What was the best part about using Amazon SES?
Amazon SES is their email sending and receiving platform which strengths include reliability, scalability and cost effectiveness. By comparison, I have learned it is approximately ten times more to send transactional based emails through PostMark. Though SendGrid and Mandrill are its closest competition in terms of price, Amazon SES still blows them out of the water. For example, it's about eleven cents to send one thousand emails with Amazon SES while it's about one dollar to do the same via Aweber. That's a huge difference. And those folks that argue the cheapest option is usually poor quality this is most certainly an exception. Amazon still regulates their email import limits, so you can't abuse it. While Amazon is already known for its reliability. Huge companies use their cloud applications and frameworks such as Netflix, Facebook and many others. Which speaks to the world class quality of their software, platform and infrastructures as a service. There's a ton of educational resources available from Amazon which is good. The support is quite in depth even though it could always be more visual in my opinion. I look forward to perhaps the use of Sendy to utilize Amazon SES for our start up email marketing but the standalone software does not have dedicated IP capabilities that I can view on the available features, although it's available in their premium email hosting starting at nineteen dollars USD per month. I don't believe it's a big issue especially if you're mostly using Amazon SES for transactional based email for at least the fifty to one hundred thousand emails per month.
What would you change about your experience with Amazon SES?
There is not much negative to say about Amazon SES in terms of its pricing, reliability or scalability, but their Amazon Web Console is not as user friendly as it could be in my opinion. Though SES seems a bit easier to navigate intuitively than EC2 or S3 which are the other Amazon cloud services I currently have experience with. There's definitely a learning curve if you're going to use Amazon SES without a client like Sendy. Sendy is sixty bucks incredibly well spent even if you're an SES expert.
Overall Feedback
This is an amazingly cost effective option to consider for your email marketing, though it may be best utilized for transactional email depending on how clean your list is and how well you maintain it for email marketing in particular, though your list has to be maintained regardless moving forward using Amazon SES to ensure your bounce and complaint rates are kept below their minimums. So there is work to be done using this platform on its own. Your most efficient use of Amazon SES is through a client such as Sendy.co which is a one time software purchase of about sixty bucks. They've done a massive amount of work already to ensure deliverability is good and cost stays down using SES. Considering our list isn't huge as we're in an early stage of our potential growth overall I don't believe the lack of a dedicated IP using it is a real issue with a smaller list certainly under fifty thousand people perhaps. And the reviews of Sendy via Amazon SES is are pretty outstanding overall. Overall, to have a loss of under one hundred bucks to try Sendy and Amazon SES is an acceptable loss in my opinion, because if the reports of the deliverability can be verified by our start up I will be an extremely happy camper and grateful for the cost savings, to go with the reliability and scalability.