The New(ish) Kid on The Block
Amazon Simple Email Service
Even though, you have an abundance of choice when it comes to your email marketing software, many of us have stuck with the industry leaders: Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Aweber and MailerLite to only name a few.
To be fair, they have changed how and who uses email marketing making it accessible to the mass. It has come with a massive price tag though. If you look at Campaign Monitor for example, a list of around 50,000 subscribers and a maximum sender volume of 200,000 a month will cost you around £280. Scale this up even further and some companies are paying thousands of pounds for the pleasure of sending out an email.
As you might have guessed from the title, there is one company in the world that truly knows how to disrupt a market: Amazon.
A few years back, Amazon has created an email marketing software that they simply call SES – simple email service. And the name says it all: it is simple BUT also incredibly cheap and cost effective.
Let’s look at the numbers as it will show you the huge difference in pricing. We assume that we work with a list of 5,000 subscribers who are happy for us to send them emails.
Mailchimp will charge us £52.99 (essential package – email only) and stipulates that we can send a maximum of 50,000 emails in total throughout a given month.
Campaign Monitor is slightly cheaper with £49 a month but we can only send a maximum of 25,000 emails during the given month. We could upgrade to unlimited emails but that would increase our costs to £89 a month.
Now, Amazon SES charges us $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send. This means in our example, our total cost for sending 5,000 emails is $0.50. If we say, we want to send a maximum of 50,000 emails to match Mailchimp's price cluster, SES would charge us $5.
Why is not everyone using Amazon SES yet?
I’ve been using Amazon SES for over 3 years. BUT and this is a big BUT, I couldn’t have implemented it into our CRM software without the help of our very knowledge developer. At the moment, the set-up and integration are not as streamlined as with the better-known email marketing providers.
Within Amazon SES, there is also not a template builder which might be the second reason why the majority of businesses have shied away from it. We’re solved this problem by using BeePro which is a fantastic email design tool. It’s very user-friendly and let’s you export the html mailer in various forms so that it’s easily integrated into your CRM. Or, some of the CRMs such as Mailchimp have an integration in place which automatically takes on templates designed in BeePro.
If you can, check out Amazon SES
Now is the time to take a look at Amazon SES or similar platforms that will disrupt the market in the years to come. Just make sure you have someone close by who understands SDK APIs and SMTPs.
