Amazon Web Services, the b-to-b in-the-cloud technology platform of Amazon.com, launched a marketing and transactional e-mail service on January 25 for businesses and developers.
The Simple Email Service tracks outgoing e-mail messages to ensure they meet ISP standards, queues them for sending, or returns them to a business for corrections. The platform will also notify business customers about bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.
The service costs 10 cents per thousand e-mails sent. It allows each client business to send 2,000 e-mail messages each day for free if they originate from the Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk services. The company is not charging upfront costs or requiring a long-term commitment.
“Businesses that operate their own e-mail service must deal with hassles such as e-mail server management, network configuration and meeting rigorous ISP standards for e-mail content,” said Tera Randall, PR specialist for Amazon Web Services.
Managed services provider Neustar, digital entertainment and content development agency 42 Entertainment and video mail platform Eyejot are among the Amazon clients that have signed up for the service.
Adam Sarner, research director in CRM strategies at Gartner, said the price of SES is lower than many other bulk e-mail services. That may attract businesses that have not yet conducted much e-mail marketing.
“Amazon has identified a big bottleneck where businesses are concerned. Delivery bothers many organizations, and they’re wondering, ‘what if we fall into spam? What do we do about it?’” said Sarner.
However, he cautioned that marketers must still ensure their messages are relevant to consumers and properly targeted. “Just because it’s cheaper and you can do it, that doesn’t mean you should,” he said.
