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Make Sure Emails Get Delivered to Supporters

Leonard Porrello
  • Updated

Replaces Make Sure Emails Get Delivered to Supporters  and deprecates FAQ: What Should I Do with Supporters Who Are Not Responding to My Emails?

There are many reasons your email blast may not get delivered to your supporters' inboxes. This article highlights what you can do to reduce the risk of your email not being delivered.

Set Up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Record

Email service providers (like Gmail) include security to enable email recipients to know who is sending a given email. The intent is to prevent spoofing, which occurs when one sends an email that appears to come from one source but comes from another. This is a common practice used by spammers to trick people into opening, reading, and clicking emails.

This information is usually hidden in the headers of an email (code you don’t normally see but which tracks the journey of an email). Email service providers have begun to add “via” information to show who is sending the email. So even though your blasts are coming from xyz@yourorg.com, the email service provider will show that messages are being sent by Salsa Labs. Here's an example of what this looks like in a Supporter's inbox:

example.png

This will no longer appear to the email recipient once the email service provider concludes that the email recipient wants to receive messages from the sender. For example, if the supporter replies to a message or adds your address to their address book, Gmail (or any other email service provider) will conclude that the supporter wants to hear from you.

Email service providers check several ways to see if a message is authentic, but the easiest road to authentication is to set up an SPF record. SPF records verify that email senders (like Salsa) have permission to send an email on your behalf. Adding an SPF record to your email system allows your email servers to approve emails sent by Engage on your behalf. If you don't have an SPF record set up when you add an email address to the "Sent From" field for a Salsa Engage Email Blast, Salsa Engage will prompt you with a warning.

Salsa staff cannot set this up for your organization. You'll need to work with your IT staff. If you are using common web hosting platforms, we have provided walk-throughs from their help desk:

  • Click here for GoDaddy
  • Click here for BlueHost
  • Click here for Google Apps/GSuite
  • Click here for NetWork Solutions
  • Click here for DreamHost
  • Click here for 1&1

NOTE: Before you begin, make sure you can add or edit a TXT entry to your DNS records. There can be only one SPF record per domain.

PRO TIP: If you're not sure who your domain host is, please go to https://whois.com and enter your domain, you can then look that up and the data will give you insight on who host's your domain.

Once you've made your SPF updates, enter your domain at https://mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx to confirm that the changes have worked. The following image illustrates what you'll see (in MXToolbox) when you've set up your SPF correctly.

00000022.png

 *PLEASE NOTE: It can take up to 24 hours for your changes to populate. DNS records for your domain normally will not update in real-time.

Tips About Adding Your SPF Record (For IT Professionals)

Implementation

The format varies between various DNS platforms - please consult your specific documentation for instructions to enter an SPF record as a TXT record. It should look similar to

    •  yourdomain.org TXT "v=spf1 mx include:salsalabs.org ~all"

To update an existing SPF record...

    • Insert include:salsalabs.org into your current configuration, just before the "all" mechanism. This tells the SPF record requestor to look up the record for salsalabs.org and include that information in the organization's SPF response.

Syntax

This typical SPF record contains a breakdown of what each component of the SPF string does.

v=spf1 mx include:salsalabs.org ~all
  • v=spf1 means SPFv1 or SPF Engage, the current version of SPF. This identifies the TXT record as an SPF string.
  • mx is a mechanism to show which email servers should be used when relaying email.
  • include:salsalabs.org is a mechanism indicating any server permitted to send mail from salsalabs.org may also send mail from your domain.
  • ~all means that all other mail not explicitly permitted by the rest of the SPF record can be accepted but will be marked for greater scrutiny.

Troubleshooting

If errors occur when checking your SPF lookup—especially references to too many DNS lookups— change the includes to IP blocks:

v=spf1 a mx ip4:204.28.10.0/23 ip4:69.174.82.0/23 -all

You should use the include statements and domain names. If Salsa Labs changes IP addresses for our email servers, those changes are reported immediately to the DNS servers that guide domains in knowing what IP addresses are.

External SPF Resources

Email List Hygiene Tips

Did you know that you have a reputation? Online reputation is important in email marketing. It is a measure of how responsible you are. Keep your email lists clean to help your online reputation. The email inbox provider industry wants to see two things concerning mass emails you send out:

  • Your email targets want to hear from you.
  • You are doing your best to only send to email targets who want to hear from you.

Here are a couple of tips to guarantee that your email lists contain only people who want to hear from you.

Inactive Subscribers

Every email list can become irrelevant by more than 20% every year, according to Marketing Sherpa data. In other words, each year about one-fifth of the people in your list no longer use the email address that you have or are not paying attention to the emails that you are sending them.

Engage considers mail addresses that don't exist anymore as Hard Bounces. They are unsubscribed automatically and won't get your emails, even if you retain the supporter record.

Segment Supporters Rather Than Delete Them

You (as an email sender) need to make sure all emails feature a call to action. Engage your supporters so they can prove to email service providers that they're interested in what you have to say.

"Ramp down" relationships with non-responding supporters rather than remove them from your supporter list. Engaged subscribers open your emails and take action. Sending emails repeatedly to working email addresses of unengaged supporters (those who have stopped opening your emails) will slowly cause your domain’s email reputation to deteriorate and increase spam triggers. The big ISP's (other than Outlook) agreed in a 2015 conference that you should "ramp down" your unengaged supporters slowly, just like you slowly "ramp up" your email efforts. In other words, slowly let them go. Change your email frequency from weekly to monthly, then quarterly. Eventually, ask them if they still want to be engaged with you. If not, break up with them.

Create a Supporter Query to define your "ramp-down" audience. Create Rules that determine which supporters are not responding to the calls for action in your email blasts or making donations.

Here is an example query definition of everyone who ever received one of your email blasts but has not taken action through one of your Engage forms recently...

  • Email Blast History "was targeted in" ANY [or in specific email blasts you choose]
  • AND Activity Form "did not submit" ANY during last 6 months [or in a timeframe you choose]
    Email_Blast_Unengaged_Supporters.png

After you craft this email and send it out, segment them into a custom, static Group that has a different message.

Spam Traps

Spam traps are email addresses created by inbox providers, internet security firms, and others to trap unscrupulous email marketing campaign managers who are not advocate opt-in email best practices. These spam trap email addresses are real addresses but are never used for communications. These spam traps are difficult to identify as such; if they were easily identified, they would be poor spam traps. Read more about spam traps.

If you are making sure that you are getting all your contacts to opt-in to receive your communications, you should have nothing to fear. However, if you have used email addresses from dubious third-party lists or scoured the internet yourself for email addresses and added them without an opt-in possibility, the spam trap may catch you.

Avoid Sending Blasts From These Domains

Never use the following domains for your "From" email address:

  • Gmail.com
  • Hotmail.com
  • AOL.com
  • Yahoo.com

Many email clients automatically block emails from these domains or send them directly to spam. To ensure deliverability, these domains should not be used in the senders ("From") address.

Whitelist Supporters

Hosted Providers

If you are using hosted tools, such as Office 365 or Outlook, white list our email server IP range:

  • 204.28.10.0/24
  • 204.28.11.0/24

What Supporters Can Do to Whitelist

On your sign-up forms, ask supporters to be sure to whitelist your "from" email addresses with their email service provider and to check spam if they don't hear from you. Supporters whitelist your email address when they add you to an approved senders list. This tells their email service provider that they know you as a sender and trust you. This ostensibly keeps emails from you out of the junk folder. In general, this is how you whitelist an email address:

  • Add the address to your contacts.
  • Mark messages as ‘Not spam’ (Gmail).
      1. Create a filter in Google to whitelist email from any domain. Click the 'gear' icon in the top-right corner, and then Settings.
      2. Click on Filters and then Create a new filter.
      3. Enter the domain of the email you want to whitelist in the From field 
      4. Click Create filter with this search.
      5. In the box labeled When a message arrives that matches this search select Never send it to spam.
      6. Click the Create filter button.
  • Add the address to your safe senders (Outlook.com, Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, and MSN Mail). 

Additional External Resources

 

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