Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) offers a cloud-based solution tailored for digital marketers and application developers aiming to distribute various emails, including marketing emails, notifications, and transaction-based communications. This service stands out for its reliability and cost-efficiency, making it an ideal choice for enterprises of varying sizes wishing to maintain consistent communication with their clientele. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) addresses the intricate challenges associated with large-scale email dispatches by offering a suite of features designed to refine your email distribution strategy. These include the management of IP addresses, content filtering capabilities, and access to detailed sending analytics, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and precision of your email communications.

Think of Amazon SES as your behind-the-scenes email wizard. It ensures your emails get to where they’re supposed to go, such as inbox, without getting lost in the vast email void. It’s packed with features to manage who you’re sending emails from, detailed reports on your email performance, and even tools to handle replies.

What’s neat is how well it plays with other Amazon Web Services, making it a one-stop shop for sending emails, managing responses, or integrating with your other applications. And because it’s Amazon, you only pay for what you use, which can be a real budget-saver, especially if you’re a small business or just starting out. In a nutshell, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) takes the stress out of email management, letting you focus on the fun stuff—like crafting those perfect email messages.

One of Amazon SES’s advanced features is the Virtual Deliverability Manager. This tool is intended to help users enhance their email deliverability. The Virtual Deliverability Manager provides insights and analytics on email-sending practices, identifies potential issues affecting email delivery, and offers recommendations for improving inbox placement rates. By enabling the Virtual Deliverability Manager, users can better understand how their emails are being processed and received by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and recipients, thus allowing them to make informed decisions to enhance their email engagement and effectiveness.

To enable the Virtual Deliverability Manager in Amazon SES, these are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Navigate to the Amazon SES console.

Step 2: As seen From the left navigation pane, choose Virtual Deliverability Manager and select Get Started with Virtual Deliverability Manager

Step 3: On the Select Engagement tracking page, accept the default or choose to Turn off engagement tracking, then select Next.

Note that turning on engagement tracking alters your URLs and links to include Amazon SES engagement tracking wrappers.

Step 4: On the Select Optimized shared delivery page, tick the Turn off optimized shared delivery, then select Next.

• Optimized shared delivery might result in preemptive delays in sending your emails to protect your sending reputation.

Step 5: Review your choices for engagement tracking and optimized shared delivery on the Review and enable page and select Enable Virtual Deliverability Manager.

We have successfully enabled Virtual Deliverability Manager.

FEATURES

Virtual Deliverability Manager Advisor 

The Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) is designed to enhance email deliverability and engagement by pinpointing critical performance and infrastructure issues that negatively impact your email deliverability and reputation. It operates at both the account and sending identity levels, providing precise recommendations for addressing these issues.

VDM Advisor displays its insights in the Open Recommendations table and catalogs issues related to standard email authentication methods like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, or BIMI. It flags problems such as non-existent records, configuration errors, or inadequate vital lengths. These issues are organized by their severity (Impact), the affected sending domain (Identity name), and how long the problem has been noted (Age of the alert). Additionally, the ” Resolve issue” column links directly to the Amazon SES Developer Guide for solutions to rectifying identified problems.

Recommendations are sorted by impact level, ensuring users can prioritize their response to the most critical issues affecting their email deliverability.

Virtual Deliverability Manager Dashboard

The Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) Dashboard in Amazon SES provides a comprehensive view of your email program’s deliverability. It features easily interpretable cards and time series graphs, showcasing metrics like open/click and delivery rates as well as bounce and complaint statistics. Detailed tables allow drilling into issues related to ISPs, sending identities, or configuration sets. Granular ISP data helps address deliverability to particular ISPs while sending identity and configuration set data spotlight areas impacting overall account deliverability. This detailed insight aids in improving the sender’s reputation and optimizing engagement and conversion timings.

• An overview of your deliverability and reputation data is displayed in the Accounts Statistics Column. It includes the total Volume, % Rate, and % Difference for Sent, Delivered, Complaints, Transient & Permanent bounces, Opens & Clicks, as determined by the date period you specified.

• The ISP table on the VDM Dashboard provides a detailed overview of email performance metrics by Internet Service Provider. It covers send volume, delivery success, both transient and permanent bounces, complaints, and email opens and clicks. These metrics are calculated based on the selected date range, offering insights into how effectively emails reach recipients across different ISPs.

• The Messages table displays sent messages that meet the specified date range and filter parameters.
• The Sending Identities and Configuration Sets sections are crucial for pinpointing specific contributors to deliverability issues within your account. Analyzing these areas lets you identify which sending identities or configuration sets affect your email performance. This allows for targeted adjustments, such as changing configurations or reducing sends from a problematic identity, especially in cases where issues like sending to a suppression list have occurred. Identifying and rectifying these specific problems can significantly streamline efforts to improve overall deliverability, avoiding the need to sift through your entire account.

Users have taken a significant step forward in optimizing their email communication strategies by successfully enabling the Virtual Deliverability Manager within Amazon SES. This advanced tool provides invaluable insights into the email delivery process, highlighting potential areas for improvement and offering actionable recommendations to enhance inbox placement rates. Integrating the Virtual Deliverability Manager equips users to understand how emails are processed and perceived by Internet Service Providers and recipients. As a result, businesses can now make more informed decisions, fine-tuning their email campaigns to achieve better engagement and effectiveness. This achievement not only signifies a commitment to maintaining high standards of email deliverability but also positions businesses to foster more robust, more reliable connections with their customers through enhanced email communication practices.