Sending emails from your store's domain
In this article, let us see how to set up your store domain for sending emails.
Sending emails from your store domain signature helps to increase email deliverability, and when your store domain is set up, the emails that are sent to customers will appear as if they are coming from your store domain signature, rather than from the Retainful domain.
When sending emails, domains are a crucial part of how people recognize and experience your brand. For example, if your company is acme.com, you would be wise to include the domain name ‘acme.com’ in the domain name that you send your emails from instead of a shared domain.
If you have not configured the Sending Domain at your Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain, all the emails which are being sent from Retainful, will appear as they are signed/sent from Retainful’s shared domain.
Sending Emails From Retainful's Domain
Setting up your email domain in Retainful ensures that all emails are delivered from your domain, which removes the "via retainful.net" from the emails and uses "yourdomain.com" on the email properties.
And, your sender email address (from email address) will match the domain you’re sending from. This means that your emails will no longer appear to be sent by a shared domain.
Sending Email From Your Own Domain
NOTE: You can configure the ‘From Name’, ‘From Email Address’, ‘Reply To Address’ at your Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Email Properties.
Customers expect your business to have a domain name and a website.
Free email services, such as Gmail and Yahoo, are great for personal use, but when you use a free email account for business purposes, people will start to doubt your professionalism and credibility.
Sending emails from your own domain also has the added benefit of preventing your store's emails from being marked as spam by an email authentication measure called *DMARC *(Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance).
DMARC is an email validation system that determines whether or not an email comes from an authentic source.
Sending emails from your shop's domain not only looks more professional but it also helps build trust and improve your email deliverability.
Creating consistent branding across each of your customer touchpoints helps promote trust among your shoppers. When your in-store displays, online store, invoices, and emails carry your branding and have a consistent look and feel, you can turn your one-time shoppers into repeat customers.
In this section of the article, we will see how to set up your email sending domain in Retainful.
Prerequisites
Make sure that you are using Retainful’s Growth or a higher plan
You can able to access the ‘Sending Domain’ feature in the 14-day free trial as well.
Checklist
- 1.Generating DNS records
- 2.Adding the DNS records to the Domain host
- 3.Verifying the DNS records
Generating DNS records
- 1.
- 2.Go to Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain
- 3.Enter your ‘Subdomain Name’ and click on ‘Add Domain’
We allow adding "subdomains" as sending domains. Since many store owners configure a number of SPF records for the main domain, it causes confusion and misconfiguration. So, we changed the "Sending domain" to use the subdomain... You can enter something like "send" as the subdomain and add the DNS records.
Enter the subdomain name
4. Once you click on Add Domain, a success message appears with the DNS records like this,
DNS Records
5. You can find three DNS records in the list, the first two are ‘TXT’ type, and the last one is in ‘CNAME’ type. These records have to be added to the hosting account's DNS records page.
Adding the DNS records to the Domain host
You can follow the below instructions to add/edit the DNS records to the domain host.
NOTE: Below is general instructions for adding/editing DNS records that will work for most domain hosts. We would be coming up with more detailed documentation on how to add those records on specific hosts.
I) Login to your hosting provider account; For instance,
II) Go to your domain's DNS records page, often called ‘DNS Management’, ‘Name Server Management’
III) Select the option to add a new record.
IV) Adding the ‘TXT’ type records,
- 1.Select record type ‘TXT’
- 2.In the Host/Alias/Name field, paste the Host/Name entry copied from the Retainful settings page. The name entry to be copied is indicated in the below screenshot:
Copy the host name
3. In the Value/Answer/Destination field, paste the Value/Alias To copied from Retainful settings page. The value to be copied is indicated in red in the below screenshot:
Copy the value
4. Save the record.
5. You can add the second TXT record, by repeating the same process (Step 1 to Step 4)
V) Adding the CNAME record,
1. Select the option to add a new record
2. Select record type ‘CNAME’
3. In the Host/Alias/Name field, paste the Host/Name entry copied from the Retainful settings page. The name entry to be copied is indicated in the below screenshot:
Copy host name
4. In the Value/Answer/Destination field, paste the Value/Alias To copied from Retainful settings page and save the record. The value to be copied is indicated in red in the below screenshot:
Copy the value
5. Save the record
That’s it. You have added the DNS records to your domain host.
Verifying the DNS records
After adding the DNS records to your domain host, you need to verify if the records are added properly.
To verify the DNS records, visit your Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain and click on the ‘Verify Domain’ button.
Verify the domain
Note: DNS can take up to 48 hours max to update. You might want to wait some time before clicking on the ‘Verify Domain’ button on the Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain.
Domain Verified
Once the DNS records are verified, the emails will go with your domain signature (DKIM) and will appear to come from your brand.
If you're facing failure in verifying your DNS records, the reason could be having multiple SPF records.
For example,
v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net ~allv=spf1 include:_spf.yourdomain.com ~allHere is a solution to sort this out,
- 1.Login to your hosting provider account
- 2.Go to DNS settings
- 3.Delete this record:
v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net ~all - 4.Then edit this record:
v=spf1 include:_spf.yourdomain.com ~all - 5.Change it to:
v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net include:_spf.yourdomain.com ~all - 6.Save
This should help you verify your DNS successfully.
NOTE: Any DNS change usually takes at least 24 to 48 hours to propagate. So, you might need to wait for some time before clicking on the ‘Verify Domain’ button to verify the DNS records.
Last modified 3mo ago