All posts by Vinay Ujjini

Migrating to a cloud ESP: How to onboard to Amazon SES

Post Syndicated from Vinay Ujjini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/migrating-to-amazon-ses-a-comprehensive-guide/

Amazon SES: Email remains a powerful tool for businesses, whether for marketing campaigns, transactional notifications, or other communications. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cloud email service provider that can integrate into any application for bulk email sending. Amazon SES is an email service that supports a variety of deployments like transactional emails, system alerts, marketing/promotional/bulk emails, streamlined internal communications, and emails triggered by CRM system as a few examples. When you use Amazon SES to send transactional emails, marketing emails, or newsletter emails, you only pay for what you use. Analytics on sender statistics along with managed services like Virtual Deliverability Manager help businesses make every email count with Amazon SES. You can get reliable, scalable email to communicate with customers at the best industry prices. If you are considering Amazon SES for its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and reliability, this guide will walk you through a systematic migration process.

Scenarios to consider:

When considering a migration to Amazon SES, let’s assess the specific scenarios to consider. These scenarios represent different contexts or situations that a business or individual find themselves in, and each scenario has its unique challenges and considerations. By identifying the appropriate scenario for your situation, you can tailor your migration strategy, anticipate potential challenges, and streamline the transition process. Few common scenarios:

  • Migrating from on-Prem to SES

    • Advantages:

      • Scalability: SES automatically scales with your needs, thus ensuring you don’t face downtimes or need to regularly upgrade your infrastructure.
      • Maintenance/overhead: Maintaining on-Prem email system can be complex and resource-intensive. Some of the tasks include hardware maintenance and scalability, back up or disaster recovery, security, and compliance (relevant to email storage and transmission).
      • Cost-Effectiveness: You only pay for what you send, eliminating overhead costs associated with maintaining and upgrading on-Prem email infrastructure.
      • Security: SES offers built-in security features like email encryption in transit and at rest, and DKIM authentication with automated key rotation, allowing for sending DMARC compliant email.

    • Considerations:

      • Email Sending Limits: SES has sending limits to protect customers from deliverability events resulting from unexpected sending volumes. Customers monitor when they have reached or are approaching their anticipated sending volumes, and may request the limits to be increased.
      • Migration Time: Depending on the volume and complexity migration has to be planned and executed to minimize downtime, maintain data & sending integrity, and maintain high deliverability. This blog goes in detail on the migration process.
      • Email authentication: Setting up email authentication records such as DKIM, SPF, DMARC and BIMI: Ensure you set up domain authentication to allow mailbox providers to build a trusted model based on the messages from your domain. Sending authenticated mail is the best path to deliverability. Additionally adding trust factors to your messages like BIMI (brand indicators for message identification) will help with brand recognition both by the mailbox provider and the end-recipient (ISPs & mailbox providers use DKIM as the authenticated identifier for the trust models to determine if to show the BIMI logo).

  • Migrating from another cloud solution to SES

    • Advantages:

      • Cost Savings: Amazon SES is cost-effective, especially at high volumes.
      • Integration with AWS Services: If you’re using other AWS services, integration is easier with Amazon SES.
      • Expert help: Amazon SES provides email expertise from architectural advise, help with the technical aspects of migrating from one service to another, in addition to email industry experts including deliverability focused specialists.

    • Considerations:

      • Transition Period/migration: Follow the migration path to mitigate transition risks.
      • Update Integrations: Any software or applications integrated with your previous cloud service will need to be reconfigured to work with Amazon SES (ex: SMTP, events, capturing feedback, metrics, etc.).
      • Avoid downtime: You can avoid downtime by ramping up sending gradually by moving each use case into configuration sets and applying warm-up patterns to each campaign as you shift traffic from existing service to Amazon SES.

  • Migrating portion of the load and running a hybrid solution

    • Advantages:

      • Flexibility: You can maintain operations on your existing platform while testing and transitioning to SES, ensuring there’s no disruption.
      • Risk Mitigation: You can monitor your migration progress in multiple steps rather than one single step.
      • Phased Implementation: You can migrate in stages, reducing the complexity of the move.

    • Considerations:

      • Complexity: Running two systems simultaneously will introduce operational & management complexities (For example, maintaining customer opt-out preferences and suppressed email addresses need to be synced into the source lists/database).
      • Cost Implications: While you’re transitioning, you will be paying for two services, which has a cost implication.
      • Consistent Branding: Ensure consistent branding and email design across both platforms to provide a uniform experience for recipients and leverage the same domain identities authenticated with DKIM so that their prior sending reputation is carried over.

Steps for migration:

1. Identify use cases: Before the technicalities, understand and breakdown the types of emails you plan on migrating:

    1. Marketing Campaign emails (e.g., cross-sell, up-sell, new product released)
    2. Transactional Emails (e.g., order confirmations, password resets)
    3. Regular business communications
    4. Inbox use cases
    5. Others (ex: OTP, acquisition, etc.)

2. Architect the flow by splitting marketing and transactional traffic: Differentiate between marketing and transactional emails, ensuring they are distinctly separated. This helps improve email management, deliverability monitoring, and ensures high-priority transactional emails aren’t delayed by large marketing campaigns. It is highly recommended is to split the transactional and marketing email traffic through separate subdomains. Choose whether to use your primary domain (example.com) or a sub-domain (mail.example.com) for sending emails. Using a sub-domain can help divide email traffic and manage domain reputations separately, like marketing.example.com and transactional.example.com. You can create configuration sets, which are sets of rules that are applied to the emails that you send. For example, you can use configuration sets to specify where notifications are sent when an email is delivered, when a recipient opens a message or clicks a link in it, when an email bounces, and when a recipient marks your email as spam. For more information, see Using configuration sets in Amazon SES.

3. Domain verification: Sending authorization policies act as the gatekeeper for authorizing use of a domain identity. Domain verification is a process for Amazon SES to verify the customer owns the domain and causes messages to be signed with a DKIM signature aligned to the domain in the “From” header address of outbound messages. It is a foundational step towards a secure, reputable, and efficient email-sending program. Here’s why domain verification is essential and how it benefits users:

Why is Domain Verification Needed?

  1. Ownership Assurance: Domain verification ensures that the customer is authorized to send emails from the specified domain. By confirming ownership, only customers who have verified a domain identity will have their messages authenticated with a DKIM signature belonging to the domain.
  2. Reduce Spam and Phishing: Ensuring that only verified domain owners can send emails contributes to a trustworthy email ecosystem. Using a verified domain identity ensures that the message is signed with a DKIM signature aligned to the domain in the from header, which means that the message will pass DMARC-style policy enforcement (describes how unauthenticated messages claiming to be from the domain).
  3. Maintain Domain Reputation: If anyone were able to send emails from any domain, it will damage the domain’s reputation that they are sending from, unless they are the owners of it. By sending from a verified domain, it ensures that your domain’s reputation remains intact and is not misused by others.
  4. Compliance with SES Policies: Amazon has set policies to maintain the integrity and reputation of its SES service. Domain verification is in line with these policies, ensuring that all users follow best email practices.

How does domain verification help you?

  1. Enhanced Deliverability: Emails from verified domains are more likely to reach the recipient’s inbox rather than being flagged as spam. Internet Service Providers (ISPs), mailbox providers and email clients trust emails that come from verified sources.
  2. Builds Trust with Recipients: The ability to verify a domain and send from it by proving domain ownership, where recipients trust the messages are actually coming from who they are purporting to be coming from.
  3. Enables Additional Features: In Amazon SES, once your domain is verified, you can also set up domain authentication mechanisms like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). These further enhance email deliverability and security.
  4. Monitoring and Reporting: By verifying your domain, you can access granular metrics specific to your domain in the SES dashboard. You can use VDM and its out of the box dashboards, which includes metrics specific to verified identities. This helps in monitoring and improving your email sending practices.

4. Testing in sandbox: Amazon SES starts users in a sandbox environment. Here, you can test sending to only verified email without affecting your production environment or domain reputation. Sandbox has a limit of number of emails you can send per day.

5. Request production access: Once ready, request access to production box by following the steps outlined here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/request-production-access.html

6. Configure domain authentication:  You can configure your domain to use authentication systems such as DKIM and SPF. This step is technically optional, but highly recommended. By setting up either DKIM or SPF (or both) for your domain, you can improve the deliverability of your emails, and increase the amount of trust that your customers have in you. Here are key resources:

7. IP management: When you create a new Amazon SES account, by default your emails are sent from IP addresses that are shared with other SES users. You can use dedicated IP addresses that are reserved for your exclusive use by leasing them for an additional cost. This gives you complete control over your sender reputation and enables you to isolate your reputation for different segments within email programs. Amazon SES 4 ways of IP Management outlined below:

  1. Shared: Emails are sent through shared IPs.
  2. Dedicated: Emails are sent through dedicated IPs.
  3. Managed dedicated: Emails are sent through dedicated IPs and Amazon SES will determine how many dedicated IPs you require based on your sending patterns. Amazon SES will create them for you, and then manage how they scale based on your sending requirements.
  4. BYOIP: Amazon SES includes a feature called Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP), which makes it possible to use your own IP addresses to send email through Amazon SES. If you already use a range of IP addresses to send email, you can request that we make your IP range (minimum range allowed is /24) available for sending email through Amazon SES.

Based on your use case and need, you can make a decision on how to proceed on IPs after reviewing the comparison matrix.

8. IP Warm up: IP warm-up is a crucial process when introducing a new IP address for sending emails. The goal is to progressively increase email volume sent through the new IP address, allowing mailbox providers to gradually recognize and trust this IP as a legitimate email sender. Sending reputation is built with a combination of sending domain and the IP addressed through which they are delivered.

  • Why is IP warm-up necessary? When an (or a set of) IP address is new (or has been dormant for a while), it lacks a reputation with mailbox providers. If you suddenly start sending large volumes of emails from this new IP, mailbox providers perceive this behavior as suspicious, potentially categorizing these emails as spam or even blocking them. Warming up the IP helps establish a positive sending reputation over time so that mailbox providers can build a positive profile for your sending which includes IP reputation.
  • IP warm-up process:
    • Start Small: Begin by sending a low volume of emails on the first day.
    • Gradually Increase Volume: Each subsequent day, increase the volume. A common strategy is to double the volume every other day, but this depends on your ultimate email volume needs.
    • Target Engaged Users First: In the initial stages, send emails to your top engaged users—those who are more likely to open, click, and not mark your emails as spam. Their positive engagement will bolster the IP’s reputation.
    • Monitor Deliverability Metrics: Keep a close eye on key metrics like delivery rates, open rates, bounce rates, and complaint rates. If you notice issues, you need to slow down the warm-up process.
    • Respond to Feedback: Some mailbox providers offer feedback loops where you can see if recipients marked your emails as spam. This feedback is invaluable during the warm-up phase to adjust your email practices.
    • Spread Sends Throughout the Day: Instead of sending all your emails at once, distribute them throughout the day. This creates a more consistent sending pattern that mailbox providers favor.
    • Continue Best Email Practices: While warming up your IP, it’s crucial to maintain best practices like segmenting your list, regularly cleaning your email list, and sending relevant content.
    • Understand your Mailbox Provider and domain distribution breakdown. For example if you send to 65% gmail.com users, you will want to focus heavily on the Gmail postmaster page and also setup tooling available for that specific Mailbox Provider. In the case of Gmail, it would be Google Postmaster Tools.
    • Identify and track any available reputation tooling for Mailbox Providers you send to. Example: Google Postmaster Tools, Hotmail SNDS, Yahoo Performance Feeds.
    • During warm-up, monitor these daily to track reputation progress.

9. Additional considerations:

  • If you are planning on using a dedicated IP, warming up is crucial. For dedicated or managed dedicated IPs, you need to either manually warm them up or you can leverage Amazon SES’s auto warm-up feature. Shared IP pools (used by ESPs for smaller senders) don’t require individual warm-ups since they have an established reputation.
  • The warm-up duration varies. For some, it might be a 3-4 weeks, while for others, it could stretch to a couple of months, depending on the final email volume you intend to reach.
  • Let’s use an example scenario:
    • Number of emails to be migrated – 10M emails/day.
    • Peak volume throughput – 2M/hour.
    • The below table shows a sample warm-up schedule.
Days Emails sent
Day 1 5000
Day 3 10,000
Day 5 20,000
Day 7 40,000
Day 9 80,000
Day 11 160,000
Day 13 320,000
Day 15 640,000
Day 17 1,280,000
Day 19 2,560,000

10. Generate SMTP credentials: If you plan to send email using an application that uses SMTP, you have to generate SMTP credentials. Your SMTP credentials are different from your regular AWS credentials. These credentials are also unique in each AWS Region. For more information on generating your SMTP credentials, see Obtaining Amazon SES SMTP credentials.

11. Connect to SMTP endpoint: If you use a message transfer agent such as postfix or sendmail, you have to update the configuration for that application to refer to an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint. For a complete list of SMTP endpoints, see Connecting to an Amazon SES SMTP endpoint. Note that the SMTP credentials that you created in the previous step are associated with a specific AWS Region. You have to connect to the SMTP endpoint in the region that you created the SMTP credentials in.

12. Monitor email send: When you send email through Amazon SES, it’s important to monitor the bounces and complaints for your account. You can do one or more of the below for monitoring your email send:

  1. Reputation metrics: Amazon SES includes a reputation metrics console page that you can use to keep track of the bounces and complaints for your account. For more information, see Using reputation metrics to track bounce and complaint rates.
  2. CloudWatch alarms: You can also create CloudWatch alarms that alert you when these rates get too high. For more information about creating CloudWatch alarms, see Creating reputation monitoring alarms using CloudWatch.
  3. Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM): Deliverability, or ensuring your emails reach recipient inboxes instead of spam or junk folders, is a core element of a successful email strategy. Virtual Deliverability Manager is an out of the box Amazon SES feature that helps you enhance email deliverability. It can help in increasing inbox deliverability and email conversions, by providing insights into your sending and delivery data, and giving advice on how to fix the issues that are negatively affecting your delivery success rate and reputation. VDM has dashboards and advisor features that are built-in, Visit this VDM blog to see how you can improve your email deliverability using VDM.

13. Ramp-up ramp-down strategy: Sending email communication along with maintaining the domain and send reputation is key to any business. The ramp-up ramp-down strategy in the context of email migration, especially to a new email sending platform or a new IP address, is a best practice to ensure that your emails maintain a high deliverability rate and don’t end up being flagged as spam. Let’s delve deeper into what this strategy entails and why it’s crucial:

  1. Gradual volume increase: Start by sending a small number of emails (refer to table below in #12 – IP warm up) and then gradually increase this number over days or weeks. This slow increase allows mailbox providers to recognize and trust your new sending source. Ramp up gradually by moving each use case and applying warm-up pattern to each campaign as you shift traffic. Closely monitor deliverability metrics as you ramp-up. If the metrics show any signs of issue, freeze the warm-up to assess the root cause. Sending stable, predictable patters are the key, avoiding unexpected spikes.
  2. Prioritize engaged recipients: Begin your email sends by targeting recipients who are most likely to open and engage with your emails, like your top active subscribers or customers. Positive interactions, like email opens or link clicks, can boost your new IP’s reputation.
  3. Monitor Feedback loops: Utilize feedback loops offered by mailbox providers to understand if recipients are marking your emails as spam. This immediate feedback can help you tweak your sending practices.
  4. Maintain consistency: While you’re ramping up, maintain consistency in your sending patterns. Avoid erratic sending volumes, which can be red flags for mailbox providers.
  5. Maintain Domain/IP Reputation: Even if you’re sending fewer emails, ensure those emails still adhere to best practices to maintain your domain or IP reputation.

14. Final cut over: After rigorous testing, ramping up, and ensuring your emails are being delivered reliably, you can fully transition to Amazon SES. Monitor continuously, especially during the initial days, to catch and address any potential issues promptly.

Deliverability resources:

Conclusion:

Migrating to Amazon SES offers a host of benefits, but like all IT endeavors, it requires careful thought and execution. By following this comprehensive guide, you can pave a path for a smooth transition, allowing your business to leverage the power of Amazon SES effectively.

About the author:

Vinay Ujjini

Vinay Ujjini is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Worldwide Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. He is an avid sports enthusiast and in his spare time, enjoys playing tennis & cricket.

Amazon SES – Set up notifications for bounces and complaints

Post Syndicated from Vinay Ujjini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-set-up-notifications-for-bounces-and-complaints/

Why is it important to monitor bounces and complaints when using Amazon Simple Email Service?

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a scalable cloud email service provider that is cost-effective and flexible. Amazon SES allows businesses and individuals to send bulk emails to their customers and subscribers. However, as with any email service, there is always a risk of emails bouncing or being marked as spam by recipients. These bounces and complaints can have serious consequences for your email deliverability and can even lead to your email account being suspended or blocked. That’s why it’s important to monitor bounces and complaints when using Amazon SES for email sending. By using Simple Notification Services (Amazon SNS) notifications, you can set up notifications and proactively address any issues and ensure that your emails are delivered successfully to your intended recipients. In this blog, we’ll show how to set up notifications for bounces and complaints in Amazon SES, so you can stay on top of your email deliverability and maintain a positive sender reputation.

Understanding bounces and complaints:

Understanding bounces and complaints is crucial when it comes to email marketing. In simple terms, a bounce occurs when an email is undeliverable and is returned to the sender. There are two types of bounces: soft bounces and hard bounces. A soft bounce is a temporary issue, such as a full inbox or a server error, and the email may be delivered successfully on a subsequent attempt. A hard bounce, on the other hand, is a permanent issue, such as an invalid email address, and the email will never be delivered. On the other hand, a complaint occurs when a recipient marks an email as spam or unwanted. Complaints can be particularly damaging to your email deliverability and can lead to your emails being blocked or sent to the recipient’s spam folder. By monitoring bounces and complaints and taking appropriate action, you can maintain a positive sender reputation and ensure that your emails are delivered successfully to your intended recipients.

Amazon SES provides tools like Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) to manage the deliverability at the ISP, sub-domain or configuration set level. You can see the details in this blog.

Solution walkthrough:

This post gives detailed instructions on how to use Amazon Simple Notification Service SNS to monitor and receive notifications on bounces and complaints in Amazon SES. This blog also has FAQs and troubleshooting tips if you are not receiving notifications following the setup: (below are the steps with detailed instructions and screenshots)

Prerequisites:

For this walkthrough, you should have the following prerequisites:

  1. An active AWS account.
  2. A verified identity (Email address or Domain) in Amazon SES.
  3. Administrative Access to Amazon SES Console and Amazon SNS Console.

Step 1: Create an Amazon SNS topic and subscription:

      1. Sign in to the Amazon SNS console.
      2. Under Amazon SNS homepage provide a Topic name and click on Next steps:
      3. SNS topic image
      4. For Type, choose a topic type Standard.
        Note: Standard topics are better suited for use cases that require higher message publish and delivery throughput rates which fits the SES bounces and complaints monitoring.
      5. SNS standard queue
      6. (Optional) Expand the Encryption section if you would like to encrypt the SNS topic.
        • Choose Enable encryption.
        • Specify the AWS KMS key. For more information, see Key terms.
        • For each KMS type, the Description, Account, and KMS ARN are displayed.
      7. Encryption image
      8. Scroll to the end of the form and choose Create topic. The topic is created and the console opens the new topic’s Details page.
      9. To create the subscription on the Subscriptions page, choose Create subscription.
      10. SNS Subscription page
      11. On the Create subscription page, choose the Topic ARN that you created in the previous step.
      12. For Protocol, choose Email. There are multiple protocols available to use and it depends on where you would like to receive the SNS notifications for bounces and complaints. Please refer to list of available protocols.
      13. For Endpoint, enter an email address that can receive notifications.
        Note: this should be existing email address with accessible mailbox.
      14. SNS Subscription details
      15. Scroll to the bottom and click Create subscription. The console opens the new subscription’s Details page.
      16. After your subscription is created, you need to confirm it through the email address provided above.
      17. Check your email inbox you provided in the endpoint in previous step and and choose Confirm subscription in the email from AWS Notifications. The sender ID is usually “[email protected]“.
      18. AWS Notification email
      19. Amazon SNS opens your web browser and displays a subscription confirmation with your subscription ID.
      20. Subscription confirmation email
      21. After subscription is confirmed, refresh the subscription’s Details page and the subscription status will move from Pending to Confirmed.
      22. Subscription details

  • Step 2: Configure Amazon SES to send bounces and complaints to the Amazon SNS topic created:

In this step, I am presenting two methods to monitor your bounces and complaints. Follow Demo 1, if you are looking for a simple way to monitor bounces and complaints events for a specific email identity. Follow Demo 2, if you have many email identities and you want to monitor bounces and complaints along with other events using configuration sets “groups of rules that you can apply to all your verified identities”.

Demo 1: Configure Amazon SES to monitor bounces and complaints for specific email identity (Email, Domain):

The domain/sub-domain/email identity must have a Verified status. If the identity is not in verified status, refer to steps to verify identity with Amazon SES before continuing further.

Prior to starting this demo, it is important to know if you have a verified domain, subdomain, or an email address that shares the root domain. The identity settings (such as SNS and feedback notifications) apply at the most granular level you have set up the verification. Hierarchy is as below:

  • Verified email address identity settings override verified domain identity settings.
  • Verified subdomain identity settings override verified domain identity settings. (lower-level subdomain settings override higher-level subdomain settings).

Hence, if you want to monitor bounces and complaints for all email addresses under one domain, it is recommended to verify the domain identity with SES and apply this setting at the domain identity level. If you want to monitor bounces and complaints for specific email address under a verified domain identity, verify this email address explicitly with SES and apply this settings into the email identity level.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
  3. Verified email identities
  4. Select the verified identity in which you want to monitor for bounces and complaints notifications.
  5. In the details screen of the verified identity you selected, choose the Notifications tab and select Edit in the Feedback notifications container.
  6. Notifications
  7. Expand the SNS topic list box of bounce and complaint feedback type and select the SNS topic you created in Step 1.
    (Optional) If you want your topic notification to include the headers from the original email, check the Include original email headers box directly underneath the SNS topic name of each feedback type then click on save changes.
  8. SNS topics
  9. After configured SNS topic for bounces and complaints, you can disable Email Feedback Forwarding notifications to avoid receive double notifications through Email Feedback Forwarding and SNS notifications.
  10. To Disable it, under the Notifications tab on the details screen of the verified identity, in the Email Feedback Forwarding container, choose Edit, uncheck the Enabled box, and choose Save changes.
  11. Feedback forwarding disabled

Demo 2: Configure Amazon SES to monitor bounces and complaints for emails sent with a configuration set using Amazon SES event publishing.

Configuration sets in SES are groups of rules, that you can apply to your verified identities. When you apply a configuration set to an email, all of the rules in that configuration set are applied to the email. You can use different type of rules with a configuration set. This demo will use event destination, which will allow you to publish bounces and complaints to the SNS topic.

Note: You must pass the name of the configuration set when sending an email. This can be done by either specifying the configuration set name in the headers of emails, or specifying it as a default configuration set. This can be done at the time of identity creation, or later while editing a verified identity.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Configuration sets. Choose Create set.
  3. Configuration set image
  4. Enter Configuration set name, leave the rest of fields to default, scroll to the send and click on Create set.
  5. Create configuration set
  6. After Configuration set is created, you now need to create Amazon SES event destinations as shown below. Amazon SES sends all bounce and complaint notifications to event destination. In this blog the event destination is Amazon SNS topic.
  7. Navigate to the configuration set you created in step 3. Under configuration set home page click on Event destinations and select Add destination.
  8. Event destinations
  9. Under Select event types, check hard bounces and complaints boxes and click Next.
  10. Event types selection
  11. Specify destination for receiving bounce and complaints notifications, there’s couple of destinations types to choose from. in this demo, we will use Amazon SNS.
  12. Name – enter the name of the destination for this configuration set. The name can include letters, numbers, dashes, and hyphens.
  13. Event publishing – to turn on event publishing for this destination, select the Enabled check box.
  14. Under Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic , Expand the SNS topic list box and select the SNS topic you created in Step 1 and click Next.
  15. Use SES as destination
  16. Review, When you are satisfied that your entries are correct, choose Add destination to add your event destination.
  17. Once you choose Add destination , the summary of event destination will show a “Successfully validated SNS topic for Amazon SES event publishing” email.
  18. Successful notification

Step 3: Using Amazon SES Mailbox Simulator to test send and receive a bounce notification via SNS topic:

Test 1: Send a test email to test Demo 1 “Configure Amazon SES to monitor bounces and complaints for specific email identity (Email, Domain) ” in previous step

In this test, I will send a test message from my verified identity which configured to send any bounce and complaint notifications it receives to SNS topic and email address subscribed to the topic. I will use SES mailbox simulator to simulate a bounce message to test this setup.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
  3. Select the verified identity you configured SNS notifications for bounces and complaints in Demo 1. In this test, I selected a verified domain identity.
  4. Click on Send test email from the upper right corner.
  5. Sending test email
  6. Under send message details, in From-address enter the first part of email address under this verified domain (from-address could be pre-populated).
  7. For Scenario, Expand the simulated scenarios and select Bounce scenario to test send a bounce message.
  8. For Subject, enter the desired email subject. For Body, type an optional body text then leave the rest of options as a default. Click on Send test email to send the email.
  9. Message details
  10. You should have an email from AWS notifications with bounce notification and details on the bounce.
  11. Content of bounce message includes the notificationType “Bounce/Complaint”, bouncedRecipients, diagnosticCode “reason the message bounced”, remoteMtaIp “IP of the recipient MTA rejected the message”, SourceIp “IP of the sender application”, callerIdentity “IAM user sending this message”. These details can help in identifying the reason behind why email is not delivered and bounced and will help you avoid such bounces in the future. Refer this document for additional content on bounce events.
  12. AWS notification message

Test 2: Send a test email to test Demo 2 “Configure Amazon SES to monitor bounces and complaints for emails sent with a configuration set using Amazon SES event publishing” in previous step

In this test, you can send a test message from any verified identity and by using the configuration set created in Step 2 which is configured to send any bounce and complaint notifications to SNS topic and email address subscribed to the topic. You can use SES mailbox simulator to simulate a bounce message to test this setup.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
  3. Select any verified identity you want to send emails from. In this test, I selected a verified domain identity.
  4. Click on Send test email from the upper right corner.
  5. Under send message details From-address enter the first part of email address under this verified domain.
  6. For Scenario, Expand the simulated scenarios and select Bounce scenario to test send a bounce message.
  7. For Subject, enter the desired email subject. For Body, type an optional body text.
  8. For Configuration set, Expand the drop-down list and choose the configuration set you created in Demo 2.
  9. Click on Send test email to send the email.
  10. Message details
  11. You will find an email from AWS notifications with bounce notification and all details of the bounce.
  12. Content of bounce message includes the EventType “Bounce/Complaint”, bouncedRecipients, diagnosticCode “reason the message bounced” , remoteMTA “IP of the recipient MTA rejected the message”, SourceIp “IP of the sender application”, callerIdentity “IAM user sending this message”, ses:configuration-set “name of the configuration set you use when sending the email” all of this details can help you to identify the reason behind why email is not delivered and bounced and will help you to avoid such bounces in the future. Refer this document for more details on contents of bounce events.
  13. SES notification email

FAQ on this set up:

I configured SNS topic with KMS encryption and I am not receiving bounce or complain notifications for emails:
If your Amazon SNS topic uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) for server-side encryption, you have to add permissions to the AWS KMS key policy to allow SES service access the KMS key, an example policy can be found here.

I followed Demo 2. However, when I try to send emails from any verified identity, I don’t receive bounce or complain notifications for emails:
When sending the email, make sure to select the configuration set you configured for bounce and complaints notification. If you followed demo 2 and you sent the email without explicitly using the configuration set in email headers, you will lose tracking for bounce and complaints events.

I am testing the setup. After I sent an email to the bounce simulator, I am not receiving don’t receive any bounce notification emails:
Check the SNS topic subscription if its in pending status and make sure you confirm the topic subscription via subscription email sent to you. If the topic subscription is confirmed, make sure you have access to the inbox of subscription email address and you are not applying any email filters.

Cleaning up:

You should have now successfully setup SNS notifications to monitor bounce and complaints for you Amazon SES emails. To avoid incurring any extra charges, remember to delete any resources created manually if you no longer need them for monitoring.

Resources to delete from SES console:

  1. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose the verified identity you configured for SNS notifications.
  2. In the details screen of the verified identity you selected, choose the Notifications tab and select Edit in the Feedback notifications container.
  3. Choose No SNS topic from bounce and complaint feedback dropdown menu and click Save changes.
  4. Under the same Notifications tab on the details screen of the verified identity, in the Email Feedback Forwarding container, choose Edit, check the Enabled box, and choose Save changes.
  5. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Configuration sets.
  6. Check the box beside Configuration set you created and select Delete.

Resources to delete from SNS console:

  1. In the navigation pane, from the left side menu, choose Topics.
  2. Check the radio button beside the SNS topic you created and select Delete.
  3. Confirm the topic deletion by writing “delete me”.

Conclusion:

Monitoring bounces and complaints is an essential part of maintaining a successful email sending system, using Amazon SES. By setting up SNS notifications for bounces and complaints, you can quickly identify any issues and take appropriate action to ensure that your emails are delivered successfully to your subscribers. By proactively managing your email deliverability, you can maintain a positive sender reputation and avoid any negative impact on your email marketing efforts.

About the authors:

 Alaa Hammad

Alaa Hammad is a Senior Cloud Support Engineer at AWS and subject matter expert in Amazon Simple Email Service and AWS Backup service. She has a 10 years of diverse experience in supporting enterprise customers across different industries. She enjoys cooking and try new recipes from different cuisines.

 Vinay Ujjini 

Vinay Ujjini is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Worldwide Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. He is an avid sports enthusiast and in his spare time, enjoys playing tennis & cricket.

Amazon SES – How to set up EasyDKIM for a new domain

Post Syndicated from Vinay Ujjini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-how-to-set-up-easydkim-for-a-new-domain/

What is email authentication and why is it important?

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) lets you reach customers confidently without an on-premises Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) system. Amazon SES provides built-in support for email authentication protocols, including DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, which help improve the deliverability and authenticity of outgoing emails.

Email authentication is the process of verifying the authenticity of an email message to ensure that it is sent from a legitimate source and has not been tampered with during transmission. Email authentication methods use cryptographic techniques to add digital signatures or authentication headers to outgoing emails, which can be verified by email receivers to confirm the legitimacy of the email.

Email authentication helps establish a sender’s reputation as a trusted sender. Additionally, when email receivers can verify that emails are legitimately sent from a sender’s domain using authentication methods, it also helps establish the sender’s reputation as a trusted sender. Email authentication involves one or more technical processes used by mail systems (sending and receiving) that make certain key information in an email message verifiable. Email authentication generates signals about the email, which can be utilized in decision-making processes related to spam filtering and other email handling tasks.

There are currently two widely used email authentication mechanisms – SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). They provide information that the receiving domain can use to verify that the sending of the message was authorized in some way by the sending domain. DKIM can also help determine that the content was not altered in transit. And the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) protocol allows sending domains to publish verifiable policies that can help receiving domains decide how best to handle messages that fail authentication by SPF and DKIM.

Email authentication protocols:

  1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework): SPF is an email authentication protocol that checks which IP addresses are authorized to send mail on behalf of the originating domain. Domain owners use SPF to tell email providers which servers are allowed to send email from their domains. This is an email validation standard that’s designed to prevent email spoofing.
  2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM is an email authentication protocol that allows a domain to attach its identifier to a message. This asserts some level of responsibility or involvement with the message. A sequence of messages signed with the same domain name is assumed to provide a reliable base of information about mail associated with the domain name’s owner, which may feed into an evaluation of the domain’s “reputation”. It uses public-key cryptography to sign an email with a private key. Recipient servers can then use a public key published to a domain’s DNS to verify that parts of the emails have not been modified during the transit.
  3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): is an email authentication protocol that uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to detect email spoofing. In order to comply with DMARC, messages must be authenticated through either SPF or DKIM, or both.

Let us dive deep into DKIM in this blog. Amazon SES provides three options for signing your messages using a DKIM signature:

  1. Easy DKIM: To set up a sending identity so that Amazon SES generates a public-private key pair and automatically adds a DKIM signature to every message that you send from that identity.
  2. BYODKIM (Bring Your Own DKIM): To provide your own public-private key pair for so SES adds a DKIM signature to every message that you send from that identity, see Provide your own DKIM authentication token (BYODKIM) in Amazon SES.
  3. Manually add DKIM signature: To add your own DKIM signature to email that you send using the SendRawEmail API, see Manual DKIM signing in Amazon SES.

The purpose of EasyDKIM is to simplify the process of generating DKIM keys, adding DKIM signatures to outgoing emails, and managing DKIM settings, making it easier for users to implement DKIM authentication for their email messages. Using EasyDKIM, Amazon SES aims to improve email deliverability, prevent email fraud and phishing attacks, establish sender reputation, enhance brand reputation, and comply with industry regulations or legal requirements. EasyDKIM doubles as domain verification (simplification) and it eliminates the need for customers to worry about DKIM key rotation (managed automation). By automating and simplifying the DKIM process, EasyDKIM helps users ensure the integrity and authenticity of their email communications, while reducing the risk of fraudulent activities and improving the chances of emails being delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

Setting up Easy DKIM in Amazon SES:

When you set up Easy DKIM for a domain identity, Amazon SES automatically adds a 2048-bit DKIM signature to every email that you send from that identity. You can configure EasyDKIM by using the Amazon SES console, or by using the API.

The procedure in this section is streamlined to just show the steps necessary to configure Easy DKIM on a domain identity that you’ve already created. If you haven’t yet created a domain identity or you want to see all available options for customizing a domain identity, such as using a default configuration set, custom MAIL FROM domain, and tags, see Creating a domain identity. Part of creating an Easy DKIM domain identity is configuring its DKIM-based verification where you will have the choice to either accept the Amazon SES default of 2048 bits, or to override the default by selecting 1024 bits. Steps to set up easyDKIM for a verified identity:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
  3. List of verified identities in SES console

    Verified identities

  4. In the list of identities, choose an identity where the Identity type is Domain.
  5. Under the Authentication tab, in the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) container, choose Edit.
  6. In the Advanced DKIM settings container, choose the Easy DKIM button in the Identity type field.
  7. Choose EasyDKIM as identity type; RSA_2048_BITT in DKIM signing key length; Check Enabled checkbox under DKIM signatures.

    DKIM settings

  8. In the DKIM signing key length field, choose either RSA_2048_BIT or RSA_1024_BIT.
  9. In the DKIM signatures field, check the Enabled box.
  10. Choose Save changes.
  11. After configuring your domain identity with Easy DKIM, you must complete the verification process with your DNS provider – proceed to Verifying a DKIM domain identity with your DNS provider and follow the DNS authentication procedures for Easy DKIM.

Conclusion:

Email authentication, especially DKIM, is crucial in securing your emails, establishing sender reputation, and improving email deliverability. EasyDKIM provides a simplified and automated way to implement DKIM authentication. It removes the hassles of generating DKIM keys and managing settings, while additionally reducing risks and and enhancing sender authenticity. By following the steps outlined in this blog post, you can easily set up easyDKIM in Amazon SES and start using DKIM authentication for your email campaigns.

About the Author

Vinay Ujjini is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Worldwide Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. He is an avid sports enthusiast and in his spare time, enjoys playing tennis & cricket.

Build AI and ML into Email & SMS for customer engagement

Post Syndicated from Vinay Ujjini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/build-ai-and-ml-into-email-sms-for-customer-engagement/

Build AI and ML into Email & SMS for customer engagement

Customers engage with businesses through various channels like email, SMS, Push, and in-app. With the availability and ease of usage of mobile phones, businesses can use 2-way Short Service Messages (SMS) to engage with their customers. Text messaging does not need applications and provides immediate interaction with your customers. Amazon Pinpoint enables businesses & organizations to interact in 2-way SMS messages with their customers. Since it is not practical and scalable for organizations to have people responding to millions of their customer’s texts, we can leverage Amazon Lex which helps build the conversational AI into the 2-way SMS. Amazon Lex is a fully managed artificial intelligent (AI) AWS service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. Machine Learning (ML) is used in digital marketing to help businesses detect patterns in customer bhevaior.

Today, if customers want to know the latest status on their order, they have to send an email, which is hard for businesses to monitor and respond, and time consuming for the customer to call regarding their order status and also expensive for businesses to field the calls.

This blog post shows how you can elevate your customer’s experience using Amazon Pinpoint’s omni-channel capabilities, Amazon Lex’s AI powered chat, and ML-powered personalization using Amazon Personalize.

The solution presented in this blog helps resolve all the above issues. The example I have used to depict this where a customer orders a bike and since the delivery has been delayed, he wants to get timely updates on the progress. He has been given a phone number by the bike company to text them with any questions. This solution elevates the customer’s experience by providing him with timely update by checking the latest from the database and also sending additional product recommendations, predicting what the customer might need.

Architecture

This solution uses Amazon Pinpoint, Amazon Lex, AWS Lambda, Amazon Dynamo DB, Amazon Simple Notification Services, Amazon Personalize.

AWS architecture diagram AI/ML, Email, SMS.

  1. The customer sends a message to the number provided by the store asking about their order status.
  2. Pinpoint 2-way SMS has as SNS topic tied to it.
  3. The SNS topic relays the message to the Lex integration Lambda.
  4. This Lex integration lambda has the integration between Pinpoint & Lex.
  5. When the customer checks on their order status, Lex taps into the fulfillment lambda that is tied to it.
  6. That lambda checks on the order status from the DynamoDB and sends it back to Lex.
  7. Lex sends the order details to Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Pinpoint delivers the SMS with the order details to the customer’s phone number.
  8. Amazon Lex lets fulfillment Lambda know to send an email to the customer with the order details.
  9. Fulfillment Lambda create an event called ‘Order Status’ for Amazon Pinpoint Journey to consume in its Journey.
  10. Amazon Pinpoint’s message template reaches out to Amazon Personalize to get the 3 recommendations.
  11. Amazon Pinpoint’s Journey triggers an email message to the customer with the order information and recommendations

Prerequisites

To deploy this solution, you must have the following:

  1. An AWS account.
  2. An Amazon Pinpoint project.
  3. An originating identity that supports 2 way SMS in the country you are planning to send SMS to – Supported countries and regions (SMS channel).
  4. A mobile number to send and receive text messages.
  5. An SMS customer segment – Download the example CSV, that contains a sample SMS & email endpoints. Replace the phone number (column C) with yours, and email with your email and import it to Amazon Pinpoint – How to import an Amazon Pinpoint segment.
  6. Add your mobile number in the Amazon Pinpoint SMS sandbox.
  7. Verify your email address that needs to receive messages from this account.
  8. Download the LexIntegration.zip & RE_Order_Validation.zip Lambda files from this Github location.

Preparation:

  1. Download the CloudFormation template.
  2. Go to Amazon S3 console and create a bucket. I created one for this example as ‘pinpointreinventaiml-code’. Under that S3 bucket, create a sub-folder and name it Lambda.
  3. Upload the 2 zip files you downloaded earlier from the Github.
  4. In Amazon Pinpoint > Phone numbers, Check to make sure the phone number you are using is enabled for SMS and its status is active.
  5. Add the machine learning generated product recommendations using Amazon Personalize.
Check if phone number is enabled & active in Pinpoint console

Phone numbers in Pinpoint console

Solution implementation

Create a Lex Chat bot:

  1. Now it’s time to create your bot. To create your bot, sign in to the Lex console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/lex.
  2. For more information about creating bots in Lex, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lex/latest/dg/gs-console.html.
  3. Click on Create bot button. Next steps:
    1. Select Create a blank bot radio button.
    2. Give a Bot name ‘Order Status’ under Bot name Configuration. (Use the same Bot name as mentioned here. If you change the Bot name here, your CloudFormation will fail)
    3. Under IAM permissions, select the radio button Create a role with basic Amazon Lex permissions.
    4. For COPPA, choose No. Click Next
    5. Under Language dropdown, choose the language of usage. I chose Language as English in my example.
    6. Click Done, to complete the Bot creation.
  4. You have to create an Intent within the Bot you just created
    1. Click on the Bot you just created. Click on Intents and click the dropdown Add intent and select Add empty intent.
    2. Give an intent name and click Ok.
  5. Once the intent is created, go to the intent and open the Conversation flow section in the intent and create a flow that that has the following info and looks like below image:
    1. Click on Sample utterance and it takes you to Sample Utterance and type in Order status.
    2. Click on initial response and type in Okay, I can help with that. What is your order number?
    3. Click on the slot value and click on Add a slot. Name: OrderNumber and Slot type is AMAZON.AlphaNumeric. In the prompt, enter Please enter your order number.
    4. Click on Save Intent button. The conversation flow should look like the below screenshot:

Amazon Lex intent

6. Go back to the Intent you just created and click on the Build button that is to the right side of the page.

Build intent

7. Once the build is successfully completed, go back to the Bot you created and click on Aliases on the left frame. Click on the Alias that was created earlier, TestBotAlias.

Bot Alias

8. In the Languages section, click on the English language that we created earlier.
9. Open the Lambda function – optional section and point the source to RE_Order_Validation Lambda that we downloaded earlier.
10. For Lambda function version or alias, select $LATEST. Click on Save.

Add Lambda to Alias

11. Go to Intents, choose the intent you just built and click on Build button again. Once build is complete, you can test the intent.

Import and execute CloudFormation:

  1. Navigate to the Amazon CloudFormation console in the AWS region you want to deploy this solution.
  2. Select Create stack and With new resources. Choose Template is ready as Prerequisite – Prepare template and Upload a template file as Specify template. Upload the template downloaded in step 1 under Preparation section of this document. Click Next.
  3. Fill the AWS CloudFormation parameters as shown below:
  4. Stack name: Give a name to this stack.
    1. Under Parameters, for BotAlias: The Bot Alias that you created as part of Amazon Lex above.
    2. BotId: The Bot ID for the bot that you created as part of Amazon Lex above.
    3. CodeS3Bucket: Give the name of the S3 bucket you created in step3 of the Preparation topic above.
    4. OriginationNumber: This is the origination identity phone number you created in step4 of the Preparation topic above.
    5. PinpointProjectId: Use the ProjectID you have from step2 of the Prerequisites phase above.
  5. After entering all the parameter info, it would look something like this below:
  6. CloudFormation parameters
  7. Click Next. Leave the default options on the next page and click Next again.
  8. Check the box I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names. Click Submit.

Set up data in Amazon Dynamo DB

  1. We are using DynamoDB table here as the transactional database that stores order information for the bike store.
  2. Once the solution has been successfully deployed, navigate to the Amazon DynamoDB console and access the OrderStatus DynamoDB table. Each row created in this table represents an order and it’s details. Each row should have a unique Order_Num that holds the order number and it’s related information. You can put additional information about the order like the example below:
  3. {
   "Order_Num":{
      "Value":"ABC123"
   },
   "Delivery_Dt":{
      "Value":"12/01/2022"
   },
   "Order_Dt":{
      "Value":"11/01/2022"
   }
   "Shipping_Dt":{
      "Value":"11/24/2022"
   }
   "UserId":{
      "Value":"example-iser-id-3"
   }
}
  4. Once you enter the data, it should look like the image below. Click on Create item.
  5. Dynamo DB values

Set up Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic

  1. We need the Amazon Simple Notification Service here, to provide internal message delivery from publishers (customer’s text message) to subscribers (Amazon Lex in this example). This is used for internal notifications in this use case.
  2. As part of the CloudFormation above, check if you have an SNS topic created by the name LexPinpointIntegrationDemo.
  3. Now, we have successfully created an Amazon SNS topic.

Set up Lambda Functions

  1. Go to AWS Lambda console and open the Lambda function LexIntegration. Under the Function overview, click on the Add trigger. Under Trigger configuration dropdown, select SNS and under SNS Topic select LexPinpointIntegrationDemo topic. Click on Add.
  2. Note: In this example, I used Node.js in a Lambda and Python in another, to show how AWS Lambda functions are flexible to use the scripting language of your choice.

Setting up 2-way SMS in Amazon Pinpoint

  1. Go to Amazon Pinpoint console and click on Phone numbers under SMS & Voice in the left frame. If you don’t see any phone numbers, please refer to #3 under prerequisites section above.
  2. This is how your screen should look like
  3. Phone numbers in Pinpoint
  4. Click on the number.
  5. On the right frame, expand Two-way SMS drop down arrow.
  6. Click on the check box ‘Enable two-way SMS’.
  7. In the ‘Incoming message destination’ select the radio button ‘Choose an existing SNS topic’ and in the drop down below, choose the SNS topic you built above.
  8. The result would look like the screenshot below:
  9. 2-way SMS
  10. Click on Save.

Import Machine Learning model into Pinpoint

  1. Go to Amazon Pinpoint.
  2. Click on Machine Learning Models. Click on Add recommender model.
  3. Give a recommender model name and description under model details.
  4. Under Model configuration, choose the radio button ‘Automatically create a role’ and give an IAM role name in the textbox below.
  5. Under recommender model, choose the recommender model campaign that you created in Amazon Personalize earlier in the project.
    1. If you did not create it, use this Pinpoint workshop to create a recommender model in Amazon Personalize.
    2. The data used in this example is for retail industry, please edit the data as needed for your use case and industry.
  6. Under the settings section:
    1. Select ‘User Id’ as identifier.
    2. Click on the drop down ‘Number of recommendations per message’ and select 3.
  7. For Processing method, choose ‘Use value returned by model’.
  8. Click on Next.
  9. You are presented with attributes section. Give a display name as ‘product_name’ for the attributes and click next.
  10. On the next screen, you can review all the information provided and click on Publish.
  11. The completed model after publishing looks like the screen below:
  12. Personalize model in Pinpoint

Create a Message Template in Amazon Pinpoint

  1. Use chapter 6.4 in this workshop Amazon Pinpoint Workshop to create a message template.
  2. Once the template is created, you need to add recommendations to the message template using this Amazon Pinpoint Workshop details. Change the type of data needed for your use case and industry in this workshop. I used sample retail data.
  3. To create a Amazon Pinpoint Journey, navigate to the Amazon Pinpoint console , select Journeys and click on Create journey.
  4. Give a name, click on Set entry condition in the Journey entry block.
  5. Choose the radio button Add participants when they perform an activity.
  6. Click in the ‘Events’ text box and type in OrderStatus.
  7. Pinpoint Journey entry
  8. Click on Add activity and select Send an email.
  9. Click on choose an email template and select the email message template we created earlier in this blog. Click on choose template button.
  10. Select a Sender email address from the drop down list.
  11. Choose sender email here
  12. Click Save. The final journey should look like this:
  13. This is the final journey
  14. Click on Actions > Settings where you will review the journey settings. There you set the start and end date of the journey if applicable as well as other advanced settings. Configure your journey settings to look like the screenshot below and click Save.
  15. Journey settings
  16. To publish your journey click on Review. On the Review your journey click Next > Mark as reviewed > Publish. A 5 minutes countdown will begin after, which your journey will be live.
  17. Once the journey is live, we need to pass the event OrderStatus and the endpoints will go through that journey and will receive an email.

Testing the solution

  1. Use a phone with a valid number (in this example, I took a US phone number) and send a text ‘Order Status’ to the number generated in Amazon Pinpoint above.
  2. You should get a response “Okay, I can help with that. What is your order number?”
  3. You should type in the order number you generated earlier and stored it in Amazon DynamoDB table.
  4. You should get a response “Your order <order number> was shipped on <shipped_dt> and is expected to be delivered to your address on <delivery_dt>. Your order details have been emailed to you.”
  5. Text message flow
  6. Alternatively, you can test this solution from the Lex bot.
  7. In Amazon Lex, go to the intent you created above and click on the Test button. Next steps:
    1. In the text box, enter Order Status.
    2. Bot should respond with Okay, I can help with that. What is your order number?
    3. You can respond with the order number you entered in the DynamoDB table.
    4. Bot should respond with Your order <Order_Num> was shipped on <Shipping_Dt> and is expected to be delivered to your address on <Delivery_Dt>. Your order details have been emailed to you.
    5. Testing the 2 way messaging in Lex console

Conclusion

Using this blog post, you can elevate your customer’s experience by using Amazon Lex’s AI chat capabilities, Amazon Personalize’s ML recommendation models and trigger a Pinpoint Journey. This blog highlights how organizations can interact in a 2-way SMS with their customers and convert that engagement to a triggered email, with product recommendations, if needed.

Next Steps

You can use the above solution and modify it easily to use it across different verticals and applicable use cases. You can also extend this solution to Amazon Connect to an agent via SMS chat, using this blog.

Clean-up

  1. To delete the solution, go to CloudFormation you created as part od this project. Click on the stack and click Delete.
  2. Navigate to Amazon Pinpoint and stop the Journey you ran in this solution. Delete the Journey, Machine learning models, Message templates you created for this solution. Delete the Project you created for this solution.
  3. In Amazon Lex, delete the intent and bot you created for this solution.
  4. Delete the folder and bucket you created in S3 as part of this project.
  5. Amazon Personalize resources like Dataset groups, datasets, etc. are not created via AWS Cloudformation, thus you have to delete them manually. Please follow the instructions in the AWS documentation on how to clean up the created resources.

Additional resources

Retry delivering failed SMS using Pinpoint

How to target customers using ML, based on their interest in a product

 About the Authors

Vinay Ujjini

Vinay Ujjini is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis & cricket.