Set up the sending domain so marketing email actually lands
Deliverability is earned on the domain, not in the message. SPF, DKIM and a warmed-up mailbox before the first send, or the best email you ever wrote goes to spam.
Mail providers decide whether to deliver your email before they read a word of it. They look at the sending domain: is it authenticated, has it sent like this before, do people complain. A mailbox that has sent ten emails a day for a year and suddenly sends two thousand looks like a compromised account, whatever the content says. This is the setup that makes a burst of mail look like a business rather than a breach.
Before you start
- Access to your domain's DNS.
- The shared mailbox connected as an email channel.
Steps
Publish SPF
A TXT record on your domain naming the servers allowed to send as you — your mail provider publishes the exact value. Without it, mail from you fails the first check every provider makes.
Publish DKIM
A signing key, again from your mail provider, as a DNS record. It lets the receiving server confirm the message was not altered and really came from your domain. SPF and DKIM together are the minimum; one without the other is half an answer.
Add DMARC, at least in monitoring mode
A policy record that tells providers what to do when SPF or DKIM fail, and sends you reports. Start with monitoring. It is what the large providers now look for before they trust volume from a domain.
Warm the mailbox up
Do not go from ten emails a day to two thousand. Send in the low hundreds to people who know you, a few days apart, and let the volume rise over two or three weeks.
Send from a person, to a segment that knows you
A named sender and a warm segment produce replies, and replies are the strongest deliverability signal there is. A no-reply address to a cold list produces complaints, which are the strongest negative one.
Honour unsubscribes as data
An unsubscribe that becomes a stage or attribute change is excluded from every later segment automatically. One that lives in somebody's memory is not.
Check it worked
Send a test to a mailbox you control at a different provider and check the headers: SPF pass, DKIM pass. If either fails, fix DNS before sending to anybody else.
The parts people get wrong
- These are DNS records on your domain, set with your mail provider. Convarza sends through the mailbox you connected; it does not sign for your domain.
- Deliverability is cumulative. One cold blast can cost weeks of reputation.
The ones people actually ask
Our emails are going to spam.
Check SPF and DKIM first by sending a test to another provider and reading the headers. Then look at volume: a sudden jump from a mailbox that never sent much is the second most common cause. Then the segment — cold lists produce complaints.
Does Convarza handle SPF and DKIM?
No — they are records on your domain, set with your mail provider. Convarza sends through the mailbox you connected as a channel, so the domain's reputation is yours to build.