Boosting Customer Engagement and Growth Using Amazon SES with theMarketer

Headquartered in Romania, theMarketer helps businesses use data to personalize email marketing campaigns. For example, theMarketer can analyze browsing and purchasing behavior to help retail companies send tailored suggestions about best-selling products to their customers. It serves a wide range of clients across industries, including ecommerce companies, dental and medical clinics, banks, and travel agencies.

The company initially tried third-party solutions for sending email messages but quickly realized that it needed a high-performing solution to support its growth. Leadership at theMarketer had experience adopting AWS services at a sister company, Retargeting.biz, that used Amazon SES. “We had a proven track record on AWS,” says Alexandru Clain, product manager at theMarketer. “We saw that the deliverability was really good, so it was an easy decision to start using AWS as the primary gateway for our email messages.”

As an AWS Partner with a Retail ISV Competency and an Advertising and Marketing Technology Software Competency, theMarketer worked alongside experts at AWS to improve the quality and security of its solution. “The primary benefit is the trust that we instill in our clients when they see that we use Amazon SES and are an AWS Partner with two competencies,” says Clain. “It communicates that we know what we’re doing and have expertise. It’s validation that we are optimized, high performing, and likely a good fit for their needs.”

Using Amazon SES, theMarketer reduced the cost of sending email messages by 70 percent and can continue to scale with excellent price performance by using the cost-effective cloud infrastructure. By setting up multi-tenancy through Amazon SES, theMarketer can support high throughput and send up to 6,000 email messages per second on behalf of its clients. Previously, it would reach quotas of 1,500–2,000 email messages per second with third-party providers. The company can also validate up to 5,000 email identities for each server cluster by using Amazon SES instead of up to 1,000 with other providers. “Using Amazon SES, we can scale quickly to accommodate our rapid growth without reaching hard quotas,” says Clain.

To achieve high deliverability, theMarketer uses Amazon SES to meet industry standards for email authentication—including Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. The company also uses a MAIL FROM address to indicate where a message originated and uses TLS to encrypt the connection to the receiving mail server for all messages. This way, theMarketer’s clients benefit from more opportunities to build trust, increase engagement, and improve key metrics. “Using AWS, we deliver nearly 100 percent of email messages to our recipients’ inboxes,” says Rareș Bănescu, founder of theMarketer. The company also offers suggestions within its solution to help its clients optimize content and meet metric benchmarks that are based on the industry niche.

Using AWS tools to fortify security and email deliverability, the company has helped its clients improve metrics that are related to opening messages and converting leads into sales. It sees up to 50 percent open rates and up to 10 percent conversion rates for bulk email campaigns in high-performing niches, such as the beauty industry. For automated email messages that are based on user actions, theMarketer’s clients achieve up to 70 percent open rates and 20 percent conversion rates. “Using AWS helps because email messages reach the inbox, which increases customer interactions and successful transactions,” says Clain. “Our clients are happy because their customers are happy.”

The company’s employees also benefit because theMarketer uses Amazon SES for its own sales and marketing teams. “Amazon SES is easy to implement and maintain, which makes our developers happy,” says Clain. “The deliverability helps our marketing and sales efforts too.”

The company has continued to expand globally since growing a client base in southeast Europe. After becoming an AWS Partner, theMarketer gained its first couple of large clients from the United States when they found the solution listed on the AWS website. The company tripled the number of clients it supports year by year in the first 2 years of operation and is continuing to expand in the United States and western Europe. Its revenue in the second year of operation was seven times that of the first year, with expectations of another 150 percent increase in the third year. “Being an AWS Partner is definitely a plus for us in terms of confidence and reliability,” says Clain. “Clients know that we have a good solution that is validated by AWS.”

Encouraged by its success so far, theMarketer plans to continue growing and expanding on AWS, fully migrating to the cloud for greater scalability, higher reliability, and lower operational overhead. To expand its reach, theMarketer is currently working on listing its solution in AWS Marketplace, where organizations can discover, deploy, and manage solutions for the cloud. The company is also exploring ways to send messages through additional channels and use generative AI services from AWS to produce banners, templates, and messages for clients.

“As we scale, we benefit from the global community of trusted AWS Partners and the massive infrastructure that accelerates time to market,” says Bănescu. “We build trust for our company and deliver good-quality services.”