E-commerce receipts, login credentials to the new membership site you just signed up for, or even something as simple as a password reset. If these emails are not hitting your users inboxes, your business loses credibility immediately, which means you are less profitable. And we need to solve that. This video is all about transactional emails. As boring as that may be. I’ll show you how to do it right. What’s up, everybody is Dave from Profitable Tools, and today we are talking about transactional emails, I know not necessarily the most exciting thing to talk about, except for when you think about what I said in the intro, that it’s actually really, really important to your business’s success.

So what are transactional emails are actually why are they important now when they weren’t really important just a few years ago? Well, let’s go back in time. Everybody four or five years ago was using a service like blue host or even site ground. I’m not saying these are good or bad providers. It’s just where everybody was because dedicated providers like Kincaide or Cloudways just didn’t really exist quite yet, at least not in their current form. So back then, blue host or site ground, they would actually handle email for you because you’d buy a domain on someplace like GoDaddy and then you’d point the name servers right at your host.

They’d take care of all of the configuration of the DNS. You didn’t really have to worry about it. A whole heck of a lot things have shifted a little bit. And now that we have dedicated Web hosting providers, they don’t want to handle email and for a good reason, it’s an entirely different specialty. So they’re really good at serving up websites, but they don’t care about email. They leave that to the experts like Rackspace or Google. But your website still needs to send out emails, so we need to connect it up to a transactional email provider.

So things like new user sign ups, receipts, all of that gets to the inbox properly. Until recently, a lot of people were using mail gun for their transactional email provider because it had a very generous free plan. In fact, a lot of businesses never even paid a dime for Morgan. So they did what you’d expect at this point and they killed that free plan. They mean they’ve got to make a living as well. So now we’re looking for new transactional providers.

And I want to suggest, if you’ve seen any my other videos, you might already know what I’m going to say. You move your transactional emails over to Amazon, says Amazon. Yes. Stands for Amazon’s simple email service. And the reason I like them so much as they have this very unique spot on the Venn diagram where they’re both the best at what they do as well as the cheapest, the best, meaning they’ve got a great Sendy reputation and you’re going to have very high deliverability and the cheapest.

Well, what do I mean by that? Let’s check out their pricing. So if you’re actually hosting your website on Amazon, too, you’ll get 62000 emails a month for free, meaning you never have to pay anything ever that doesn’t go away. That’s not like a one year thing. That’s forever. But if you’re not on Amazon, too, and I’m not, you actually do have to pay a very small amount of money. You can see it is ten cents for every 1000 emails you send.

So let’s think about that. If you’re getting 10000 leads through a contact form on your website, that means you’re paying one dollar a month for emails. You can’t make a buck back on ten thousand leads, reinvestigate that business model. So if you want to follow along in this video, I’ll show you how to set up sites with a WordPress website. Go ahead and start your Adewusi account right now. Click the button in the corner so you can go ahead and set up an account you might have to add in your credit card.

Just remember, it’s going to be a very, very, very small transactional amount. You don’t have to worry. It’s Amazon. They already have all your data anyway. All right. I’ve got a demo WordPress account set up right here. And let’s go ahead and get started configuring sites. Let’s start off by adding a plug in here. It’s got a plug ins, add new and we’re going to search for WP Offload SES. Here we go to this first one right here from Delicious Branes.

That’s the developer of this plugin. Now, this is the light version. We’re also going to talk about some of the pro features which are actually rather enticing when you think about the implications. But for now, let’s get set up with the light version. I’ll install this and activate now. Let’s go ahead and get configured. We’re going to go over to settings and down to offload assets light. One of the things that I like most about this developer is they have a really good step by step to Turrill.

But I’m going to take you through the entire thing so you can see exactly what to do over and assess as we go through it. The setup wizard, lets go ahead and get started. So the first thing we need to do is actually log in to assess and create what they call an IBM user. Let me show you how to do that. Well, click right here and that’ll open this up in. Yes. Now if you don’t get taken to the screen, you might need to log in first.

Just go up to services and type in. I am. Then you’ll need to go down to where it says users. Now, go ahead and add a new user, give it a name that you can recognize. And then under access type, choose programmatic access. Let’s go down to the next under set permissions. We’re going to choose attach existing policies directly in the search box. Let’s search for seats. It’ll be the first one that we want to choose here.

This has Amazon as he has full access. Go and check the box next to it and choose the blue button down below. All right. On this screen, we get our access key as well as our secret access key. This is the only time you will see this information. So save it if you want or do what I do and just create a new user name every time you need to log into anything with us. Yes. Well, we do need to do right now is actually copy and paste this over to our WordPress site.

I’ll copy the access key. We’ll go back to WP Offload SES and go to the next section. Now, this screen is where we’ll actually enter in our access key. Both are private as well as our regular access key. Now, you do have two options here. They actually very heavily recommend you put the access keys in the WP config file, which is only slightly more techie if. You’re afraid of that, and I don’t blame you if you are, you can actually enter it right into the fields here where it says access key and secret access, you simply copy and paste it.

Now, the reason it’s preferable to put them in the WP config file is that is just more secure. If you’re worried about someone getting a hold of your access keys, they could actually send out email from your account, which would rack up a bill for you and could also destroy your deliverability in terms of Amazon will not trust you from here on out under region. You’re going to want to choose the location nearest your web server will just cut down on the leg a little bit.

For me, that’s going to be this Oregon location. Let’s click the blue button that says move out of sandbox mode. So sandbox mode, what is this? It sounds very confusing, very computer programing. Basically, Amazon is protecting their reputation as well as, you know, the reputation of other users on their service by not letting people just have wild, free access to sending emails without a little bit of vetting. So sandbox mode means you’re only allowed to send emails to people with the same domain name as you.

So it would be your coworkers are just sending test emails to yourself, but have no fear. Getting out of sandbox mode only takes maybe a couple of days a day or two and it’s very easy to do. We’ve got a link right here. Let’s go ahead and click this. Then there’s a very simple form we want to fill out to request being let out of sandbox mode. That’s what we’re actually doing is an SES spending limit increase because we’re increasing the limits we can now send outside of our own domain name under male type.

Choose transactional entering your website, you URL right here. Then there’s two questions about how you’re going to use a service. One asking about who will you be sending emails to. You can say people who have signed up through my website that they’ve opted in. And then the second question is about how will you monitor for bounces and complaints? And you can simply write. I will be checking the actively checking the inbox to monitor for bonuses and complaints. If anyone pounces, I won’t send to them again.

If anyone complains, I won’t send them again. Then you’re going to want to agree to their terms of service here under requests. Go ahead and choose the same region you chose Oviond WordPress just a second ago. For me, that was Oregon. And then we need to set a spending limit. I wouldn’t choose the daily spending quarter right here and then set a new value, something reasonable like 25 or 50000 emails. That’ll definitely give you some room to grow for most businesses, if you do reach the point where you’re sending twenty five or 50000 emails a day at one, congratulations.

But to you simply have to fill out this form again and ask for another increase next. Just head down to the bottom and hit the submit button. Now, at this point we could head back to the WordPress plug in, but I actually like to do things a little bit differently. You see on the next screen, they’re going to ask us to verify our domain with Amazon. Yes. Now, remember, the plugin has control over cIass so we can kind of update things for us.

But I really like to do this manually because we have one extra option available to us right in the interface. Let’s go back over to Amazon and other services I’m going to type in. Yes, it’s a second option down a simple email service. Then let’s click over to Domain’s here. We’re going to verify a new domain. Go ahead and type in your domain name here. And then before you click the blue button, I want you to check this.

Boxes generate DKA settings. This is an extra authentication step and it will help with your deliverability in the next screen. You’re going to be given a list of DNS credentials you’ll need to enter into your DNS provider, something like GoDaddy or your shared host. If you’re using something like Scrounger, it’s important to point out here you only want to enter in the text record as well as the three senior records. There’s a little slider over here. Don’t miss that third one into your DNS provider.

You don’t need to update the emacs records because that’s how you actually receive email. So updating that with your DNS provider could break your regular email provider. If you’re using Google or Rackspace, just leave the Emacs records alone. On the next screen. You should see whether you’ve been validated or not. You can click this little reload button and that’ll tell you whether you’re able to send your kids here that I’m verified for sending as well as my DKA status.

Just a word of caution. The decay I can take a minute or two longer to validate. So if yours doesn’t go through right away, don’t panic. Just give it a minute and try again. Once you’re all verified, head back over to WordPress where you’ll see the WP Offload SES verification screen where you want to make sure we choose, verify domain and then go ahead and type in the domain name that you just set up over in S. Yes.

Then click the complete verification button over here. You’re going to see a text record, but don’t worry, you’ve already done this. It’ll be the same text record as what you just entered in a moment ago. When we’re over on the platform, let’s click the Configure WP Offload SES button on the screen. We can set up these sending email address as well as the display name that will show up as the front name in our receiver’s emails. And then we can also set up some logs, basically how often the logs will be deleted by default.

It’s set to ninety days. You can go as much as two years and as few as seven days. Now, it’s important to note here that the logs actually track email opens and clicks. So you might want to store a year or even two years worth of logs. All right, let’s hit, save and complete set up. You don’t want to make sure that you have send using as it’s turned on. We can also enable. Open tracking as well as click tracking that will add this to the logs now in order to actually see the information, we’re going to need to upgrade to the pay to plug in.

Let’s go ahead and send a test email and make sure this is working. I’ll click right here. It says, Send text, email and go ahead and enter an email address that you are familiar with and can check easily. Was it Sendy? Great. It says message sent. And here’s what the verification email looks like. Just to confirm, it did go through my inbox. It says, Hey, are you sending this email? Are you awesome?

That means you’re all set to start sending emails via. Now, everything we’ve done so far has been in the free version of this plug in, and there are actually fairly compelling reasons for why you might want to pay to have the premium version if you’re doing any sort of volume of business on your website at all. Let me get into that right now. First of all, you’re going to get support, which you don’t get on the free version.

I think that goes without saying you can’t support a free plug in because you just don’t have that much time in the world. So paid versions get email support. That’s great. But if emails are going out on time, you might not need that. The things that are actually really interesting is the ability to track and monitor the emails that go out. Let me show you an example. We’ve had open and click reporting so you’ll be able to see if someone receives your email, opens it up and clicks any of the links inside.

So there’s two reasons this might be useful. One, if you run a website and you have users logging in and out, you know that they’re always claiming they didn’t get emails and not that they’re always lying, but sometimes they kind of are. So someone says, hey, I didn’t get this receipt you sent me six months ago. You can check your logs and say, yeah, you did. And I can tell that you clicked on it three times as well.

So that solves some problems right there. But maybe a little bit more of a practical reason for doing this is if you’re running a membership site and you want to see if people are able to get the emails that go out from your membership platform and that they’re opening and engaging with them, they can often be marketing, ask emails with options you upgrade to different membership levels. Having some tracking built in is really, really helpful. Some of those people that complain about not getting their password, well, their inboxes are full because they have very bad email clients.

So now you’ll have auto retry of emails that are sent. When bouncers go out, you can have them automatically tried again because an inbox was full or whatever reason. It just wasn’t deliverable. Now we can have it auto retry a set number of times. You can also do the retries manually. You can actually go ahead and search through all of the emails that have been sent out through your server and find the one that was supposed to get sent and try sending it out again.

If you want to see exactly what any email looked like, you’ll be able to do that as well, because you can search for any email and then open it up and see what the contents actually look like. WP Offload also makes it very easy to track the deliverability of your website by sending health reports every day to your inbox. So we’re going to wrap it up here now. I hope you understand how to set up Amazon cIass with your website so that the emails you send out to your customers hit their inboxes, give any questions, make sure you head over to our Facebook group, be happy to answer them over there.

Or, of course, just leave a comment down below. You want to pick up a copy of WP WP Offload SES? Yes, you can do that at the link below. They’ll be the referral link for the channel. So if you do make a purchase, it does kick us back a few bucks. That’ll do it for this video. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.