of time.

Before making a decision, carefully consider your business needs, budget, and technical capabilities. If you have a dedicated team with the necessary skills and resources, building your own email infrastructure may offer greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness in the long run. 

Halon can be deployed on any type of infrastructure—get in touch to learn more and determine the right path for your business.