Amazon Web Services LLC, has announced they are entering the ESP marketplace with the launch of Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). The service which is still currently officially in “Beta” is described by Amazon as “a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.” This has caused more than just a few ripples in the email messaging space, with potentially far reaching consequences for the industry as a whole.
1 Million Messages for $100
Cost effective? You can say that again, if it works, then senders are looking at about $100 to send 1 million email messages. The kind of costs that can only be achieved when you have the economies of scale that Amazon is able to bring to the table. Even spammers for hire using the most dubious of techniques would not offer rates this low. Amazon said this on the subject of their pricing in a release to the press “Amazon is able to pass on the efficiencies of its scale to customers, and pricing for Amazon SES is only $0.10 per thousand email messages sent.”
This is the final confirmation of what many have known for a long time, the commoditisation of the sending of email has already happened, and only last week Andrew Barrett revealed was the “ESPs Dirty Secret“.
Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services stated
“Customers have consistently asked us for the ability to send large quantities of high-quality email from Amazon EC2. Amazon SES makes it very easy for businesses to send email from applications running on Amazon EC2 and other AWS services. …With Amazon SES, businesses no longer have to worry about the details of building and maintaining their own email-sending solution … they can focus on improving customer communication and reducing costs.”
EmailExpert has spent the last 12 hours testing the new platform, speaking directly to key members of the SES team at Amazon as well as other early adopters of this new service. We have also canvassed a number of ESP’s in the marketplace, many of whom are extremely tight lipped or only prepared to comment off-the-record. News broke too late for us to establish contact with many of the European ESP’s we hope some will be in touch today.
ESP’s may not have as much to fear as they initially thought from this service. It requires technical knowledge to get set-up. It is not as simple as entering your smtp server address, username and password into your current application. You will likely need to use the API, in fact if you wish to have DKIM signing you must use the API, with some extremely specific rule-sets. The service comes with no bells and whistles, you get no tracking or ROI reporting, it is very much “bare bones”.
If you work in the industry and are prepared to make a comment on the subject please get in touch ‘andrew.bonar @gmail .com’
We will be shortly posting a variety of deliverability testing results and further information that we have learned as a result of our testing to date. Follow @email_expert & @andrewbonar on Twitter for updates.
This is great news. Our guys are in the middle of creating a unique email marketing tool and this could be just the break we were looking for!
- Tony
Hopefully this will nudge certain email clients to improve their readability when considering HTML emails. Great news!