Because Amazon knows that sending emails in large numbers is more difficult than it seems, the company expects e-commerce companies, large and small, to take advantage of this great opportunity. With this service, a company can use the same technology and formatting that it uses to send emails to its customers.
The anti-spam rules are only tightened. That is why there is a good chance that order confirmations, invoices and newsletters from your online store will end up in the spam folder. This is disadvantageous for your company, since this information is important for the customer. As a result, you as a online store owner, can miss out on money. Invoices are not paid because they are sent to the spam folder, or you do not receive any inquiries from the customers.
The first step to prevent this is to add an SPF record to your DNS. This method has been working for years, to prevent your emails from ending up in the spam folder.
But, because Microsoft and Google have tightened their rules, this SPF record is unfortunately no longer a guarantee. This means that you have to improve the configuration, to ensure, that your online store does not send spam. In oder to do this, you must use a special email server such as Amazon SES with advanced DKIM records.
What is Amazon SES?
SES is the email distribution engine from Amazon that works on a pay-per-use basis. The SMTP server sends emails via applications such as Microsoft Outlook or other SaaS platforms, which generate emails and require SMTP servers to distribute emails.
SES cooperates with applications, which run on Elastic Beanstalk or Elastic Compute Cloud. Please note that this is not a platform designed to maintain email addresses or compose emails. Unlike other email distribution services, SES uses the Experience of Amazon to send emails to the huge customer base it serves.
The email service is available in the east and west of the United States and in regions in Ireland. It offers customers the advantage of greater availability and low latency.
Benefits of SES
SES is very beneficial for online retailers because it eliminates the difficulties in sending bulk emails. The companies can also benefit from the advanced email infrastructure and the many years of experience that Amazon has.
Simple API call
With a simple API, a company has access to a scalable, high-quality email infrastructure to communicate cheaply and efficiently with customers. To guarantee a higher delivery ratio, SES uses various content filtering technologies that thoroughly scan the emails from your online store, to ensure, that the email content meets all ISP standards. Depending on the results, the emails are prepared for sending or sent back to their sender for rectification.
Affordable
SES has a simple value proposition. You can increase the scalability as often as you want and whenever you want, you pay for what you use. You can use a free option (excluding data transfer costs) of 2,000 email messages on a daily basis. You can use this option when you send emails from Elastic Beanstalk or EC2. You can also send 1000 emails for just 10 cents.
It is clear that an uncontrolled SES service is likely to attract spammers. Therefore, the company suggests that an interested party should start with the SES sandbox.
Monitors Key Metrics
In addition to the favorable rates, ISPS rlies on Amazon SES emails to come from a credible and proven source. This is because SES monitors some key statistics, such as complaints and hard bounces, to ensure that questionable or controversial content is not disseminated.
When the service detects deviations and abnormalities, your account will be blocked. Companies that send emails must therefore adhere to best practices, such as: sending relevant content of the highest quality, maintaining email lists properly, and ensuring that complaint and bounce percentages are between 0.1% and 5%.
Although the standard method of SES identifies complaint and email bounce messages, these are also included in the tracking of emails that are forwarded after being sent. You also have the option to reconfigure SNS to better display this information. Using SES, many applications that typically send bulk e-mails can use the SNS report to combine these statistics with various triggers to provide real-time statistics or identify potential issues.
Email pausing
With the new updates for the API processes, there is now an option to temporarily pause sending emails to SES. You can disable emails for sending to the full SES account with the update sending option.
Pausing emails is very useful. Keep in mind that the SES policy uses an automatic execution. With the help of the email pause function, you can temporarily stop the option of delivering emails and prevent your email account from being blocked. During the time when you can not send emails, you canfind out why your email account is causing abnormal complaints or a huge bounce rate. Once you’ve found the reason, you can start sending emails again.
The pause function also helps to ensure that the ability to distribute emails with a SES service is not interrupted. It ensures that the reputation of the sender is not damaged by problems or errors.
Start
Amazon SES is an excellent service for online stores in the retail trade. You can easily try Amazon SES, as it is easy to set up. You can click on the SES Sending Service via the control panel. You have the option to use the email service immediately. You are initially limited to a maximum of two hundred emails per day. Once you have access to ‘production access’, you have the option to send up to 100,000 emails per day.
The limits for emails are increased evenly depending on your bounce rate, email pattern and complaint statistics. In most cases, email limits jump from 100,000 to a maximum of 500,000. You can also submit a manual request.
SES rates
SES offers affordable and competitive email delivery. The first 62,000 emails every month are free, provided that these emails come from Elastic Beanstalk or EC2. Thereafter, prices rise up to 10 cents for every thousand emails. Attachments cost twelve cents per gigabyte.
You can make it easier for yourself by using Amazon SES. Join this popular service today and stay in touch with your customers.