Email Marketing with Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cost-effective cloud-based bulk email service built on the reliable and scalable infrastructure that is developed by Amazon.com. Email marketing with Amazon SES gives you a range of sophisticated features which makes it an ideal solution for sending your bulk email campaigns. Moreover, with this solution, you only pay for what you use.

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Amazon web services (AWS) is a business unit within Amazon.com which was officially launched in 2006. It provides online services (web services) for other websites and client-side applications on a cloud computing platform offered by its parent organization, Amazon.com. All these services are billed based on the usage of the service.

Important features of Amazon SES Email marketing services are:

  • High Deliverability by the use of better content filtering technologies, complaint feedback loops with major ISPs, authentication mechanisms like Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF).
  • Multiple cloud-based Email-Sending Interfaces like Amazon SES console, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Amazon SES API.
  • Availability of better Statistics regarding your sending activity like successful delivery attempts, rejected messages, bounces, and complaints on a real-time basis via a single API call or by using the Amazon SES console.
  • Better notification mechanisms to forward you bounce, complaint, and delivery notifications through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) or through email (only for bounce and complaint).
  • Amazon SES Mailbox Simulator can be used to test the various email-sending scenarios like a successful acceptance, a hard bounce, a complaint, an out-of-office auto response, system’s maximum throughput, etc without affecting your sending quota or your bounce and complaint metrics.

Email sending capacity:

The sending limits for Amazon SES is based on the recipient rather than the number of emails and is calculated on an ongoing basis. The “sending quota” is the maximum number of emails that you can send in a day while the “maximum send rate” is the maximum number of emails that the Amazon SES will accept from your account per second.

For new users, the sending quota is 200 email per day and maximum send rate of 1 email per second. This can be increased on request and can be checked at any point of time in the Amazon SES Console. These two limits will keep on changing based on the quality of your sent emails.

Moreover, the maximum size limit for an email is up to 10 MB, including any attachments that are considered a part of the email message.

Amazon SES Price structure

The billing of the service is as per the use basis. Moreover, there is no initial setup or minimum cost. If you are an existing EC2 user, you can start your bulk email marketing with Amazon SES for free.

You can send 62,000 emails and receive 1,000 emails per month for free.

But data transfer, attachments, and mail chunk will be billed. New AWS users, eligible for the AWS free usage tier, get initial 15 GB of data transfer free. Also, they get 1 GB of data transfer free every month. Outgoing emails are changed at $0.10 per 1,000 emails.

Emails sent to Amazon SES Mailbox Simulator, sent to regular recipients and received are billed separately. Sent attachments are billed at $0.12 per GB while an email chunk (every 256 KB of email) are billed at $0.09 per 1,000 complete chunks.

Brief about analytic and tracking features

Amazon SES automatically collects the statistics related to your email sending activity like successful delivery attempts, rejected messages, bounces, and complaints on a real time basis either by calling an API or using the Amazon SES Console. These analytics can help you identify and fix issues related to email quality and deliverability.

Famous customers using Amazon SES

Some of the more renowned organizations that use Amazon SES for email marketing are Siemens, HTC, Ticketmaster, D-Link, hi-media group, Vodafone.

Global presence and infrastructure

AWS is located in 12 geographical locations all over the globe in countries as USA, Brazil, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and China. As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 Million servers across 28 availability zones.

Rules of sending marketing emails

It is the responsibility of the users to remain compliant with applicable laws and regulations regarding the sending of marketing emails. They are responsible for sending emails only to the subscribers who expect to receive emails from them. Amazon SES can suspend an account which is found sending spam and low-quality emails. Users should own and control each email address or domain the email is sent from, to prevent phishing activities. Users can verify up to 1000 email addresses and domain names in Amazon SES. Moreover, using Amazon SES marketing services, users can send an email to a maximum of 50 recipients (including “TO:,” “CC:” and “BCC:”). If the users need to send the email to more than 50 recipients, they will have to send multiple emails with each email having 50 or less recipients.

Restrictions about bounce and complaints

The sending limit for Amazon SES is based on the recipient rather than the number of emails and is calculated on an ongoing basis. This limit will keep on changing based on the quality of your sent emails. That means the higher the bounce rate and complaints (bad quality of emails), the lower will be the email sending limit for a specific account.
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