Reselling the Elastic Email service offers businesses and individual customers the opportunity to provide email services to their clients without the complexities of building their own infrastructure. By leveraging Elastic Email’s extensive functionality, resellers can re-brand the platform, manage multiple subaccounts, and control usage - all while benefiting from a flexible and scalable service model. This guide provides a detailed walkthrough of the reselling process, including setup, branding, and operational guidelines to optimize both - efficiency and user experience.
1. Reselling the Elastic Email Service - Overwiev
Elastic Email allows users to act as resellers by offering email services under their own brand. With features like subaccount management and custom branding, you can easily tailor the service to meet your client’s needs while managing usage and billing through a single Parent/Main account.
However, reselling is not intended for businesses looking to make quick profits through affiliate marketing or typical work-from-home opportunities. Instead, it’s designed for organizations that want to offer robust email solutions to their customer base.
Key Benefits:
Ability to create unlimited subaccounts.
Custom branding for user interfaces, login screens, and email templates.
Centralized billing and usage monitoring.
Flexibility to limit and control subaccount access based on client agreements.
2. Getting Started with Reselling
Before diving into the setup, ensure that your intended use of the service complies with Elastic Email’s Terms of Use. As a reseller, you will also need to establish your own Terms of Use policy, making it easily accessible on your website. Elastic Email must approve your terms before you start offering the service to customers.
Once your policies are in place, the setup process is relatively straightforward, with customization options ranging from basic settings to more advanced configurations.
Steps to Begin:
Review Reseller Requirements: Make sure you understand Elastic Email’s terms and ensure your business model aligns with adopted Usage Policies.
Set Up Custom Branding: Customize the user interface, login screens, and other access points for your clients, making the service appear as if it’s your own. More information about Custom Branding settings you'll find in the dedicated article.
Create subaccounts: Assign individual subaccounts to each customer, giving them their own email management system while you maintain full control over billing and usage.
3. Custom Branding and Whitelabeling
Elastic Email provides a variety of customization options to help you re-brand the service. With custom branding, you can alter the appearance of login screens and other customer access points to reflect your company’s branding. This ensures that your customers interact with a consistent, branded experience right from the start.
Custom Branding Settings:
Login Screen Customization: Personalize the login screen with your logo, colors, and messaging.
User Interface (UI) Customization: You can go further by hosting the UI directly on your own website, offering clients a seamless branded experience.
Branded Templates: Create email templates that align with your brand. You can also decide which templates your subaccounts will have access to.
Whitelabeled Domain Verification:
Your customers may want to send emails from their own domains. Elastic Email allows them to verify their own domains using your whitelabeled branding!
4. Managing Subaccounts
The cornerstone of Elastic Email's reselling feature is the ability to create and manage subaccounts. Each subaccount operates as a standalone entity, with separate contacts, reports, and email templates. This allows your customers to manage their email services independently while you maintain control over billing and resource disposal.
Key Features of Subaccounts:
Isolated Operations: Each subaaccount is independent in terms of contact lists, campaigns, and templates.
Centralized Billing: As the reseller, you handle all billing and account management for your subaccounts.
Usage Control: You can define the daily or monthly email limits for each subaccount, controlling how your ccustomers use the service.
Customizable Features: Decide which features are available to your clients, such as access to specific templates or advanced reporting.
5. Billing and Usage
As a reseller, you will be billed by Elastic Email for the total usage of all your subaccounts. This includes charges for both successful and unsuccessful email deliveries, as well as any refunds or charge-backs from your customers. Elastic Email’s pricing structure applies to both - Marketing and Email API options.
Important Billing Notes:
You are responsible for all charges, regardless of email delivery outcomes.
Any refunds or chargebacks issued to your customers will not affect your billing from Elastic Email.
You should establish clear payment and refund policies with your customers to to ensure transparency and credibility for all parties.
6. Support Responsibilities
As a reseller, you are the first point of contact for any support issues that arise with your customers. Elastic Email’s support team will not directly assist your clients - but will work with you to resolve any technical issues on their behalf.
Setting Up Support:
Establish your own support system, which can be as simple as a dedicated email address.
Customers should be instructed to reach out to your contact point directly, for any service issues.
You should designate support representatives who will raise technical support tickets with Elastic Email Customer Support Team if needed.
7. Compliance - summary
To successfully resell Elastic Email’s services, compliance with their Terms of Use is mandatory. This ensures that all resellers and their customers follow proper guidelines and maintain the integrity of the platform.
Key Compliance Points:
Your Terms of Use must be prominently displayed and enforced with your customers.
Elastic Email reserves the right to review and approve your terms before you begin reselling.
You are fully responsible for any support and billing issues related to your customers.
As long as you ensure compliance with Elastic Email’s policies, you can provide a seamless, branded email experience for your customers while maintaining full control over operations.