Amazon SES Email Marketing

What is Amazon SES?

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a service from Amazon, built on top of Amazon’s Web Services architecture, which allows users to send emails at scale. Amazon SES is cheap and comes with a free daily limit, but it doesn’t offer any of the basic features that are needed to execute and analyze email marketing campaigns, so many developers use it for sending transactional emails from within their applications only.

BigMailer platform offers its users support for both marketing and transactional emails, as well as automation, and offers features like list and campaign management, engagement tracking and reporting, segmentation and geo targeting. By using Amazon SES, BigMailer is able to avoid some of the overhead of a typical email marketing provider, like managing reputation of servers that emails are being sent from, and to offer its customers high deliverability at great savings. You can think of Amazon SES as a wholesaler or warehouse where is BigMailer is more like a retail store front for a consumer.

Why use Amazon SES with BigMailer?

There are 2 main reasons:

  1. Ability to customize email headers so they look authentic and don’t have a “via  some-random-server.obscure-domain.com”. Because the From field matches actual Sender, the trust score of the emails is higher and it helps Inbox placement and higher deliverability rates.
  2. To prevent abuse of the system. Because BigMailer sends emails through each customers SES account, things like high bounce rate only affects individual customer account and not the entire BigMailer platform or other customers. Traditional email marketing providers have entire “Compliance” or “Deliverability” departments that enforce email list quality rules for their customers because their customers are serviced by the same servers with shared reputation. It’s not uncommon for market leaders to turn away customers they believe have low quality email lists.

How to get Amazon SES account out of sandbox

Your Amazon SES account must be out of Sandbox mode to be able to send real campaigns. Your Amazon SES account is automatically taken out of sandbox mode after you send a request to increase your send limit. Most customers get their requests resolved within an hour and unless you requested a specific limit based on your list size, the starting limit is typically 50,000 emails per rolling 24 hour period. If your list is larger than 50,000 contacts be sure to request a limit you require and provide additional info, e.g. links to your site and a page where you collect email addresses. See more detailed info in this article about submitting a request to Amazon.

Do I need to be a developer to connect Amazon SES account?

No! Any non-technical user can simply follow our step-by-step on-boarding screens with detailed instructions to connect their Amazon SES account to BigMailer. And if you aren’t comfortable with the steps, we are here to assist you with the setup process completely for free – just contact us and request free setup assistance.