Guest post: How EmailOctopus built an email marketing platform using Amazon SES

The following guest post was written by Tom Evans, COO of EmailOctopus.

Our product, EmailOctopus, grew from a personal need. We were working on another business venture, and as our email subscriber base grew, the costs of using the larger email service providers became prohibitively expensive for an early-stage startup.

At this point we were already using Amazon SES to send sign up confirmations to our users. We loved Amazon SES’ low pricing and high deliverability, but being a transactional email service, we missed some tracking features offered by our marketing provider. We decided to develop a simple interface to make it easier for us to build and track the performance of marketing emails on top of the Amazon SES platform.

After sharing our accomplishments with other founders, and with no other SaaS solutions on the market that met the same need, we began to turn our basic script into a polished email marketing application. We named our application EmailOctopus. Over 4 years later, and with over 1.5 billion emails delivered through Amazon SES, our mission remains the same: to make contacting your customers as easy and inexpensive as possible.

EmailOctopus is now a fully fledged platform, with thousands of users sending marketing campaigns every day. Our platform integrates directly with our customers’ AWS accounts and provides them with an easy-to-use front end on top of the SES platform. EmailOctopus users can upload or register subscribers who have opted into their correspondence (through an import or one of our many integrations), then send a one-off campaign or an automated marketing series, all while closely tracking the performance of those emails and allowing the recipients to opt-out.

Scaling EmailOctopus to handle millions of emails per day

Building an email marketing platform from scratch has presented a number of challenges, both technical and operational. EmailOctopus has quickly grown from a side project to a mature business that has sent over 1.5 billion emails through Amazon SES.

One of the biggest challenges of our growth has been dealing with a rapidly expanding database. Email marketing generates a huge amount of data. We log every view, bounce, click, spam report, open and unsubscribe for every email sent through our platform. A single campaign can easily generate over 1 million of these events.

Our event processing system sits on a number of microservices spread over EC2 and Lambda, which allows us to selectively scale our services based on demand. Figure 1, below, demonstrates just how irregular this demand is. We save over $500 a month using an on-demand serverless model.

Figure 1. Number of events processed over time.

This model helps us manage our costs and ensures we only pay for the computing power we need.  We rely heavily on CloudFormation scripts to edit that infrastructure; these scripts allow every change to be version-controlled and propagated across all of our environments. In preparing for this blog post, we took a look at how that template had changed over the years—we’d forgotten just how much it had evolved. As our user base grew from 1 customer to 10,000, a single EC2 instance writing to a MySQL database just didn’t cut it. We now rely on a large portion of the AWS suite to reliably consume our event data, as illustrated in Figure 2, below.

Figure 2. Our current event processing infrastructure.

Operationally, our business has needed to make changes to scale too. Processes that worked fine with a handful of clients do not work so well with 10,000 users. We pride ourselves on providing our customers with a superior and personal service; to maintain that commitment, we dedicate 10% of our development time to improving our internal tools. One of these projects resulted in a dashboard which quickly provides us with detailed information on each user and their journey through the platform. The days of asking our support team to assemble database queries are long gone!

What makes EmailOctopus + SES different from the competition?

Amazon SES uses proprietary content filtering technologies and monitors the status of its services rigorously. This means that you’re likely to see increased deliverability on your communication, while saving up to 10x on your current email marketing costs. EmailOctopus pricing plans range from $0 to $109 per month (depending on the number of recipients you need to store), and the cost of sending email through Amazon SES is also very low: you pay nothing for the first 62,000 emails you send through Amazon SES each month, and $0.10 per 1,000 emails after that. Need to send a million emails in a month? You can do it for less than $100 with EmailOctopus + Amazon SES.

Our easy-to-use interface and integrations make it easy to add new subscribers, and our email templates help you create trackable, beautiful, responsive emails. We even offer trigger-based automated email delivery—perfect for onboarding new customers.

I’m ready to get started!

Great! We’ve made it easy to start using EmailOctopus with Amazon SES. First, if you don’t already have one, create an Amazon Web Services account. Once you’ve done that, head over to our website and create an EmailOctopus account. From there, we’ll walk you through the quick and easy process of linking the two services together.

If you’ve never used Amazon SES before, you will also need to provide some information about the types of communication you plan to send. This important step in the process ensures that all new Amazon SES users are reputable, and that they will not have a negative impact on other users who send email through Amazon SES. Once you’ve finished that step, you’ll be ready to start sending emails using EmailOctopus and Amazon SES.

To learn more about what EmailOctopus can do for your business, visit our website at https://emailoctopus.com.