Ensure your email campaign messages reach your customer's inbox each time.
In this help article we will go over email sending best practices and how you can implement them.
Are your Members and Campaign Email Addresses Correct?
One of the most important things you can do is ensure every email address on your mailing list or your member's personal details are correct. Misspelled email addresses are a major contributor to earning a bad sender reputation and ending up on spam block lists.
It is a recommended practice to periodically check in with your members to make sure their email address is up to date in your system. For marketing or campaign emails be sure to remove or update any email addresses that bounce or are misspelled.
Blacklists & Domain Reputation
By following the above practice of only sending to correct email addresses you will reduce the likelihood of ending up on a blacklist or earning a poor sending reputation. Many email providers have "spam traps" where if any email is sent to these trap accounts you will end up on a blacklist instantly. Constantly sending to unknown accounts or accounts that bounce will also get you on a blacklist. Once your domain has a low reputation as a sender it is very difficult to get any legitimate mail delivered so best be careful.
Authenticating Your Email Domain
This next section covers the three main email authentication mechanisms that all domains should have implemented.
These three mechanisms are applied to your DNS zone to tell email providers which servers are authorised to send email from your domain, whether or not an individual email has been tampered with along the way, and what should be done about emails that don't conform to these mechanisms.
SPF - Sender Policy Framework
SPF is a DNS record that identifies what IP addresses are allowed to send email using your domain. This is the most widely used mechanism to authenticate an email domain. The SPF record should include all IP addresses that send mail for your domain.
As our customer, you should have an SPF record that looks like this:
your-domain.com.au. IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.telligence.net.au -all"
You should also include any other platforms you send email via.
DKIM - Domain Keys Identified Mail
DKIM signatures ensure that the email that arrives at the recipient is identical to the email that you sent. This is a key protection against email tampering in transit and goes a long way to maintaining a good sender reputation. DKIM is complementary to SPF and both should be implemented so if one or the other fails, DMARC will still pass. More on DMARC below.
When a DKIM signed email is sent, the receiving server uses the corresponding public key to verify the message.
DMARC - Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance
DMARC is the overarching policy mechanism that tells email providers what they should do with email that doesn't pass SPF and DKIM authentication. Options are: allow it, filter it, or reject it.
Once a DMARC record is implemented in "allow it" mode you should monitor the reporting for messages that don't comply with SPF and DKIM and make adjustments until all messages comply. Once that's done you can set the DMARC policy to "reject" all mail that doesn't comply. Here's a great free tool for weekly DMARC reports you can use to monitor your domain: https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com
How you can implement SPF/DKIM and DMARC
If your club has a tech person who is across all this stuff, then great, just ask them to implement these technologies and they should be across it. If not, and you need to do this yourself, please check out the following steps:
1. Get access to your DNS console
The first step is gaining access to your DNS console. For many customers this is the hardest step. If you don't know who manages your DNS, a good place to start is by contacting your domain provider as most customers DNS is managed via their domain console. If you don't know either of these things, please contact our support team for help.
2. Create or update your SPF record
Now that you have access to your DNS console, if you don't have an existing SPF record, simply add the following:
@ IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.telligence.net.au -all"
You will also need to add either the IP addresses or SPF includes for any other email sending services you use. For full details on SPF syntax, please see this site: https://dmarcian.com/spf-syntax-table
If you already have an SPF record, simply add our include section to it "include:_spf.telligence.net.au".
3. Generate and apply your DKIM records
Now this is a little trickier. Some email sending platforms don't yet support DKIM so as long as SPF is in place, this is OK, for now. Other platforms will allow you to generate a DKIM record to authorise emails from your domain. Member Jungle customers need to contact us for these records.
Once you have the DKIM records for all your email sending services, please add them to your DNS zone.
4. Set up a DMARC policy and monitor it
A great free DMARC service is Postmark. You can use this tool to generate a DMARC policy as well as get weekly reports on the status of emails getting sent by your domain.
Once you have the DMARC record, add it to your DNS zone. At this stage, the policy should be set to 'none' which means no blocking will take place.
Now give it a few weeks to monitor the reports you get and make sure that all genuine email sending services are covered by at least SPF and ideally DKIM as well.
Once you're sure all is working well, you can change the DMARC policy to 'quarantine' or 'reject'. This means emails that are not authenticated are either sent to spam or rejected.
Final Considerations for Email Campaigns
Think about how many emails you receive every day and how many you simply disregard. This is also true for campaigns you send to your members so the key here is be polite!
If you want to keep off spam and black lists for email campaign messages follow these best practices:
- Make it easy to unsubscribe: the simpler and clearer it is for someone to unsubscribe the better. The harder you make it the more likely someone will report your message as spam and that's not good.
- Think about frequency: do your members or subscribers want to hear from you daily, weekly or maybe just monthly? Sending too often is a sure fire way to lose subscribers and get reported for spam.
- Take care including external links: linking to pages on your website is generally safe but be careful linking to websites you don't control. Make sure you only include links to websites that are known to be good. Spam filters will gladly block your message for linking to a suspicious website.
- Clean up your campaign lists: remove subscribers who regularly don't open your emails and remove any subscribers who bounce or have invalid email addresses. These are all surefire ways to get blacklisted if you don't keep on top of it.
Maintaining a good sending reputation takes constant care and work but it is doable if you care about your emails getting to your members.
Need Help?
If you are finding that your emails are being marked as SPAM from the Email Campaign Module and would like some more help, please contact our support team.