Adzuna Doubles Email Open Rates Using Amazon SES

Adzuna launched in 2011 as a job search site based in the United Kingdom, and it now operates in 20 countries, including the United States, Singapore, Australia, and India. Users can search the website by type of job and location and have the option to sign up with their email address for job alerts. When users sign up, Adzuna sends an initial welcome email and, after that, sends regular alerts when relevant jobs are posted to the site. With tens of millions of visitors every month, Adzuna sends around two billion personalized emails every year.

Because its users rely on the accuracy and timeliness of Adzuna’s emailed job alerts, Adzuna required an email service that was, above all, reliable. “It’s important that there’s no downtime and that there are no deliverability issues or at least no server issues where emails just completely fail to send,” says Bilal Ikram, email marketing manager at Adzuna.

Amazon SES turned out to be the most reliable tool for the company’s needs. The Adzuna team initially tested a few other email tools, but they weren’t scalable to the degree the company needed. Using the automation abilities of Amazon SES, the company has been able to handle its burgeoning volume of email since it began using the service in 2011—almost from the company’s start. Without these capabilities, Adzuna would be unable to perform a key service feature.

“It would be impossible for us to send volumes of emails with dynamic content to the same extent without using Amazon SES,” says Ikram. “It’s very important that we automate that process and send out emails that are relevant to our users.”

To support its goal of sending personalized emails to users, Adzuna needed an easy-to-use email service that could handle increasingly large volumes of email as the company grew. Amazon SES proved to be a simple, scalable solution. First, it integrated seamlessly with Adzuna’s existing AWS infrastructure. Second, because Amazon SES could be used as a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the Adzuna developers were able to automate the entire process. The team never had to log on to the service or worry about its inner workings, which meant that it could focus its energy on more important tasks like making necessary edits and updates to emails.

“We can simply create commands that constantly send out the emails connected to Amazon SES without us having to worry about volumes,” Ikram says. Further, Adzuna set up Amazon SES so that it runs across multiple AWS Regions, helping to manage the workload and providing a backup option for sending emails if needed. “If we were to have an outage, we would have a fallback, which makes the network more reliable,” Ikram says.

At first, Adzuna relied on standard Amazon SES features while staff focused on content and deliverability. In recent years, Adzuna has shifted to using dedicated IP addresses and tools like Amazon CloudWatch, a service that provides observability of users’ AWS resources and applications on AWS and on premises.

Since Adzuna’s migration to dedicated internet protocol addresses, the company has seen a significant improvement in email open rates, which have almost doubled. It also saw improvements in click-through rates.

Adzuna has continued to benefit from the scalability of Amazon SES and its additional features. In 2022, the company added an additional four countries, and it has used Amazon SES to meet the needs of its growing user base throughout the expansion.

Overall, Adzuna has benefited from using multiple AWS services for different purposes while keeping everything under the same umbrella.

“Using Amazon SES, I can focus more on improving the quality and content of the emails and our underlying metrics rather than having to worry about just sending the emails out on a daily basis,” Ikram says. “So that means we have more time to focus on the things that really matter—connecting our users to better, more fulfilling jobs.”