According to Marketing Charts, 82% of marketers worldwide consider email marketing to be the main strategy for increasing leads and conversion rates. Taking advantage of the increasing demand for email, the use of tools to promote information such as email marketing has also become more popular than ever, many providers have quickly launched a variety of other services to help users optimize the email delivery process.

Of course, a “big man” like Amazon cannot ignore this potential business. Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon Simple Email Service – Amazon SES with the goals of making it easier for digital marketing pros and application developers to send email marketing, notifications, and transactions at scale.

So, what is Amazon SES? How to sign up and how does it work? Let’s find out with VTI Cloud in this article.

What is Amazon SES?

According to Amazon Web Services:

“Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and easily scalable email service that allows developers to send email from within any application.”

Amazon SES is a service for sending bulk emails at a cheap price and the best quality available today. The sending speed is fast, the ability to enter the inbox is always high. Especially convenient payment method (direct payment via Visa card) or payment via partners in Vietnam to receive valid invoices.

Amazon SES is often used to send and receive emails with your own email address and domain name easily, more economically than solutions. However, you cannot send emails directly on Amazon. But need to use 1 email sending software. This software is connected to Amazon via protocols such as SMTP, HTTPS, API, etc.

Therefore, when you use Amazon SES as your email sender/receiver, you can develop many different software solutions at the same time: autoresponders, email unsubscribe systems, and applications. Support customers to send emails to.

Why business needs Amazon SES?

Sending emails effectively

Many businesses are now using free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail… to continuously send bulk emails in a few days. This is because these accounts are free, for personal, non-commercial use.

The maximum limit per day only allows you to send 500 emails. If you use your personal account to send sales emails, it’s a matter of being detected and locked out of your account….of course. This is a rule to ensure fairness for users (your email customers). With Amazon SES, you can send 1 million emails per day – 2,000 times more than Gmail.

Amazon SES will show you the results of email delivery (after each mass email campaign) through the following 4 parameters:

• Deliveries: Number of emails sent each day.

• Bounces: Percentage of emails that do not exist or do not receive emails from Amazon SES.

• Rejects: Percentage of emails that refuse to receive emails from you.

• Complaints: Percentage of marking your email as spam.

These statistics measure the effectiveness of each email communication, as well as providing additional insights like email open rates or clicks that measure customer engagement during the communication process via your email, which helps to improve the email sending campaigns.

In addition, emails sent via the SES service will be authenticated by amazonses.com. You can simply understand that your email has a guaranteed third-party Amazon, so your mail will be much more reputable than other regular mail. This you can verify by having these emails be tagged as Important or going directly to the customer’s Inbox.

Scaling safely

Amazon SES authentication options, such as the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) email authentication, confirm your sending permissions on behalf of your domain.

In addition, AWS also supports Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to help secure mail sending from any application. Amazon SES is globally available, HIPAA qualified, regionally compliant (C5, IRAP), and globally certified (Fed-Ramp, ISO, GDPR).

Cost savings

Building a large-scale emailing solution is often a complex and expensive challenge for a business. Specifically, you face infrastructure challenges such as email server management, network configuration, IP addresses, and system operating costs.

Not to mention the pressure from a third-party email solution that requires contract and price negotiations, as well as the upfront cost, also known as Upfront, is not small. Currently, in the world, there are many different email service providers such as Getrespone, Sendgrid, Mailchimp, etc., but Amazon SES has a much more competitive email delivery fee.

“Only 1$/10,000 email.” 

Compared to self-built systems of enterprises is not relevant, because mail delivery efficiency is not guaranteed, these servers do not have any credibility with email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc. So it is obvious that Emails sent from business/personal servers will go straight to the Spam mailbox.

Below is the price list of the Amazon SES service, which can be found at: Amazon Simple Email Service Pricing | Cloud Email Service | Amazon Web Services

Use cases of Amazon SES

Based on the experience of deploying and consulting on Amazon Simple Email Service, VTI Cloud summarizes 03 main cases where this service should be used to optimize costs and increase efficiency for email delivery.

Transactional Emails

Send instant communication based on triggers from your app to customers, such as purchase confirmation or password reset.

Marketing Emails

Promote your products and services, such as special offers and newsletters, with customized content and email templates.

Bulk Email Communication

Promote your products and services, such as special offers and newsletters, with customized content and email templates.

Integrates with existing services on Amazon Web Services

In fact, Amazon SES has easy integration with AWS services. Thanks to this outstanding connectivity feature, you can create automated solutions for your system:

• Email any application. If your application runs on the  Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) platform, you can use Amazon SES to send 62,000 emails per month at no additional cost. In addition, you can also send emails sent from Amazon EC2 using the AWS SDK, Amazon SES SMTP interface, making calls directly to the Amazon SES API.

• Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to create an email-enabled application; such as setting up a program that uses Amazon SES to send newsletters to customers.

• Set up Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send you notifications about emails that were sent unsuccessfully, mailed complaints, or successfully delivered to recipients’ mailboxes. When you use Amazon SES to receive email messages, email content can be instantly updated on Amazon SNS.

• Control user access to email delivery using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

• Store email you receive in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and simultaneously use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to optionally encrypt messages you receive in an Amazon S3 bucket.

• Process received emails by activating AWS Lambda functions.

• Use AWS CloudTrail to record Amazon SES API calls that you make using the console; or through Amazon’s SES API service.

Register account to use Amazon SES

After understanding what is Amazon SES and how it capable, VTI Cloud will guide you through the steps to register for Amazon SES. Note this procedure is only used for the following cases:

• Run tests with Amazon SES.

• Send test emails without using any other program.

•  

  Simplify email setup (the fewer steps the better).

Step 1: Sign up for an AWS account

Before using Amazon SES, you need to sign up for an AWS account. This account will automatically register and connect to services available in AWS, including Amazon SES and services in the AWS Free Tier plan to experience.

You can refer to the instructions in the previous article of VTI Cloud: Experiencing cloud computing with AWS Free Tier account | VTI CLOUD

Step 2: Verify email address

Before being able to send email through Amazon SES from your email address; businesses must perform email address verification

• Visit https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/.

• In the console, use the region selector to select the AWS region where you want to verify your email address, as shown in the image below. VTI Cloud encourages the use of region Asia Pacific (Singapore).

• Under “Identity Management”, select “Email addresses”.

• Select “Confirm a New Email Address”.

• In the “Verify New Email Address” dialog box, enter your email address in the “Email address” field. Then select “Verify this email address”

• Check your Amazon inbox for an email confirmation with the following subject line: “Amazon Web Services – Regional email address verification required (Domain you selected in step 2)”.

Step 3: Send email via Amazon SES

You can now simply send emails using the Amazon SES console. As a new user, your account will be tested in a sandbox environment. As a result, you can only send emails to and from email addresses that you have verified.

Step 4: Get out of the Amazon SES sandbox

To be able to send emails to unverified email addresses and increase the speed and number of emails you can send each day, your account needs to be moved out of the Amazon SES sandbox following a step-by-step process. after:

• Visit https://console.aws.amazon.com/.

• Under Support, select “Support Center”

• In the “My support case” section, select “Create Case”

• Under the “Create Case” section, select the “Service limit increase” dialog box.

• Then, you in turn fill in information based on 3 main classification items: Case Classification, Case Description and Contact Option

• After filling in the necessary information, click “Submit” to send a notice to log out of the Amazon SES sandbox. The AWS Support Team will respond to you within 24 hours.

Next steps

• After you’ve sent yourself a few test emails, use the Amazon SES mailbox emulator to test it further. Because the emails to the mailbox emulator do not include your failed delivery and complaint messages.

• Monitor your submissions; such as the number of emails you sent and the number of bounces or claims received. For more information, refer to the article Monitoring Your Amazon SES Sending Activity.

• Full domain verification so you can send email from any email address in your domain without needing to verify individual addresses.

• Increase the likelihood that your email will be delivered to your recipient’s inbox instead of the junk box by validating your email.

Conclusion

Amazon Simple Email Service is a service for sending bulk emails at a cheap price and the best quality available today. Amazon SES is not only an email delivery tool but also a solution to help optimize the email delivery process and also help businesses save significant costs compared to building their own email solutions.

Moreover, registering to use and configuring Amazon SES is not too complicated, but also creates a lot of opportunities to reach customers more accurately and efficiently.

VTI Cloud with its experience can assist businesses in consulting and setting up in the most accurate and complete way. Help businesses save their time and resources to focus on developing the current application.

About VTI Cloud

VTI Cloud is an Advanced Consulting Partner of AWS Vietnam with a team of over 50+ AWS certified solution engineers. With the desire to support customers in the journey of digital transformation and migration to the AWS cloud, VTI Cloud is proud to be a pioneer in consulting solutions, developing software, and deploying AWS infrastructure to customers in Vietnam and Japan.

Building safe, high-performance, flexible, and cost-effective architectures for customers is VTI Cloud’s leading mission in enterprise technology mission.