Amazon SES Consulting
Order confirmations that land in spam are a support ticket and a refund request. We run SES at 200M+ messages a month for an eCommerce platform, and the work is mostly reputation discipline rather than infrastructure.
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Transactional and promotional email that reaches the inbox at retail volume — dedicated IP warm-up, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, reputation monitoring, and peak-season send planning on Amazon SES.
Plan a four to six week structured ramp. Start at roughly 50 emails per day on the dedicated IP, double daily until you cross 50,000, then increase around 25% per day to your target volume. Send only to engaged recipients during warm-up, monitor bounce and complaint rates daily — keep complaints under 0.1% and bounces under 5% — and authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC from day one. Split transactional and marketing onto separate IPs. We run this playbook for clients sending 200M+ messages per month on SES, and the most common mistake is pushing through a rising complaint rate rather than pausing the ramp.
Yes, and it is usually the highest-return change available. They have fundamentally different complaint profiles: a promotional send might see complaint rates an order of magnitude above a shipping notification. Shared reputation means a bad campaign week degrades delivery of the receipts customers are actively waiting for, which converts a marketing problem into a support cost. Separate IPs and subdomains, separate configuration sets, and separate monitoring.
That depends entirely on what you did in September. A reputation built at steady-state volume does not automatically support three times that volume, and a sudden ramp reads to receivers like a compromised sender. Model peak volume against current reputation, complete any warm-up before the campaign calendar opens, and confirm sending capacity weeks ahead. The teams that have a bad November are almost always the ones that treated send capacity as elastic in the way compute is.
When you need a full campaign platform rather than a sending infrastructure. SES is deliberately an infrastructure service — it does not give you a template builder, segmentation UI, journey orchestration or a marketing-team-facing analytics surface. If your marketing team needs to run campaigns without engineering involvement, you want SES underneath a platform, not SES instead of one. Where SES wins decisively is cost at volume and control over reputation and infrastructure.
Order confirmations, shipping notifications and password resets share a sending reputation with a promotional programme that has a much higher complaint rate. When the campaign hurts the reputation, the receipt stops arriving — and that becomes a WISMO ticket rather than a marketing metric.
Retail send volume is not uniform. A programme that sends steadily all year triples in November, and a sudden ramp on an IP with no recent history at that volume reads to receivers exactly like a compromised sender.
Bounces and complaints arrive as events that require action, not as numbers for a monthly deck. Continuing to send to an address that hard-bounced is one of the fastest ways to degrade a sending reputation, and it happens by default when nobody wires the feedback loop.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC get set up during migration and then drift as new subdomains, new vendors and new campaign tools are added. The failure surfaces months later as a deliverability decline nobody can attribute.
Different IPs, different subdomains, different configuration sets. A promotional campaign with a bad week should never be able to stop an order confirmation from arriving, and separating them is the single highest-return structural change in most retail email programmes.
A planned four to six week ramp starting low, doubling daily to a threshold and then increasing gradually to target volume, sending only to engaged recipients during the warm-up. Complaint rates monitored daily and the ramp paused rather than pushed through when they climb.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC from day one, with DMARC reporting actually consumed rather than just published. New subdomains and new vendors go through the same check, so drift surfaces at introduction rather than a quarter later.
Bounce and complaint notifications route through SNS and EventBridge into suppression handling that takes effect immediately. Hard bounces are removed, complaints are honoured, and the feedback loop is a system rather than a person remembering.
Volume modelled against the current reputation, warm-up completed before the campaign calendar starts, and sending capacity confirmed weeks ahead. The surprise belongs in October planning, not in a November incident channel.
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