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Send Emails with Amazon SES from Google Sheets

Amazon's Simple Email Service, or SES, is a cloud-based email service that you can use to send bulk emails, newsletters, transactional emails or any other emails messages at scale. The Document Studio add-on enables you to send unlimited emails using AWS SES email service for rows in your Google Sheets.

Create a Sender Identity

Log into your SES console, and from the menu bar, choose the AWS Region where want to verify the email address or the domain for sending emails.

In the sidebar, go to Verified Identities and click on the Create Identity button. Choose the Email Address box, enter your email address and click on the Create Identity button. AWS will send an email to that address to verify your identity.

AWS SES Sender Email

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You can either verify a single email address or a domain. When you verify an entire domain, you are verifying all email addresses from that domain, so you don't need to verify email addresses from that domain individually. Learn more

Add an SES User

Next, we'll create a new user in the AWS SES console that will have permissions to send emails on your behalf through SES and will not have access to any other AWS service.

Click your name in the top right corner of the AWS console, and then click on My Security Credentials in the menu bar to access the Identity and Access Management (IAM) dashboard. Go to Users > Add Users and give a name for the user. Choose Programmatic Access for the Access Type section and move to the Permissions section.

SES IAM User

Generate SES Credentials

Now that our SES user has been created, we'll give it access to the SES service.

Under the Set Permissions section, select Attach existing policies directly, search for AmazonSES, check the filtered option that says AmazonSESFullAccess and move to the Tags section. Skip this section and click on Review to complete the user creation.

Click the Create User button and you'll provided an Access Key ID and Secret Access Key for the user.

SES Full Access Permissions

Connect Google Sheets to SES

Install Document Studio and open your Google Sheet to launch the add-on. You may either open an existing Google Sheet or create a new sheet and add data manually.

Inside the Document Studio app, give your workflow a name, like Send Emails with SES and select the specific worksheet in your Google Spreadsheet that contains the merge data. Click on Continue to move to the conditions page.

On the Conditions pane, specify if you want the email workflow to run only if the row data satisfies certain conditions. Click Continue and, on the next screen, choose Send Email from the list of available tasks.

Send Email from Google Sheets

You can also send emails through Sparkpost, SendGrid and Google's own Gmail service.

Configure SES in Sheets

Choose Amazon SES from the list of available email sending services.

Next, chose the AWS Region that you have selected while generated SES access keys in the AWS console. Provide your SES Access Key and the Secret Key that were generated in the previous step.

For the sender's email address and reply-to fields, you need to provide the same email address that you've added as an identity is SES. If you have verified a domain, you can send email from any subdomain or email address of the verified domain without having to verify each one individually.

Configure Amazon SES

Configure Email Message

Specify a list of TO, CC and BCC recipients in the respective input boxes. You can specify multiple recipients in the same email, separated by commas.

If the email addresses are dynamic and listed in a spreadsheet column, you can choose the email column name from the Send Email to dropdown.

Provide a subject and body for the email. You can use {{variables}} in the subject and body for personalized emails. Advanced users may add Scriptlets in the email body for conditional text.

Preview and Save

Click the Preview button and you should see a sample email sent through Amazon SES to your own email address. Document Studio will take the data from the second row of the selected Google Sheet and use it to personalize the email message. Click Done to locally apply your changes.

On the next screen, turn on the Run workflow every hour option and the workflow will run in the background. Click the Save button and the workflow will now appear in the workflow dashboard where you can edit, delete or manually run the workflow.

Authenticate your Emails

It is highly recommended that you authenticate your emails sent with SES to improve deliverability.

  1. Add an SPF record in your DNS configuration (guide)
  2. Sign your emails with DKIM (guide)
  3. Set up the DMARC policy on your sending domain (guide)