One of the most common issues that can result your recipients not receiving your emails is related to the “From” or “Reply To” email address that you use. Email Service Providers (ESPs) look at the “Reply To” email as one way to indicate whether the email is from a valid sender or not. They analyze this data to see if there is a potential for the message to be a “Spoof” of another sender, OR just a spam message that is unsolicited. There are several important guidelines that you should follow here.
- Use a VALID email address as your “Reply To” email. Although it can be annoying to receive a lot of responses from your marketing, the reality is if you are sending a valid message to your customers, they should be able to respond to you. Chronopitch will NOT send the bounces and other non-delivery messages to you. You will receive only valid replies; this may include auto-responders that someone has set up on their email (such as “Out of Office” auto replies), but they typically are not a large percentage of your list. Using something like “NoReply@myurl.com” can be viewed by Email Service Providers as a red flag for Spam. They assume that valid marketers are willing to send AND receive messages from the recipients.
- Do NOT use free email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or similar as your “Reply To” email. These services are not recommended for use through as an ESP as a "from" address because these webmail providers have strict DMARC policies set up to protect their organizations from phishing attempts through “spoofing” emails. Spoofing is a term used to describe an email that appears to come from a valid sender, but is not actually from that sender. Free email services do not allow their email addresses to be authenticated, because it would make it much easier for their own domain to be spoofed. For example, someone could present themselves as Gmail Support and request personal data, etc. It is much preferable to use an email address where you can control the authentication settings, which brings us to our next tip.
- Use an email address from your own domain and set your SPF records in your DNS to include our email transport service. Okay, so this one sounds pretty technical, but it is actually a pretty easy fix that will reap HUGE benefits in your delivery rates. If you use a email tied to a domain that you control as your “Reply To”address (such as GM@mygolfcoursedomain.com) you can provide an easy method for ESPs to validate your emails. This is through the use of what is known as an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) validation. You need to add (or have your Ops/IT/Hosting support teamIT/Domain Host add) an SPF Record in the DNS settings for your domain by inserting Include:mailgun.org to the list of existing SPF records. This will greatly reduce the likelihood of your messages sent through Chronopitch being flagged as Phishing/Spam messages and result in better deliverability to your recipients. The specific entries for the SPF record should look like this:
|
Record Type |
Value |
|
TXT |
V=spf1 include:mailgun.org ~all |
These tips regarding using the proper “from” or “Reply To” email address apply to ALL bulk email services, not just Chronopitch (Note: the SPF record addition would obviously be different for different email services) . If you would like to learn more about the different approaches to this topic, here are some articles you can visit:
https://www.mailjet.com/blog/news/dmarc-gmail-changes/
https://help.campaignmonitor.com/from-name-and-address#no-free-webmail
https://mailchimp.com/help/limitations-of-free-email-addresses/