How to send marketing email through Amazon SES at cost

Why the usual way fails

Raw SES is an API, not an email app. There is no editor, no audience picker and no unsubscribe page, so you either build those parts yourself or rent them from someone. Most hosted marketing tools price by contacts or by month, and some resell sending at their own rate instead of passing on the provider's price. Building it yourself means writing bounce handling, one-click unsubscribe headers and list cleanup code that has nothing to do with your actual product.

How Rowsend helps

Rowsend is a Mac app that sends through your own SES account, or through Postmark, Mailgun or any SMTP server, and adds no markup to the emails you send. You pay once for the app, and your provider bills you directly at its own price. The app covers the parts raw SES leaves out: an editor, segments built from your own database, unsubscribe links with the one-click header, and bounce and complaint handling. For a list of 10,000 contacts, Rowsend's own comparison counts $48 of SES sending in the first year, based on SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails.

Step by step

1. In the SES console, verify the domain you will send from and move your account out of the sandbox so you can email real users.
2. Create an AWS access key that is allowed to send through SES, and keep it out of your code and chat logs.
3. In Rowsend, choose Amazon SES as the provider for your project and paste the key. The app encrypts it on your computer.
4. Connect your database and build the segment you want to reach, such as users who signed in within the last 30 days.
5. Send yourself a test, then schedule the campaign or send it in batches. On a new domain, start the warm-up at 50 emails a day.
6. When it has gone out, check deliveries, bounces and complaints for that campaign. Addresses that bounce are left out of later sends.

Tips

• Set a daily limit in Rowsend that sits under your SES quota, and give a new domain a warm-up that starts at 50 emails a day. Mailbox providers trust a domain that grows its volume slowly far more than one that mails the whole list on day one.
• Count the Cloud part honestly. The app is one payment, but the pieces that need a public address, like the one-click unsubscribe page, hosted images and sends while your Mac is off, come from Rowsend Cloud at $90 a year or $9 a month, or from a server you run with Docker. Every license includes 30 days of Cloud, so you can see whether you need it.
• If your list is under 1,000 contacts, look at the free plans first. Rowsend's own pricing page says Loops and Resend cost less at that size, so the savings show up once your list grows past it.
• Keep an eye on complaints in the first few campaigns. SES watches your bounce and complaint rates closely, and Rowsend pauses a campaign on its own when they climb, which gives you time to clean the audience before your account gets flagged.

Questions