Enhance Your Email Campaigns using Amazon SES SendBulkEmail APIs Inline Templates

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cloud-based email sending service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), handling both inbound and outbound email traffic for your applications. It allows users to send and receive email using SES’s reliable and cost-effective infrastructure without having to provision email servers yourself. Customers use Amazon SES to send emails like one time passwords (OTPs), transactional emails such as order confirmation, and promotional/marketing emails.

For this post, you should be familiar with the following:

Amazon SES continues to evolve, offering new features that help you simplify and optimize your email campaigns. We’re excited to announce the addition of inline template support for both the SendEmail and SendBulkEmail APIs. This new capability allows you to include template content directly in your API requests, reducing complexity and eliminating the need to manage separate template resources in your SES account.

What are inline templates?

Inline templates allow you to provide the subject, HTML body, and text body of an email directly in the API request, along with dynamic placeholders for personalized content. Instead of creating and storing a separate email template in SES, you can define the template as part of your API call. This feature is especially useful for organizations that need flexibility in managing numerous templates or want to make quick adjustments to email content.

How inline templates simplify your workflow

Previously, Amazon SES required you to create and store email templates in your SES account, which you would then reference by name or Amazon Resource Name (ARN) when sending an email. This process adds some management overhead, particularly for organizations that frequently create new templates or exceed the limit of templates per AWS Region. With inline templates, you can reduce complexity by defining your email content directly in the API payload, avoiding the need to create and manage stored templates. This approach can improve flexibility, allowing you to quickly make changes to your email content without updating stored templates. Additionally, it can simplify your integration by providing template content directly within your application logic, making the process more seamless and efficient. When using the and SendBulkEmail API, you can include personalized content for up to 50 destinations in a single call, making large-scale communication more efficient.

How to use inline templates

To use inline templates, you simply provide the email content (subject, text, HTML) and the replacement data directly in the SendBulkEmail API request payload within TemplateContent parameter.

Inline-template API

Here’s an example for using the SendBulkEmail API with inline templates:

file://mybulkemail-inline-template-conten.json:

{
    "FromEmailAddress": "Mary Major <mary.major@example.com>",
    "DefaultContent": {
        "Template": {
            "TemplateContent": {
                "Subject": "Greetings, {{name}}!",
                "Text": "Dear {{name}},\r\nYour favorite animal is {{favoriteanimal}}.",
                "Html": "<h1>Hello {{name}},</h1><p>Your favorite animal is {{favoriteanimal}}.</p>"
            },
            "TemplateData": "{ \"name\":\"friend\", \"favoriteanimal\":\"unknown\" }"
        }
    },
    "BulkEmailEntries": [
        {
            "Destination": {
                "ToAddresses": [
                    "anaya.iyengar@example.com"
                ]
            },
            "ReplacementEmailContent": {
                "ReplacementTemplate": {
                    "ReplacementTemplateData": "{ \"name\":\"Anaya\", \"favoriteanimal\":\"angelfish\" }"
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "Destination": {
                "ToAddresses": [
                    "liu.jie@example.com"
                ]
            },
            "ReplacementEmailContent": {
                "ReplacementTemplate": {
                    "ReplacementTemplateData": "{ \"name\":\"Liu\", \"favoriteanimal\":\"lion\" }"
                }
            }
        }
    ],
    "ConfigurationSetName": "ConfigSet"
}

SES SendBulkEmail API call:

aws sesv2 send-bulk-email -cli-input-json file://mybulkemail-inline-template-conten.json

Output:

{
    "BulkEmailEntryResults": [
        {
            "Status": "SUCCESS",
            "MessageId": "010001xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-000000"
        },
        {
            "Status": "SUCCESS",
            "MessageId": "020002xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-000000"
        }
    ]
}

Backward compatibility

If you’re currently using stored templates, don’t worry – Amazon SES still supports the use of stored templates, and you can continue to use them without any changes. Inline templates are simply an additional option for customers who need more flexibility or wish to avoid managing stored templates altogether. Since inline templates only support the use of simple substitution, stored templates remain the solution for advanced personalization options such as conditional logic or complex formatting. More details in our doc link: How to use Bulk email template.

Get started today

The inline template feature is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is offered. To start using inline templates, refer to the Amazon SES Developer Guide and what’s new announcement. There are no additional charges applicable for using inline template feature.

Conclusion

The inline templating feature in SendBulkEmail allows you to avoid worrying about template management by updating / creating new email templates whenever a minor modification or alteration is required in the existing templates, as well as cleaning up unused templates on a regular basis. Therefore, if your business has a high number of email template requirements, there are no predefined rules or patterns for creating email templates, and you need to generate many templates simultaneously within Amazon SES, you must use inline templating feature of SendBulkEmail API . If you do not want to use the Inline templating capability, you can continue to use the templated SendBulkEmail API from Amazon SES.

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