Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is an outbound-only email-sending service useful for marketing and transactional email, relying on the infrastructure of Amazon. Amazon SES provides the requisite statistics and built-in notifications for bounces, complaints, and deliveries for optimization of campaigns. Emails are sent via SMTP or the Amazon SES API.
Amazon's pricing is per usage, presently at $.10 per thousand sends. The service is free for users of Amazon EC2 (up to 62,000 messages),…
$0.10
for emails after the first 1,000
Mad Mimi
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Mad Mimi is an email marketing solution targeted at SMBs, designed to be intuitive and straightforward. It was acquired by GoDaddy in August 2014 to expand their small business support offerings.
$10
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Mad Mimi
Editions & Modules
Sending Emails from an Application Hosted in Amazon EC2
$0.10 ($0.12)
for every 1,000 emails after 62,000 (for each GB of storage)
Sending Emails from Another Email Client or Software Package
$0.10 ($0.12)
for every 1,000 emails (for each GB of storage)
Receiving Email
$0.10
for emails after the first 1,000
Sending Emails from an Application Hosted in Amazon EC2
Amazon Simple Email Service comes with the bundle of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it also offers a limited number of emails per month for free. One who has a technical background and wants to send custom emails with custom domains in a professional way can go with Amazon Simple Email Service. If you have no technical background or tech team, it might not be useful for you.
Mad Mimi is perfect for scheduling remainder emails. For instance, if you need to remind a client about a pending order next week, you can schedule the remainder email today and it will be sent exactly the date and time you want it to even if you are out of office. If you need to contact thousands of people at a time, Mad Mimi can be used to send the emails all at once to all of them, especially for marketing purposes and newsletter purposes.
Amazon Simple Email Service is a much lower cost than most other solutions and truly makes cost a non-factor in most situations where we consider implementing it.
The API is so well documented that implementing Amazon Simple Email Service in nearly any application or codebase is achievable with basic coding knowledge.
I've been on the free plan for years and it has suited me very well. It's reliable and has all the core features I need at the moment. Considering how all the online tools can add up, this is right for my business.
Mad Mimi has a super-simple interface, and it's drag and drop, so I don't have to spend a lot of time designing each email. Although you can customize with your logo and colors.
There are several free add-ons, which allow for a limited amount of automation. I would recommend taking advantage of the RSS feed, webform, and drip campaign features.
You can segment your list into as many groups as you like, which makes for more effective email marketing.
The ease on adding links, such as unsubscribe links, is not as easy as it is with other email service providers. Creating simple tags that take the place of a link could help a lot, especially for those not as familiar with HTML.
Perhaps a way of archiving old emails, or hiding them from the past emails area. It can look a bit cluttered, and can be confusing in some circumstances.
Providing some learning material, or at least a more thorough overview of email marketing, and the user interface would be of great use to beginners.
Pretty simple, I know I'm getting what I pay for and a little more. Although simple and easy for the new user; a more seasoned marketer can still get the most from MadMimi. Especially if the primary purpose is to generate strong brand loyalty with effective communication that integrates your various outlets: MadMimi makes it easy for your customer to pick-up what the business owner wants to relay.
We did not have the need of contacting Amazon for support. The documentation they provide is of great quality. Examples are easy to follow. One thing to have into consideration is we didn't have the premium support for AWS, so I can't provide details on how good or bad this service is, but in general, the basic support I had was great.
Mailchimp has a fixed monthly price, and with the number of emails that we sent, it's pretty expensive. Since our mailings are quite infrequent, using Mailchimp didn't make financial sense for us, even though Mailchimp is a more polished, packaged solution for email marketing. We evaluated other email delivery solutions as well and didn't find anything that matches Amazon SES on reliability and pricing.
Constant Contact is the Goliath of the industry and to us, it was unnecessarily complex and expensive. We chose Mad Mimi, after looking at several other new offerings and we've been extremely satisfied with our choice of Mad Mimi.
I've spent 3 years creating blog posts, and it is only now encompassing the breath that allows me to draw upon this pieces as a reusable resource, but now this is happening.
I preferred the Mad Mimi platform to Mail Chimp, and I suspect it continues to offer advantages. I felt Mad Mimi did themselves a disservice by failing to support their free subscriber service to the same extent that Mail Chimp does. When one's mail list gets sufficiently large, then it does pay to pay them, but not in the context I was using it.
It seems that Mad Mimi is targeting direct marketing purposes, as this is a use where ROI is more easily measured.
