How to see all your Amazon SES email logs and events (opens, clicks, e.t.c) for free using Engage.so
Sharing this because someone might need it
I’ve been using AWS SES for about 4 years now on my project — Selar.co, and one of the many reasons I love SES is because it’s cheap. You can send over 100,000 emails and it would cost less than $10. The only drawback of SES is there’s not a lot of visibility with the email logs, things like open rates, click rate and delivery rate.
There are a number of articles online about using AWS Cloudwatch to track email events and logs on AWS SES but if we’re being honest, the logs on cloudwatch are so hard to work with. So it’s either you use SES as it is, or pay a huge sum to email alternatives like mandrill, mailgun that have all the logs. I’m cheap, so NO 😄.
For me, all I wanted was something I could use to see sent emails and also see the open rate, delivery rate, click through rate of sent emails. Plus, searching the logs too, all of which I couldn’t achieve with Cloudwatch.
I finally found what I needed when I tried engage.so, they’re pretty new, and have a free tier that allows you connect your Amazon SES account to see the logs of your sent emails.
I’ve been using them for 3 months now and I couldn’t be happier.
The setup is also very straight forward:
(This is me being lazy and not trying to share an actual breakdown of the steps, in my defense, I just wanted to get this post out)
- Sign up @ engage.so
- Setup your AWS API keys to connect your AWS account
- Add few lines of code on your app to add few headers to your SES emails.
Once you’re done connecting our Amazon SES and following the steps on their setup flow, the next step will be add some headers to your codebase.
I use Laravel, so it was as simple as adding a few lines of code in my AppServiceProvider to add the header to all emails sent from our app.
They have a very simple straight forward guide on their website, so don’t worry if the above isn’t very clear, you will be able to set everything up in just 10 minutes or less.
Another thing I love on their dashboard is, I am able to filter my logs to find emails based on so many parameters.
I specifically use them for AWS SES logs, but they also have other integrations like mailgun, stripe, e.t.c
Lastly, while my main usecase for Engage is their SES logs, but they’re a lot more than that.
They’re an all-in-one customer messaging tool that allows you send smart messages to your customers based on automations, tags, segements, e.t.c
One huge pro with them is, unlike other transactional email platforms that charge you by the emails you send or users you’re sending to, they allow you connect your existing email provider (e.g AWS SES) so you get to not spend a huge sum on both your transactional emails and your email automations.
We’re finally setting up our automation on Selar and we’re using them for it, I’d share details when that’s done.
Just thought to share this tool because this is something that ANNOYs me about SES, hope it helps you.
Check them out: engage.so
