Automating and Sending Several Hundred Million Personalized Emails Monthly Using Amazon SES with PLAID

PLAID’s mission is to maximize the value of people with the power of data. The company built a customer experience platform, KARTE, on the cloud to analyze user behavior on the web and apps, simplifying customer communication for its clients. To centralize and secure the management of multiple customers, PLAID designed KARTE on a multitenant architecture. As the company rapidly grew its client base, however, it faced scale and cost challenges with its third-party email service provider for KARTE Message, a KARTE product that helps clients send customized multichannel communications.

The product had to find a way to cost-effectively personalize marketing communications for its clients at scale, so it chose Amazon SES. “Because of its simple API, high delivery success rate, cost efficiency, and high scalability, Amazon SES was a perfect match for our requirements,” says Jun Kusahana, executive officer and vice president of core platform at PLAID.

The company worked closely alongside AWS to plan the implementation of Amazon SES. First, it built a simple email distribution function in less than 1 year. Then, it created proofs of concept for its clients and made improvements in deliverability and sender reputation in response to their feedback. “We achieved scalability and gained knowledge about IP operations with support from AWS,” says Kusahana. Now that the project is complete, PLAID can send up to 2,000 personalized email messages a second.

Using Amazon SES, KARTE Message complements high volume with high deliverability. The product now manages its email policies centrally, facilitating user segmentation for more advanced targeting without overburdening its team. KARTE Message supports delivery that is tailored to individual behavior, such as sending email messages to customers with high or low engagement trends according to the results of analyzing a large amount of behavioral data. That way, KARTE Message’s clients can deliver the right message at the right time and personalize customer interactions, driving increased lifetime value. In total, KARTE Message personalizes hundreds of millions of email messages by analyzing 180 PB of user behavior data each month. “Using AWS, we can manage projects effectively by anticipating growth, starting small, and progressing step-by-step,” says Kusahana.

KARTE Message’s clients are seeing the difference. By using Amazon SES, KARTE Message has enhanced customer experience at scale. For example, clients can automate marketing email messages from within almost any application. Amazon SES maintains reputable IP addresses that increase the likelihood of email messages making it through spam filters. The solution also scales to deliver millions of email messages per batch. Using these features, KARTE Message’s clients can now target consumers with more relevant and timely marketing email messages with a deliverability rate of 99 percent. “The reputable IP addresses and top-tier inbox deliverability of Amazon SES have facilitated seamless customer engagement for our clients and improved metrics such as the percentage of email messages that recipients open,” says Kusahana.

The project has also freed up resources for further innovation. KARTE Message is now saving 20 percent on email costs and has a far simpler email management experience. In addition, PLAID developers are starting to save time on infrastructure management by using Amazon SES with other AWS services such as Amazon EventBridge, which makes it easier to build event-driven applications at scale. “It’s very attractive that the solution has the flexibility and stability we need to handle large-scale traffic and mass distribution without requiring infrastructure management,” says Kusahana.

Moving forward, KARTE Message plans to offer greater sophistication. The product hopes to use generative artificial intelligence and privacy protection technology to boost message relevancy while securing customer data.

By using Amazon SES, KARTE Message can focus on delivering value. “Using AWS services, we were able to rapidly deploy and flexibly scale our solution while delivering results and high business impact,” says Kusahana.