Customer Stories / Software & Internet / Bulgaria
Omega Coders Almost Doubles Click-Throughs on High-Volume Email Campaigns
Omega Coders transforms the effectiveness of email campaigns for its largest client by migrating to Amazon SES, which improved click-through rates, reduced costs, boosted successful inbox deliveries, and is driving future innovation.
100%
improvement in email click-through rates
33%
cost saving for email services
Minutes
gets email distribution operating fast
99.07%
successful inbox delivery
Innovation
launches machine learning proofs of concept
Overview
Omega Coders builds software solutions and provides clients with IT services that include managing high-volume email campaigns. After challenges halted the daily delivery of about 10 million emails for its largest client, a software company that builds affiliate marketing products, Omega Coders contacted its Amazon Web Services (AWS) account team, which proposed using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). Working with the AWS team over a weekend, Omega Coders migrated to Amazon SES. The results: the company relaunched email distribution in minutes, almost doubled click-through rates on marketing emails, lowered costs by 33 percent, and increased inbox delivery success to 99.07 percent.
Opportunity | Delivering More Than 10 Million Emails a Day for a Main Client
Omega Coders, headquartered in Bulgaria, is a web and mobile application design and development company. Launched in 2014, the organization also provides managed IT services, giving customers the expertise to maximize their technology investments. Thomas Van den Berge, chief technical officer at Omega Coders, describes the business as client-obsessed. “Our customers’ success ultimately leads to our own,” he says.
As part of its offering, Omega Coders works with email service providers (ESPs) on behalf of its clients. The ESPs distribute millions of marketing emails for clients every day, forming a vital part of their marketing campaigns to generate sales, enhance customer engagement, and create brand awareness.
The company needed to find a solution quickly after challenges with one ESP halted the delivery of more than 10 million daily emails for its largest client, a market leader in rebranded software products for affiliate marketing. “In the space of 24 hours, we went from sending out millions of messages to sending out none,” says Van den Berge. “The company looked at us to find a solution to the problem fast since the problem was putting its marketing strategy at risk.”
We have a happy client thanks to the support of the AWS team and Amazon SES increasing click-through by nearly 100%.”
Thomas Van den Berge
Chief Technical Officer, Omega Coders
Solution | Fixing Distribution Challenges in Minutes with Amazon SES
To find a solution fast, Omega Coders considered Amazon SES, which it had successfully used for several clients in the past. It immediately contacted Amazon Web Services (AWS) to see if it was possible to rapidly scale Amazon SES to cover a 10 million-plus workload in short order. Van den Berge recalls, “I messaged our AWS account manager and was really impressed with the response we received. The AWS team understood how serious the problem was for our client and offered us instant support.”
Omega Coders worked with AWS over a weekend to get distribution working again for Monday. During that period, Van den Berge and his team configured Amazon SES to start sending out the emails, completing tasks like swapping out the email protocol host name and changing usernames. “It took us less than 5 minutes to start sending emails again with Amazon SES,” states Van den Berge.
Between Monday and Thursday, Omega Coders gradually increased the number of emails being distributed until it hit the 10 million mark. What’s more, it automated distribution processes something it couldn’t do in the past. Van den Berge comments, “It’s true other email distribution services offer automation through APIs, but in our experience the APIs often break owing to compatibility issues. We don’t get that problem with AWS.”
Outcome | Nearly Doubling Click-Through Rates, Reducing Costs by 33%
Besides Amazon SES providing a rapid solution, the service has helped Omega Coders almost double the email click-through rate for its client, giving it “more bang for its marketing buck,” as Van den Berge says. He adds, “We have a happy client thanks to the support of the AWS team and Amazon SES increasing click-through by nearly 100 percent.”
Omega Coders can also analyze raw data in Amazon SES to give its biggest client more insights into the performance of its emails that will help optimize marketing further. Comments Van den Berge, “We can calculate the time when a recipient is most likely to open an email.”
Furthermore, it’s easier for Omega Coders to assess which content is performing well to help refine messaging, and by using Amazon CloudWatch Logs, it can map out customer journeys.
Omega Coders is also using the raw data to drive innovation, including creating a new dashboard built using microservices solutions like Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate. With this dashboard, customers will be able to compare the performance of different ESPs before deciding which one to choose.
In addition, the company found the pricing of Amazon SES to be more transparent than its previous solution, empowering its client to make better marketing choices. The client was able to see how much each email costs with greater precision and make a more detailed evaluation about whether to send an email. It also makes the returns on email marketing more measurable, helping the company optimize campaign budgets.
Van den Berge and his team also discovered the AWS service to be about 33 percent more cost-effective. That’s because since moving to Amazon SES, more emails are arriving in subscriber inboxes successfully, bringing down the cost per email. Says Van den Berge, “Previously, around 6.8 million emails a month were failing to arrive correctly, but now we’re achieving a 99.07 percent success rate with Amazon SES.”
Using those savings, Omega Coders is now funding proofs of concept for Amazon SageMaker and Amazon SageMaker Autopilot on behalf of its client to see how machine learning (ML) can help improve the effectiveness of its email strategy. “Customers are all asking us about ML and AI nowadays because they know the potential is huge,” says Van den Berge. “So it’s great that we can help them gain the resources to fund proofs of concept and provide the expertise to use all the AWS AI and ML services available.”
About Omega Coders
Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Omega Coders is a software developer and IT services company with a range of international clients. The company focuses on agile and lean methodologies to service clients, and it specializes in the PHP programing language.
AWS Services Used
Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) lets you reach customers confidently without an on-premises Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) email server using the Amazon SES API or SMTP interface.
Amazon ECS
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you to more efficiently deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers.
Amazon SageMaker
Build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models for any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows.
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