Amazon enters the ESP space - and why we aren't worried!

The news broke yesterday that Amazon is launching its SES (simple Email service), this has caused a ripple through the ESP space according to the Magill report.

So what are the key facts?

-    It’s cheap – really cheap $0.10 per thousand. That’s uber cheap BTW, you’d have to be sending hundreds of millions on our unlimited platform to get that equivalent rate at Pure360

-    Its forms part of AWS (Amazon Web Services).  So you know it will be seriously robust, as Amazon very rarely goes down

-    There is no interface – only available through an API, so if you like being able to login and schedule campaigns this isn’t for you

-    No reporting beyond Sent/Bounced/Complaints

-    Ok if you aren’t doing email marketing

-    Not really designed for high volumes – you start on 1000 a day

-    They also offer Freemium (free for under2000 a day), this feels more and more like a transactional play

Who is this going to work for?

- The technically self sufficient marketer

-    If you already sell on Amazon and have done the work to integrate with AWS then it won’t be a massive step to start sending emails through their SES service

-    The transactional marketer

-    This will work well if as above you are already familiar with the AWS and are having trouble consistently getting delivery to the inbox for your transactional emails. These are small in volume but of course HAVE to get there

Who this won’t work for

-    The typical marketer

-    If you aren’t familiar with APIs, or want to send more than a few thousand you’ll struggle to make the savings you’d think

-    Without any reporting or campaign management all you are really paying for is the actual sending of emails which you could achieve through any number of SMTP gateways

Conclusions

A number of ESPs have tried and failed to make a mark on the transactional market (us included!), believe me we’d love to send all those emails for you and we’re all very well qualified to do so but...
The issue isn’t about capability, often the barrier is the client - routing transactional emails from an ecommerce platform or internally built system is way outside a marketers’ influence and isn’t anywhere near as easy as extracting a list from your CRM and hitting send.

This is where it gets interesting, AWS already plugs into a lot of systems so this barrier is already part overcome.

So transactional yes, marketing no – hence me not worrying.