Amazon SES is part of AWS, Amazon Web Services. You have to create an account, but it’s free. This opens up the vast world of Amazon Web Services like SES, SNS, S2, and so on. You will soon realize that you are not in Kansas anymore. This is where the big boys play. In fact, many ESPs are actually putting a pretty face on Amazon SES with their templates and newsletter builders and reselling it.
Amazon SES stands for Amazon Simple Email Service. Amazon is essentially selling computer time. It’s really a bare-bones ESP. You’ll find no forms, no templates — none of the things you’d expect from, say, Sendinblue (see previous section). You only pay for the CPU cycles you use. And that’s where the dramatic difference lies – the cost. Even with a modest email list, with a traditional ESP you pay $10–$50 per month, whether or not you send out your newsletter. There are no monthly fees with Amazon. You only pay for emails sent, and the cost is 10 cents per 1,000 emails. To give you a comparison, a growing email list that would cost $200 with a familiar ESPs would cost $1 with Amazon SES.
The downside is that it requires a bit more work on your part to set up. Amazon SES easily sends your emails that are created in another application. Our recommendation is Mailster, which is covered in the next section.
Mailster
Email marketing (covered in Chapter 11) is one of the best ways to stay in touch with and grow your audience. You can use an all-in-one ESP such as Sendinblue (described earlier in this chapter). Since they have pre-made templates, your life is made easier, and since you’re only using one company, setup is easy. Although you have a free tier, costs increase exponentially as your audience grows.
Or you can use Mailster to create emails and campaigns and use Amazon SES (see previous section) to send them. This is a relatively simple and cost-effective solution. Not as easy as, say, Sendinblue, but definitely worth a bit of work.
One of the great things about Mailster is that since it’s a WordPress plugin, you can create your newsletters and campaigns right within your WordPress dashboard with Mailster’s drag-and-drop editor. You don’t need to learn another email sending company’s system. And you don’t have to keep jumping between the two. I (author Ted) have been using this combo for years. This is a great time and money saver. (Turn to Chapter 7 for an introduction to WordPress.) When you’ve created a newsletter you like, you can duplicate it and edit it for the next email you send. This way you get a consistent professional look for your email campaigns but only need to insert new posts, videos and images into the newsletter shell you create.
You can also set up a system to handle bounces (undelivered emails) to keep your email list clean. You can set up autoresponders. Mailster also shows you the statistics of your campaigns — number of opens, number of clicks, and so on — so you can measure how successful your campaigns are and fine-tune them.
Mailster plugin costs $59. Mailster has free lifetime updates, so there are no recurring costs. It comes with a free newsletter template, and an extensive library of paid newsletter templates is available. Support is very responsive and they try to answer all questions. However, there is a price for support.
Since you are setting up a self-hosted email service, it is important that you do not actually use your host to send emails. For this you use Amazon SES. As long as you do this, you’ll avoid all the problems that more expensive email solutions warn you about. Amazon SES costs about 10 cents per thousand emails. There is no monthly charge. If, for example, you don’t send email, Amazon SES costs nothing.
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