On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of the Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), which they describe as “a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers”. They go on to say that Amazon SES will eliminate “the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service”.
Wow this sounds like a game changing development!
With 10 years’ experience in delivering email marketing campaigns using over 20 different email service providers, Alchemy Worx couldn’t resist the opportunity to register for the SES service to see if the service really is a game changer! So does this mean you should ditch your current ESP or in-house email marketing system?
First, in order to access Amazon SES, you will need to have or register for an Amazon Web Services Account which you can do here. Once signed in, you’ll be presented with an impressive selection of Amazon Web Services Products including Beanstalk, S3, EC2, VPC, CloudWatch, Elastic MapReduce, RDS, SNS. Initially quite a daunting prospect!
To get to where you need to go the navigation path is Products > Messaging > Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
As a separate product, you will need to sign-up to it separately and then activate your account via phone callback and pin verification system. Once activated, you now have access to the evaluation (sandpit) version of the service. In order to access to the full version, you are required to fill out an additional application which can be found here.
So now you are all set to deploy your first email right?
No, Not quite. Amazon’s Simple Email Service is so called because sending a message is “as simple as calling a single API”. To call an API, you need Security Credentials configured for API authentication purposes. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer 3 special credentials in order to access applications and services within the AWS Cloud. These include Access credentials; Sign-In Credentials, and Account Identifiers.
At this point, it is already clear that plenty of technical knowledge is going to be required to send those emails. This is all before we get to the code required to actually send the email in the first place. You can read more about the developer guide here.
Any email marketing professionals expecting a user friendly front-end interface or desktop client to go with the $0.10 CPM which they can use to build and schedule sophisticated email campaigns will find there isn’t one!
Today, Amazon’s Simple Email Services are mainly designed to appeal to companies looking for a back-end solution for their transactional email messages or wanting to replace an aging in-house email platform. If you currently deploy your email campaigns using a typical ESP, this service is unlikely to appeal to you.
Last updated: Apr 17, 2015 admin
