Setting up email sending via your own domain is an essential part of Social Sync's email integration.
Why send mail via your own domain?
Sending mail via your own domain, especially through a CNAME setup, offers several important benefits that directly impact sender reputation, deliverability, and overall email marketing effectiveness. Here's why it's crucial:
1. Establishes Trust and Brand Recognition:
When you send emails from your own domain, recipients are more likely to recognise and trust your brand. Using your domain in the sender email address and email headers reinforces brand identity and legitimacy, reducing the likelihood of your emails being flagged as spam.
2. Improves Email Deliverability:
When you consistently send emails from your own domain, your sender reputation improves over time. Sender reputation plays a pivotal role in email deliverability. This reputation is based on factors such as email engagement metrics, spam complaints, and email authentication practices. A positive sender reputation increases the likelihood of your emails reaching recipients' inboxes instead of being filtered into spam folders.
By leveraging your domain's reputation and authentication mechanisms, you can maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns and foster stronger connections with your audience.
How to set it up?
Fear not, although it initially seems complicated, the process is actually relatively straightforward - just a simple copy and paste exercise.
We'll provide you with several CNAME records that you simply need to paste into your DNS provider's dashboard.
DNS (Domain Name System) is like the internet's phonebook, translating domain names into IP addresses. DNS records contain information about a domain's configuration and are essential for various internet services, including email.
Your DNS provider, is often, but not always the same as your website hosting so you may need the help of someone from your IT team or whoever manages your website.
Once you've added the records, it'll then take up to 48 hours (although normally this is more like 2-4 hours) for the updated records to propagate across the internet.
Lets go through this step by step in more detail...
Step 1: Create a new email domain integration
In Social Sync's dashboard choose Settings from the left menu, then go to the Integrations tab.
Choose the Email Domains integration and press the Manage button.
On the next page, assuming you haven't already setup a domain, then you'll be presented with this screen. You simply need to click on the Connect New Domain button:
On the next popup window, simply enter the From Name that you want your supporters to see in their inboxes and the Email Address you'd like to send your emails from.
Both of these values can be changed later so no need to worry too much about the specifics at this stage, however they are required fields to complete the rest of the domain setup (for our fictional charity domain worldchangers.org in this case).
Fill this out with some details for your own organisation then press Save.
Step 2: Copy CNAME records
You'll now be presented with a screen like this
The records here are the aforementioned CNAME records you'll need to copy/paste to your DNS provider's control panel.
You may need to send the records to your IT team or website manager to complete this step. It should be a relatively routine task for them taking no more than a couple of minutes.
Step 3: Paste CNAME records to your DNS provider.
Unfortunately there are 100s of DNS providers and each one has its own unique control panel, so its impossible to provide precise instructions at this point.
Typically the process will be somewhat as follows:
Access Your DNS Management Console: Log in to your domain registrar or DNS hosting provider's dashboard to access your DNS management console.
Add a New CNAME Record: Look for the option to add a new DNS record and select CNAME from the record type dropdown menu.
Enter the CNAME Alias and Target: Enter the CNAME name provided at step 2 in the "Name" or "Alias" field. In the "Value" or "Points to" field, enter the target domain or hostname specified by your provider.
Repeat for each CNAME record: Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the other 2 records (so that's 3 in total)
Save the Changes: Once you've entered the CNAMEs, save your changes.
Here's an example screenshot showing the setup in process:
Step 4: Await authentication
Once this process is done its simply a waiting game.
DNS changes can take anywhere up to 48 hours to fully propagate, although 2-4 hours is much more common, and in some cases the change may be quicker still.
You can close your DNS control panel and also close the CNAME records popup from step 2 in Social Sync.
The integration will initially have a status of "pending"
In the background we will automatically scan for the DNS records on an hourly basis. Once we detect the records have successfully propagated, the integration status will update to "completed".
You can also do a manual scan for the CNAME records. Simply click the 3 dots menu (shown above), click the Authenticate link in the menu dropdown, then click the Re-check button in the top right corner of the CNAME records modal.
Step 5 (optional): Adding additional domains, or new emails at the same domain.
Sometimes you may want to add a new email domain, in which case its simply a case of repeating the steps above and copy pasting the new CNAME records to the DNS control panel of the new domain.
Adding a new email address at a domain that has already been authenticated is even simpler as the domain itself is already all setup! In this case all you need to do is repeat step 1 of the above process and the email will be ready to use.
Important: All email addresses that you want to send emails from need to be setup in this way. Within the Email Builder the sender address settings field is a dropdown list comprised of the email addresses which have setup via the email integrations page.
Additional Info
On October 3, 2023, Google and Yahoo announced requirements that bulk senders must have DMARC in place beginning February 2024.
If you send 5,000 messages a day or more into either of the world’s largest mailbox providers, starting February 2024, your email domain must have a DMARC policy in your DNS. These messages must pass DMARC Alignment or they will not be delivered.
If you fall into this category of high volume sender - e.g. you expect to send over 5,000 emails a day to supporters with a gmail.com email address - and you're uncertain if your domain has a valid DMARC record, please contact our support team and we can help you check your current status and provide advice on any required actions.
Troubleshooting
The most common issues are as follows:
Empty spaces in the DNS records: DNS records are particularly sensitive so any empty spaces at the beginning or end of the record can cause the records to not propagate, so they never get picked up in our scans and remain in a "pending" state indefinitely. These spaces are often invisible at a glance in the fields they were pasted into, so its worth double checking by clicking into the fields and placing your cursor at the beginning/end of the text.
Auto appending: Some DNS hosts (notably Godaddy) will automatically add your top-level domain to the end of DNS records you create. This can turn a CNAME for “email.domain.com” into “email.domain.com.domain.com”.
Be sure to follow the convention on existing records in your DNS panel when adding new ones, as sometimes you will only need to add what is to the left of the top-level domain.
For further assistance or troubleshooting guidance, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team via the chat widget in the bottom corner of this page. Its handy if you can provide a screenshot of your DNS control panel to help us identify any specific issues.