Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

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Email continues to be the most effective medium for engaging with customers, boasting an incredible ROI of 4200%, far surpassing social media and blogs. Organizations that neglect proper email management and reputation risk having their messages flagged as spam, which diminishes customer trust and can lead to significant revenue losses. Research indicates that 16% of marketing emails either go missing or are caught in spam filters. In this article, we will explore the advantages of utilizing dedicated IPs for email delivery and how managed dedicated IPs simplify the process.

Enhancing Your Sending Reputation and Deliverability with Dedicated IPs

When customers first sign up for Amazon SES, their emails are sent from shared IPs. While shared IPs are a cost-effective and secure method for sending emails, the drawback is that customers cannot control their own sending reputations. The reputation associated with a shared IP is determined by the overall quality and engagement of all emails sent from that IP. This means that even reputable senders—those sending highly relevant content or crucial transactional emails—struggle to enhance their sending reputation on shared IPs. By optimizing their sending reputation, senders can increase their deliverability rates, ensuring that emails land in the recipient’s inbox rather than the dreaded junk folder. Dedicated IPs, exclusive to a single sender, allow for improved reputation management, as no external bad actors can influence their sending reputation.

Many organizations choose to lease dedicated IPs, allowing them to be the sole sender and avoid sharing their IP address with others. This strategy helps in cultivating a strong sending reputation and fostering trust with ISPs and mailbox providers, thereby ensuring higher delivery rates. However, challenges arise when it comes to estimating the number of dedicated IPs needed to manage sending volumes effectively. Often, customers lease more IPs than necessary, incurring unnecessary costs. Additionally, dedicated IPs require a “warm-up” process, where the volume of emails sent from the IP is gradually increased. Failure to do so can result in ISPs interpreting a sudden spike in email traffic as spam, leading to blocks. This manual configuration process is typically cumbersome, and many customers fail to reach the necessary volume, averaging a 45-day warm-up period, which hinders their agility in the market.

Introducing Managed Dedicated IPs

Amazon SES now offers managed dedicated IPs, where the entire process of provisioning, leasing, warming up, and managing the IP is automated. This feature simplifies the setup and maintenance of email sending through dedicated IP spaces, building on feedback from customers using the standard dedicated IPs.

Managed dedicated IPs offer several key benefits:

• Streamlined Onboarding: Customers can create a managed dedicated pool via the API/CLI/Console and start dedicated sending without needing to submit AWS support cases for individual IP leasing or release.
• Auto-Scaling per ISP: Manual monitoring and scaling of dedicated pools are eliminated. The pool automatically adjusts based on usage and the specific policies of ISPs. For instance, if SES identifies that an ISP has a low daily send quota, it will scale the pool accordingly to distribute traffic more evenly across multiple IPs.
• Warmup Tracking: SES monitors the warmup level for each IP towards individual ISPs. If a customer has been sending primarily to Gmail, that IP is considered warmed up only for Gmail, and SES will gradually increase traffic to Hotmail as needed.
• Adaptive Warmup: The warmup percentage calculations consider actual sending patterns at the ISP level. Instead of requiring customers to specify a warming schedule and optimal volume, the managed service adapts based on each ISP’s capacity.
• Spill-over Mechanism: Messages are accepted through the API/SMTP, and the system will defer and retry excess sending when it exceeds the pool’s safe limits for a specific ISP.

Onboarding to Managed Dedicated IPs

If you utilize multiple dedicated IP addresses with Amazon SES, you can create groups known as dedicated IP pools. For example, one pool might be designated for marketing communications, while another is reserved for transactional emails. This isolation ensures that issues with marketing emails do not affect the delivery of transactional messages.

Configuration sets allow you to apply specific rules to your verified identities, which include domains, subdomains, or email addresses used for sending emails through Amazon SES. By associating dedicated IP pools with these configuration sets, you can effectively manage your email campaigns.

Getting started with managed dedicated IPs involves creating a dedicated managed pool, associating it with a configuration set, and specifying that configuration set when sending emails. This onboarding process is similar to that of standard dedicated IP sending.

For detailed instructions on setting up managed dedicated IPs, follow these steps:

1. Console: Navigate to the SES AWS console and select Dedicated IPs.
2. Click on the “Create Managed IP Pool” button.
3. Enter the details for your new managed dedicated IP pool, selecting “Managed (auto managed)” as the Scaling Mode. Do not associate it with a Configuration Set initially, then click create.
4. Return to the dedicated IP Managed IP pools view to see your newly created pool listed in the “All Dedicated IP (managed) pools” table.

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