[47]

In my experience Amazon SES is great if you only used it for transactional emails. If you start sending marketing emails you will soon find yourself being blocked by ISPs and email service providers. You will end up spending a considerable amount of time getting yourself unblocked. Some service providers will even block the domain name, so even switching the service won't help you. Everything will go to spam from that domain name.

I have built the tech for an ecommerce startup (https://www.article.com) from scratch. Using different services for transactional and marketing emails is probably one the best decision i made early on.

Pro Tip #1:

"Use a different domain name for the from address while sending out marketing emails"

For example if your primary domain is example.com. Use [e-mail] as your from address in transactional emails. Use [e-mail] as your from address in your marketing emails. Off course forward all emails received by [e-mail] to [e-mail] (Why? see Pro Tip #2).

Pro Tip #2:

"Never use fake emails like [e-mail] for the from address for any email you sent. Yes not even for marketing emails"

You will be surprised how many time customer just reply to emails they have received even if it is an unrelated marketing email. You will regularly see customers receiving a monthly newsletter and they will hit reply asking "Can you change the shipping address on my order?"

[philfrasty]

„Use [e-mail]“

Is this really beneficial? With all the domain-spoofing going on I would not click a single link in an email from a domain I have never visited.

[pilom]

We do this and thank God we do. Our marketing emails get down blocked all the time simply because of the scale (and our marketing team is a little over zealous) but after our transactional emails got blocked for the 3rd time we moved all marketing to another domain and gave been happy since.

[supergreg]

Would a subdomain, [e-mail], avoid getting your domain blocked while looking more official?

[adrianN]

Are you in the demographic that normally clicks on links in marketing e-mails?

[hibbelig]

It's not about clicking a link in the mail. It's about hitting the reply button in the email client.

[cm2012]

You are not average.

[bfred_it]

The forwarding part of Tip #1 is important. I regularly mark as spam marketing emails from companies who never asked me to sign up, but I still want to receive their transactional/support emails.

[mattferderer]

This is one of those excellent pieces of advice that seem like common sense when you hear them but you probably wouldn't have thought of doing.