You have to hand it to email.
Fifty years after the very first one was sent, it continues to hold its own against the new, young upstarts.
SMS, video calling, messaging apps, social media platforms – they all provide us with modern, constantly-evolving options when it comes to how we communicate, and yet the email still prevails.
In our work lives in particular, the email is king. We may only need to ask a customer or colleague a simple question, or we may only need to exchange some basic information, but more often than not, we choose to do so in an email.
For brands and enterprises, emailing is an essential component of the customer engagement piece, with millions sent and received every day in pursuit of sales and service wins.
But how many are delivered to the right recipient? How many cut through as intended? How can you maximise IP reputation? And what does it all cost?
Email Service Providers must be able to answer all those questions and more.
For customers of the really smart ones, it is a relationship capable of adding huge value to not only those crucial deliverability and cost metrics, but also to the back-end (and increasingly self-service) business of measuring, analysing and improving them.
So, when you consider the epic scale of most organisations’ email usage, it’s easy to see why picking the right provider partner is key.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) delivers billions of emails every day and, prior to its launch in 2011, was responsible for email delivery for all of Amazon.com.
“Deliverability is the most important thing when it comes to email – if you are not delivering customers’ emails, you are not meeting your promise to them,” says Wayne Dunne, Senior Manager, at Amazon Simple Email Service.
“There’s a shared responsibility in that, but a large part falls on the Email Service Provider to get things right. But also, philosophically, we don’t feel customer organisations should have to overpay for that.
“We believe a modular approach is the right thing to do. Customers use us as a core but can have us manage more elements of their infrastructure if they wish. Some want to hand us an e-mail for us to deliver and don’t mind if they share resources with others because it saves them some costs. Others want dedicated resources deployed and managed just for them.
In the case of SES, its Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) feature automatically scans customers’ e-mail configurations and gives recommendations on what to do to get better results.
A dashboard enables users to see how many emails bounced on a per-IP basis, which geographical territories have performed best, and which marketing emails have been delivered most successfully.
Then, the VDM makes changes on the customer’s behalf to improve effectiveness going forward.
SES has features allowing for email delivery performance and trajectory by mailbox provider (such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo) associated with major shopping events or periods of growth, and automatically flexes dedicated IP address capacity up or down accordingly – removing the need for ongoing dedicated capacity planning.
“To run a successful e-mail campaign you need to be monitoring deliverability and then understanding and acting upon the results,” says Dunne.
“In very large organisations, there is an expensive specialist carrying out that role. However, not all organisations can afford that. We automate the processes and take away a lot of the required heavy lifting.
“If you’re getting better email deliverability at low cost, you can spend money elsewhere in your business to help it grow.
“That kind of ROI – particularly now, when organisations face tough economic pressures – can make a huge difference.”
It’s not just cost-side ROI either.
Huge amounts of creative resource routinely go into organisation’s messaging and marketing emails but, if they fail to reach the right inbox, that investment is wasted.
Conversely, if an organisation’s emailing is effective, the messaging and marketing drives revenue.
“Most organisations have an understanding of how much they derive form their email marketing efforts,” says Dunne.
“What’s important for senders is that when they have someone’s e-mail address, that’s a one-to-one conversation. The sender organisation owns the relationship with the recipient. There’s no third party in the middle and they have complete control over the message. In simple terms, the higher the number of appropriate inboxes reached, the higher the potential to drive revenue.”
In a world which continues to produce vast amounts of those email conversations, it seems it pays to be sure they are delivering all they can.
To learn more about how AWS Amazon Simple Email Service can help your and your customers’ businesses work smarter, click here.
