Exporting to Amazon SES
This article applies to the Email builder in all plans.
Level Up your Emails in Amazon SES
You can easily design your emails in the Beefree builder and then push them to Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) for sending. Our connector allows you to export an email to Amazon SES.
Prerequisites
Prior to exporting your emails to Amazon SES, ensure you have the following:
- Beefree account
- Create and configure an Amazon SES IAM policy
Permission Policies
Take the following steps within Amazon SES to configure the permission policies and successfully export your Beefree email designs to this platform.
To set the specified permission policies for your Amazon SES credentials, you need to create an IAM policy. Here is a JSON example of how to define the permissions for the specified actions:
- Go to the IAM Management Console.
- In the left navigation pane, click on Policies and then click on Create policy.
- Select the JSON tab and paste the following policy document:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"ses:ListTemplates",
"ses:CreateTemplate",
"ses:GetTemplate"
],
"Resource": ""
}
]
}
- Click on Review policy.
- Provide a name and description for the policy, then click on Create policy.
After creating the policy, you need to attach it to the IAM user or role that you want to grant these permissions to:
- Go to the IAM Management Console.
- In the left navigation pane, click on Users or Roles, depending on where you want to attach the policy.
- Select the user or role to which you want to attach the policy.
- Click on the Permissions tab and then click on Add permissions.
- Select Attach policies directly, then search for the policy you just created.
- Select the policy and click on Next: Review.
- Click on Add permissions to attach the policy.
This will grant the specified SES permissions to the selected IAM user or role. Reference the Creating IAM policies guide for more information.
Connect Amazon SES and Export Emails
Take the steps outlined in this section to connect your Beefree account to the Amazon SES connector and export your email designs.
Here are 2 ways that you can connect your Amazon SES account in Beefree:
- From the Workspace Settings section: connect your Amazon SES account before you start designing.
- From the Export options of your email.
Setting up a connector does not sync your designs with external services. If you update a design after exporting it, you must re-export to see the updates. The export file will populate as a new design inside your ESP.
1. Connect from Workspace Settings
Go to Settings > Connectors and click the Connect button for Amazon SES.
Fill out the information in the modal to begin setting up the connector:
- AWS Key and Secret: here there is an article from the AWS documentation on how to get them.
- Region: Read this article from AWS docs to find it.
- Account Name: this isn't mandatory. It is just your account name. If you have more than one, this may help you identify the account that you are exporting to later.
2. Connect from Export
Then click on Push to your sending system.
A new modal will display the list of available connectors. Select Amazon SES and follow the steps to connect your accounts. If you have already connected, you will not be asked to do so again.
Beefree will confirm that the email has been successfully exported. You will see it appear in your Amazon SES account in Email Sending > Email Templates. The name of your design in Beefree will be the same as the name of the Amazon SES template, along with a unique identifier. Here's an example:
Subject Lines
When you export emails to Amazon SES, consider the following:
-
If you included a subject line in your email, the export will send your subject line to Amazon SES
-
If you did not include a subject line in your email, the export sends the email name to Amazon SES
To add a subject line to your email, take the steps outlined in our Using Preheaders and UTMs article.
Update Your Beefree Email Designs in Amazon SES
The Amazon SES connector allows you to easily update existing Beefree email designs in Amazon SES.
You need to update permissions in Amazon SES to use this option. Go to your account's "Permission Policies" section and add ses:UpdateTemplate.
Update Emails in Amazon SES
Once you’ve edited an email in Beefree, you can export the design and utilize the Update Existing option to update the design within Amazon SES. This allows you to push changes to an existing email design without creating an entirely new version of it
Update Emails to Amazon SES Steps
To update an email design in Beefree and export it to Amazon SES, follow these steps:
- Log in to the Beefree App.
- Open the email design you want to update.
- Make the necessary content changes to the email.
- Click Export on the upper right-hand side of the screen.
- Select the Push to your sending system option.
- Choose Amazon SES from the list of options.
- Select the Update existing option to apply your changes.
The Beefree app will then update the email with the latest version and send it to Amazon SES without creating a new version.
Updated Elements
When using the Update Existing option, the following elements will be updated in Amazon SES:
- HTML
- Subject Line
- Preheader
- UTMs
Note: In Amazon SES, the preheader is included within the HTML. Therefore, any changes made to the preheader in Beefree will automatically reflect in Amazon SES after the export.
Additional Considerations
- The Update existing option is only available for exports made after this feature’s release. Previous exports won’t support this feature because their original template IDs are not known.
- If you change the email name in Amazon SES, the Beefree Update Existing option won’t appear, because the system won’t recognize the email. In this case, you can still export the email as a new version.
- Amazon SES does not support non-ASCII characters in email names. Beefree automatically removes these characters during export to prevent errors.
Multiple Workspaces / Customers
Do you work with multiple brands or clients and need to easily manage all your emails and templates?
No problem! The Enterprise Version of Beefree allows you to set up different workspaces so you can better organize your email creation workflow. Enterprise allows you to specify different connectors for each workspace so you never need to switch accounts.
For example, say you are a digital marketing agency with 10 clients that use Amazon SES. With Enterprise, you will be able to create 10 workspaces in Beefree and connect each of them to their specific account.
Looking for a different sending platform? You can check our complete list of connectors for Beefree — or request a new one!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Comments
11 comments
Your region doesnt support Singapore.
Hey! Thanks for letting us know. I'm notifying our team about this, and we'll see if we can get that region added to the connector.
Any plans on letting users type themself the zone ? I would like to use AWS EU-WEST-3 (Paris). Thanks !
can you add us-west-1?
there's a special reason this field is not open? others providers leave this field open
Hi Stéphane and Uriel, sorry to hear that your regions are unavailable! I'm letting our Product team know about this. We'll see if we can add these in the future!
Hello ,
Is there any way we can update the existing template which we have already exported to SES?
Hello,
How can we we pass the subject? As of now we are getting Rendering Failure event as BeeFree is not sending subject to the SES.
we are receiving following error message.
"failure\":{\"errorMessage\":\"Attribute 'subject' is not present in the rendering data
Hey Sagar, it looks like you opened a support ticket about this! We'll address your question about the subject there. In terms of updating the design in Amazon SES, this is not possible. You need to export the updated version of your email if you're looking to update something.
Is there a way to remove the unique identifier in the template name when exported to SES ?
Having a random unique identifier means that we cannot work independently on our backend -- we have to first generate the name in Bee, and then go back to our backend to input the name, instead of picking a name from the outset.
Can you list what permissions this AWS access requires as I was getting 'Invalid Credentials' when I only gave it access to CreateTemplate and UpdateTemplate in SES? I do not want to give it wide permissions so need to know exactly what it requires.
Hi Alex,
Please try GetTemplate, CreateTemplate, UpdateTemplate, and ListTemplates. Thanks!
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