For anyone interested in migrating an in-house server to Amazon Web Service (AWS), the question remains: How do I migrate my email marketing system and send email from an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance? If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, we’ll explain it all. The important thing to remember is this: Goolara Symphonie can be run from AWS, giving cloud users a powerful tool to perform email marketing from their own environment.

Amazon’s Cloud

Several companies are battling for King-of-the-Hill status as the best cloud provider, with Amazon and Microsoft being the top competitors for this market. As of this writing, the apparent winner for email marketing is Amazon, whose AWS solution allows for email sending, unlike Microsoft’s Azure. (for more on this topic, see Cloud Based Infrastructure and Your Email Marketing Solution).

When most people think of AWS and email, they think of Amazon’s own Simple Mail Solution (SES). While this may be fine for some, its limitation is right in its name: it’s Simple. Try to add features such as full automation, dynamic content, and content blocks, and you’ll hit a brick wall pretty quickly. While there are third party add-ons that can enhance the features of SES, they still work off Amazon’s basic “batch-and-blast” approach. That’s fine for the email marketer who thinks in those terms, but for someone looking for a more sophisticated approach to strategic email marketing, this won’t work at all. Fortunately, there is a solution.

Best of Both Worlds

Many companies that have moved their infrastructure to the cloud have had to keep some of their own data centers to operate their on-premise email marketing programs, or have switched to hosted solutions. An on-premise version has many advantages over a hosted solution in connectivity to corporate resources like CRMs or Point-of-Sales systems, the control and security of maintaining your own data, cost savings for high volume users, and much more. With Goolara’s Symphonie solution installed in AWS, you get the best of both worlds – all the power of Symphonie, but installed in your AWS environment.

Assessing the Cost

If you are familiar with AWS you’ll already know there are many cost points, and determining how much a service will eventually charge can be a bit challenging. Symphonie can be run with just two AWS services, EC2 and Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS), simplifying some of the calculations. The Symphonie license is perpetual, meaning you can use it forever to send an unlimited amount of email, for the one-time purchase price. For large volume senders this can mean significant savings over hosted providers.

To better understand what’s involved in using Goolara’s on-premise email marketing software via AWS, we’ve created this guide, which detail the process and outlines the various AWS components you’ll to make it work. Feel free to contact us to learn more about the process and to see if your company could benefit from moving its email marketing system into AWS.