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Email survey deliverability - set up your own domain
Email survey deliverability - set up 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 a neutral email address using your account's slug, for example, acme@cxsurvey.com, which is still sufficient to provide good email deliverability.

Retently is also throttling surveys sent from the neutral email address 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.

Connect a Google or Microsoft account

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

If you have a Microsoft mailbox, then follow this tutorial:

Verify your domain

Alternatively, you can verify and use your domain to send email surveys and/or autoreplies.

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

  1. Add your domain

  2. Configure your DNS records

  3. Verify your domain

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 SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records first. More details in the next chapters.

Configure your domain's DNS records

Domain white-labeling requires an SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, which effectively authorize and authenticate Retently sending on behalf of your domain.

On the Domains & Emails page, after submitting a new domain, you will see next to it four columns, each one corresponding to a specific record type:

  • Owner

  • SPF

  • DKIM

  • DMARC

Click the "⚠️ Details" link next to each record type, and a popup will display all the records that you need to add to your domain's DNS zone.

If needed, you can also check the records in the tutorial linked below:

Verify your domain

Once you've configured the required DNS records, on the Domains & Emails page, click the "Re-check button".

If there are any issues with any of the required records, you will see a "⚠️ Details" link in that record type's column.

Otherwise, if the records are configured correctly, then you will see a ✅ icon next to each record and a "Verified" status, indicating that you can now use the domain in survey and autoreply templates.

Configure the survey template

Once you have successfully configured your domain, 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.

NOTE: All the direct replies to your email 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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