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Email survey deliverability - setup your own domain
Email survey deliverability - setup your own domain
Alex Bitca avatar
Written by Alex Bitca
Updated over a week ago

Survey credibility is one of the first things respondents look at. By having your survey sent from your domain, respondents feel safer that their answers are received by the business they trust and that the collected information won’t be misused.

 By default, Retently will send your surveys from survey@retently.com, which is still sufficient to provide good email deliverability.

Retently is also throttling surveys sent from survey@retently.com to prevent being blacklisted by major email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. The surveys sent from your domain are not capped or throttled somehow.

If you have a Google mailbox, click the button below and connect it directly.

There are a few steps required to send your email surveys from your own domain:

  1. Add your domain

  2. Configure your DKIM and SPF records

  3. Verify your domain with our ESP

We will discuss each of these steps in this tutorial.

Add your domain

From your account settings, click on the Domains & Emails Icon.

Initially, you won’t see any records on the Domains page. To create one, click on the + Add domain button. When adding your company’s domain, ensure there are no typos and hit the Add button.

The new domain will have a status of “Not verified”, and that’s because you have to configure your DKIM and SPF records first. More details in the next chapters.

Configure your SPF and DKIM DNS records

Domain white-labeling requires an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to your domain and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) records, which effectively authorizes and authenticates Retently sending on behalf of your domain.

Verify your domain

Once confirmed that your DNS records are correctly set up, please contact us via our live chat or support@retently.com. Make sure to include in your message the email address where we should send you the verification link (the email must include the newly added domain or subdomain if you decide to use one).

We will check your DKIM and SPF records’ status in our email service provider. If there’s an error, we will let you know. If everything is set up correctly, we will send a verification link to the provided email address, as per the example below:

When you have received it, DO NOT open the verification link in your browser - it will not work. We must access it while being logged in to our Mandrill account. Therefore, please copy the link and send it to us at support@retently.com or in our live chat.

Once we verify the domain, we will let you know, and you can use it in your email survey templates.

You can also check the status of your domain on the Domains page. If it is successfully verified, the status will be updated accordingly. Remember that the "Verified" status will be displayed only after we manually activate it from our end.

Configure the survey template

Once you have successfully configured the SPF and DKIM DNS records, log in to your Retently account to set up the email address your surveys will be sent from.

You can configure this option for each of your email NPS surveys. You can access the survey template editor from an NPS campaign, or view a list of all of them on the Templates page.

 

When editing a survey template, find the "From email:" input field, and replace the current email address with a desired one, that includes the new domain you have set up the SPF and DKIM DNS records for.

NOTE: All the auto-replies to your NPS survey will be sent automatically to the email address included in the "From email:" field in the survey template editor, so make sure it exists and is being monitored

If needed, you can add different email addresses (with the same domain) in each of your survey templates.

To add a new custom domain, repeat all the steps in this tutorial.

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