The Challenge: Beyond 'Sent' is 'Delivered'
Sending an email is easy. Ensuring it lands in the recipient's inbox—and not their spam folder—is a complex challenge known as email deliverability. Your success depends on your sender reputation, which is an invisible score that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail and Outlook assign to you. A poor reputation means your emails get filtered, delayed, or blocked entirely.
To help customers navigate this complexity, AWS created the Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM), a powerful suite of tools designed to help you monitor, analyze, and improve your email deliverability.
What is Virtual Deliverability Manager?
The Virtual Deliverability Manager is a feature within Amazon SES that acts as an expert system for your email program. It provides actionable insights into your sending performance and recommendations to improve your inbox placement rate. Think of it as a built-in consultant that helps you proactively manage your sender reputation instead of reacting after problems arise.
Why It Matters: The Pillars of Deliverability
VDM helps you manage the core pillars that ISPs use to judge your reputation:
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Authentication: Proving you are who you say you are. VDM helps you correctly implement the three main email authentication standards:
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SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Lists the authorized servers that can send email on behalf of your domain.
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DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Adds a digital signature to your emails, proving they haven't been tampered with.
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DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): A policy that tells ISPs what to do with emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks (e.g., quarantine or reject them).
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Engagement Metrics: How recipients interact with your emails. High positive engagement (opens, clicks) boosts your reputation. High negative engagement (bounces, spam complaints) damages it.
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Infrastructure Health: Ensuring your sending infrastructure adheres to technical best practices.
Core Components of Virtual Deliverability Manager
VDM is composed of two primary features that work together to give you a complete picture of your email health.
1. The Dashboard
The Dashboard is your central monitoring hub. It visualizes key deliverability and engagement metrics over time, allowing you to spot trends and identify potential issues quickly.
Key Metrics Tracked:
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Delivery Rate: The percentage of emails that were successfully delivered to the recipient's mail server.
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Open Rate: The percentage of delivered emails that were opened by recipients. (Requires engagement tracking to be enabled).
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Click-Through Rate: The percentage of opened emails where a recipient clicked on a link. (Requires engagement tracking to be enabled).
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Complaint Rate: The percentage of recipients who marked your email as spam. This is a critical metric to keep as low as possible (ideally below 0.1%).
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Hard Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that were permanently rejected (e.g., due to an invalid email address).
By analyzing these metrics together, you can understand how your content is performing and whether your sending reputation is improving or declining.
2. The Advisor
The Advisor is a proactive diagnostic tool. It automatically inspects your sending domains and provides a list of actionable recommendations to fix issues that could be harming your deliverability.
Common Advisor Recommendations:
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Missing or Misconfigured SPF Record: It will alert you if your domain's SPF record is missing or not set up correctly.
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DKIM Configuration Issues: It checks if DKIM is enabled and properly configured for your sending identities.
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Absence of a DMARC Policy: It will strongly recommend you implement a DMARC record to protect your domain from spoofing and gain visibility into how your domain is being used.
The Advisor takes the guesswork out of email authentication, providing clear, step-by-step guidance on how to resolve these critical issues.
How to Get Started with VDM
Using VDM involves a few key steps:
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Enable the Feature: The Virtual Deliverability Manager is not enabled by default. You must first activate it in the Amazon SES console for your AWS account.
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Create a Configuration Set: To track engagement metrics like opens and clicks, you must send your emails using a Configuration Set. This is a collection of rules you apply to your sent emails.
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Enable Engagement Tracking: Within your Configuration Set, you must explicitly enable "Open tracking" and/or "Click tracking." When enabled, SES will automatically insert a tiny, invisible tracking pixel and redirect links to measure these interactions.
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Review the Advisor: Once enabled, immediately check the Advisor for any outstanding issues with your domain's authentication settings (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and prioritize fixing them.
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Monitor the Dashboard: Regularly review the Dashboard to monitor your sending trends. If you see a sudden drop in your open rate or a spike in your complaint rate, it's an early warning sign that you need to investigate your recent sending activity and content.
Benefits of Using VDM
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Proactive Issue Detection: The Advisor helps you find and fix problems before they negatively impact your sender reputation.
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Improved Sender Reputation: By following VDM's guidance, you align with ISP best practices, which naturally leads to a better reputation.
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Increased Inbox Placement Rate: The ultimate goal—a better reputation means more of your emails land in the inbox where they can be seen.
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Centralized Deliverability Insights: VDM consolidates all the key metrics you need into one place, saving you from having to use multiple third-party tools.
Conclusion
In the world of email, "sent" does not equal "delivered." The Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager is an essential, built-in tool that empowers you to take control of your email deliverability. By leveraging its dashboard and advisor, you can move from simply sending email to sending it effectively, ensuring your critical communications reach their intended audience.