Transactional Emails with AWS SES
The easy way to use AWS SES for transactional emails.
Last updated
The easy way to use AWS SES for transactional emails.
Last updated
If you are a Startup, chances are your entire tech stack is on AWS but you are not using AWS SES. Instead you use a third party email service like Mailchimp or SendGrid.
AWS SES has the same reliability and deliverability as any other email service. And it comes at a price point too good to ignore. So why does SES not have 'top-of-mind' recall when it comes to transactional email. There are a few reasons we know of.
AWS SES is hard to get started with. You need to get out of the sandbox first.
There's pages and pages of documentation to deal with.
There's no contact management.
You cannot design and manage email templates.
Expensive add-ons (delivery dashboard/virtual deliverability manager).
Is there a way to overcomes these hurdles? YES. That's where SENDUNE comes in.
SENDUNE abstracts away all the complexity of sending transactional emails with AWS. What you get is a highly reliable way to deliver all your transactional emails at a fraction of the cost.
Transactional emails are emails that your customers expect to receive from you. I mean they are refreshing their inbox waiting for your email to show up. The greatest examples of transactional emails are the ones you send for user 'Signups' and 'Password Resets'.
A template needs to be created in SENDUNE for every kind of transactional email you wish to send. You can create templates using the no-code designer or the html editor or the plain text version.
Let's illustrate how you can set up an email template. We'll use a live example - i.e. an actual transactional email that we use at SENDUNE for user sign ups. In our case we have created an email template using the plain text designer. Our user sign up email template looks like this.
This template is triggered via an API call whenever a new user wants to sign up. Notice the template contains a 'replace tag' in double curly brackets { {signup-link} }.
The API call is a simple cURL request. The { {signup-link} } is replaced with an actual link the end user can click to complete the signup process. Below is the actual email sent. Users click on the link and complete the sign up process.
That's all there is to it. Here are some takeaways.
We have created a plain text template. You can create any fancy template using the SENDUNE Designer or the HTML Editor.
You can have as many 'replace-tags (merge tags)' as you want within each template.
You can create as many transactional templates as you wish.
Once your templates are ready you can forget all about them. They will just work. We have clients who have created transactional email templates for signups and password resets many years ago and haven't touched them since. SENDUNE + AWS SES is that reliable.
You can have your engineering teams or product managers create the templates while the tech team just does the API integration.
There is no limit to the kinds of transactional emails you can create and send. Apart from Sign ups and Password Resets you can create transactional emails for sending invoices, order notifications, payment updates, e-commerce notifications, or just about anything.
Remember all these templates reside outside your application code. So you can come back and make any changes without any downtime to your application. That's the ultimate beauty of using SENDUNE.
