Multichannel Customer Engagement with Amazon Pinpoint - Integrated Email, SMS, and Push Notification Delivery
Run segment-based campaigns across email, SMS, and push notifications. Learn about journey automation and analytics.
Pinpoint's Role and How It Differs from SES
Pinpoint is a multichannel customer engagement service. While SES is a low-level API specialized for email delivery, Pinpoint integrates email, SMS, push notifications, and voice messages, providing segmentation, campaign management, journey design, and delivery analytics in a single service. Pinpoint's email delivery uses SES internally, so deliverability and sending limits are equivalent to SES. If you only need transactional emails (password resets, order confirmations), SES is sufficient, but Pinpoint is the better choice for marketing campaigns and user retention initiatives.
Segmentation and Campaign Delivery
Pinpoint segments are dynamically defined by combining user attributes (age, region, plan type) and user behavior (last login date, purchase count, app launch frequency). Dynamic segments are evaluated in real time at query execution, always reflecting the latest user state. A campaign is the unit for delivering messages to a segment. You can configure immediate delivery, scheduled delivery, or recurring delivery, and compare subject line or message body variations with A/B testing. Delivery results are available in real time on the dashboard, showing open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Multi-Step Engagement with Journeys
A journey is a workflow that delivers multiple messages in stages based on user behavior. You design flows in a visual editor, combining conditional branches (did the user open the email? did they click a link?), wait steps (send the next message after 3 days), and splits (A/B testing). For example, you can build a flow that sends a welcome email immediately after registration, a feature introduction email after 3 days, and a reminder email only to users who haven't logged in after 7 days. Pass-through and drop-off rates are visualized for each journey step, helping you identify where users disengage and improve your messaging. For more on customer engagement strategies, see related books on Amazon.
Pinpoint Pricing
Pinpoint pricing is pay-per-use by channel. Email costs approximately $1.00 per 10,000 messages (equivalent to SES), SMS is charged per message based on the destination country (approximately $0.07451 per message for Japan), and push notifications cost approximately $1.00 per 1 million notifications. Journey usage adds approximately $0.006 per 1 million messages. Targeting and segmentation are free for up to 5,000 monthly endpoints, with overage at approximately $0.0012 per 1,000 endpoints. Since SMS tends to be the most expensive channel, it is recommended to limit SMS to high-priority notifications such as reminders and verification codes, and use email or push notifications for general marketing.
Summary
Pinpoint is a service that centrally manages multichannel customer communications. It lets you narrow your target with segmentation, deliver personalized messages through campaigns and journeys, and measure effectiveness with analytics, all within a single service. It scales from small volumes with pay-as-you-go pricing.