Amazon.com, Inc. was founded by one of the great tech entrepreneurs of our time, Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, in Seattle. Today, 24 years later, Amazon is a technological giant with over $4.106 billion operating income, available worldwide and holding the title for the largest Internet retailer in the world (according to revenue). Amazon started as an online bookstore and evolved into one of the most significant electronic commerce and cloud computing companies on the market. One of their last products in the field of corporate email accounts is the Amazon Simple Email Service.

For all free or low-cost business email providers there, Mailbird is also a great low-cost option for desktop email clients as this is one of the main reasons why existing businesses choose Mailbird over the competition!

Before we go into the subject of Amazon Web Services, let’s give you a few more facts about how amazing the Amazon company is:

Amazon is the second most valuable public company in the world after Apple.

Amazon is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world.

Amazon is the second largest employer in the United States after Walmart.

Pricing strategies might have helped a lot in their journey but this is another topic for another post.

The Amazon Simple Email Service is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a subsidiary of Amazon (parent company) that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms. What are cloud computing platforms? This technology allows users to have a virtual cluster of computers available to them, at all times through the power of the Internet. This platform was launched in 2002, but it was later relaunched and redesigned in 2006, according to the parameters presented by Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black in their white paper research.

The best way to describe what Amazon Web Services (AWS) does for users is through the words of Andy Jassy, AWS founder and vice president in 2006: “Helps free developers from worrying about where they are going to store data, whether it will be safe and secure, if it will be available when they need it, the costs associated with server maintenance, or whether they have enough storage available. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it.”

The Amazon Simple Email Service was introduced five years later, in 2011, as a new way of sending huge bulks of emails the right way. If your company deals with email marketing in any form, or your business simply has a very busy B2B communication that requires bulk and transactional emails on a daily basis, then this simple email service might be perfect for you. The Amazon Simple Email Service is considered to be one of the best transactional email sending services on the market today, and the end goal is that your emails go straight to the inbox and not in the spam folder. You can send any number of emails to any number of receivers without having to worry about storage space, or blocking the email servers and causing any form of damage.

In the following section of this article, we will discuss the best features of the Amazon Simple Email Service.

The most prominent features of Amazon Simple Email Services

The Amazon Simple Email Service is, in fact, an email marketing solution, which allows businesses to send a huge amount of emails (bulk emails) to many different recipients without disturbing their regular workflow, storage space or email servers. At the end of this section of the article, we will provide you with a brief step-by-step guide on how to configure your domain according to the required parameters and start using the Amazon Simple Email Service.

Amazon SES is defined and promoted by the company as “a cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. It is a reliable, cost-effective service for businesses of all sizes that use email to keep in contact with their customers.” Moreover, the salient selling point, besides the apparent use of the service, is the high-level integration with the apps and email solutions you’re already using in your company. If you visit the Amazon SES website, you will see the list of their featured clients like HBO, Siemens, InVision and other prominent corporations.

However, for you as a business owner, the most important things are the features offered by Amazon SES and how you can use them to your advantage.

Features:

Amazon SES features a content filtering technology and a reputation dashboard, which were designed to protect your reputation as a sender and to deliver your emails to the right inboxes

It’s incredibly cost effective because you’re paying only for the services you’re using, and there are no additional or hidden fees. Furthermore, the first 62,000 emails you send every month are free if you use an application hosted on Amazon EC2.

You can set up your configuration settings, which are best applicable to the nature of your business.

You can send your email metrics to Amazon CloudWatch for further analysis.

Amazon SES allows you to receive notifications through Amazon SNS.

Amazon SES is accessible, reliable and has a 24/7 technical support team to aid you with any problems or difficulties.

Advantages:

Your emails won’t be registered as “marketing emails”, and thus they won’t end up in the spam folder, instead of the inbox.

The chances of your emails landing in the spam folder are 0.1 percent, unless the content is really spammy.

Amazon SES features the most cost-effective email pricing you can find on the market, with only $ 0.0001 per email sent.

Have you met Sandy? Sandy is an Amazon SES powered app, which helps you manage and run your marketing campaigns. You can do everything through the app and not log in the dashboard at all. The app features a clean dashboard itself and has an analysis system, which provides you with essential details about every marketing campaign that you ran through the app.

Disadvantages:

The Amazon SES can be a bit difficult to navigate, configure and learn for beginners or people that are not that technologically savvy.

The dashboard can be complicated for navigation, and it will take time to learn what every function does and how to use it properly.

Setting up your Amazon Simple Email Services can be done in three easy and simple steps. You just need to follow our guidelines, and you will be done with the setup in a matter of minutes. Let’s begin.

Step 1 – Create the SMTP credentials – All the emails you want to send through the Amazon Simple Email Services have to go through the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) interface. The first thing you need to do before sending the emails is to log on to the AWS Management Console to create the SMTP credentials. Once you’re logged in, you need to find the “SES Email Sending Service” option and click on it. It’s the third option under App Services.

Once you click on that, you will need to find the “SMTP Settings” option, which is located in the left navigation bar, under the “Email sending” settings. When you click on the “SMTP Settings” a window will appear with a button for creating SMTP credentials. Download them or copy them on a safe place on the hard drive, because the password won’t be shown again. Once the credentials are created, the download option will appear automatically.

Step 2 – Verify your email address – Again, you need to log in the Management Console if you’re not already logged in, and click on the “Verify a New Email Address” link. Once you click on the link, a new dialogue box will pop up, where you will have to type in your email address. In the dialogue box, you will encounter this message: “To verify a new email address, enter it below and click on the Verify This Email button. A verification email will be sent to the email address you entered.”

Once you click on the button, you will receive an email from the Amazon Simple Email Services asking you to confirm the email address. You should be aware that the link is viable only for 24 hours after receiving the email. Once you click on the link in the email, the status of the email address in the console should change from “pending verification” to “verified”. If you want to test this right away, as you should, click on the “Send a Test Email” button, which is right next your verified email address to check if everything works properly. If it does, you’re set for sending bulk emails from that email account.

Step 3 – Removal of Amazon Simple Email Service restrictions – This is an additional step if your company needs to send out more than 200 messages in a 24-hour period. The Amazon Simple Email Service imposes these restrictions on new users for protection, including fraud and abuse. If you want to remove the imposed limits and gain unlimited access to the Amazon Simple Email Services, then you need to file a request with the Amazon Support Center.

The simple email client

Another point we would like to discuss while we’re on the subject of email solutions and email management include simple email clients. If you’re a veteran of B2B communication, and you know how to run an email marketing campaign, then there is no need to explain how important email management is for a smooth business operation. Receiving and responding to emails in a timely manner can be crucial for keeping your clients and customers happy and satisfied with your service.

This is where desktop email clients come in! The benefits and advantages of using a proper email client are many, especially if the software is equipped with productivity features and offers full app integration. Integrating the business-oriented apps like Slack, Asana, Degoo, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Apps, Unroll.me, Todoist and others, in the email client, can save your employees time and make them more productive. If you want to up your email game, you should consider finding an email client that features some of the following options:

Uniﬁed Inbox with colour indicators – will allow you to see all of your emails from all your accounts in one inbox. The colour indicators tell what email comes from what account. It’s the perfect feature for keeping track.

Attachment Search – it’s a feature that allows you to search for attachments instead of opening the emails in your inbox. This is a super handy app that can save you and your team a lot of time.

Avatar Search / Proﬁle Picture Search – this feature allows you to see all the emails that are in your inbox from the specific person/avatar you clicked on.

Drag and Drop of attachments – this feature is perfect for everyone working in a corporate environment and deals with a lot of documents and revisions on a daily basis. The drag & drop attachments option allows you to choose if you want to attach or add the docs inline in the compose window.

Inline Reply – is a fantastic feature for project management when many people are involved in the same email conversation. The inline reply will help keep all threads clean and easy to follow for everyone.

Quick Action Bar – this feature allows you to hover over the email in the inbox and an instant action bar will appear that will enable you to “process” that email as fast as possible.

Quick Preview of Attachments – this feature lets you take a look at an attached picture/document/PDF or any other file quickly. This means that you won’t have to open Word, Paint or any other apps that might be associated with the attachment.

According to us, if you’re a Mac user, you should take a look at Airmail, or if you prefer a Windows OS, then Mailbird would be perfect for you. Evolution is open-source, and the “go to” candidate for most Linux users. Furthermore, you can use the Amazon Simple Email Service with every app or software email solution already installed on your computer.

For all free or low-cost business email providers there, Mailbird is also a great low-cost option for desktop email clients as this is one of the main reasons why existing businesses choose Mailbird over the competition!