How to Save Money on Email Marketing Campaigns
Tags: Email Marketing Campaign, Email Marketing Software, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Tips, Email Newsletters

Email marketing campaign is one of the best way to reach out to the subscribers. I started my first email campaign with MailChimp. Its free tier comes with 2000 contacts and 10,000 emails/month. This was good enough for me at start but later my subscribers increased and that is when I realized my monthly cost is going very high. I started looking for the cheaper solution and found Sendy. This is a email marketing platform which works with Amazon SES. What a great combination!

What is Sendy?

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This makes it possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.

What is Amazon SES?

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a pay-as-you-go service based on the volume of emails sent and received. There are no subscriptions, no contract negotiations, and no minimum charges.

When you call Amazon SES from an application hosted in Amazon EC2, you can send 62,000 messages per month at no charge. This Free Usage Tier benefit does not expire.

Your EC2 server and SES must be in the same AWS region to qualify for the free tier 62,000 messages.

With Amazon Simple E-mail Service, you pay only for what you use, and there is no minimum fee.

Should you send an email from an application hosted in Amazon EC2, you pay $0 for the first 62,000 emails you send each month, and $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send after that. You also pay for the following additional charges: $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send, and any additional charges for using EC2. If you are sending email from an email client or other software package, you will pay $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send and $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send.

Refer to the Amazon SES detail page for the most up-to-date information on pricing, data transfer costs, and the Free Tier.

I was already running my server on Amazon EC2 so I installed Sendy on it. Setup is very easy. See below steps.

Overview of all setup steps

Amazon SES setup

By default Amazon SES is in sandbox mode, send a request to AWS customer support and then will remove sandbox and increase email limit to 50,000 emails per 24hr.

Add a domain, where you will install sendy software. You will have to add few DNS records.

Add email address from which you will be sending emails. You just need to confirm email.

that’s all!

Sendy setup

Install sendy as per these steps. Setup is very easy.

Login to sendy and create your first campaign.

Add emails and Start sending newletters.

that’s all!

Sendy charges

One time cost of sendy application is just $69

Sendy vs Mailchimp

If you compare Sendy with Mailchimp you will be surprised how much it saves money. Here is cost of 100,000 emails compared with MailChimp.

Cost of 10,000 email marketing campaign

How to install Sendy on Amazon EC2?

Sendy is a php application. It is very easy to install. You need to create mysql database and update config with mysql details. This will help you get application running. Here is step by step guide for installation.

How does Sendy works?

Sendy helps you to manage emails and create a newsletter. Amazon SES helps you to send email to all the subscribers.

What is the server requirement for Sendy?

I recommend you to go with 1GB server, which is good enough to start. If your subscribers increase then depending on server load increase your server capacity.

Conclusion

Sendy is one of the best email newsletter application that will help you to save lot of money over the time. It has a very good reporting interface also. Think about it before deciding your email newsletter service.

Let me know which email service you are using and is it better than sendy?

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