Authenticate Your Email For Better Delivery.
Email is a fantastic way to quickly stay in contact with your customers and subscribers, but has always had one flaw since its commercialisation in the 90’s - and that is legitimacy. It is very difficult to identify a legitimate email from a fake one.
How do we fix this? … Let’s find out:
To solve this problem, standards dictate that we should be authenticating any email which you send. This goes for both your office based email and your email marketing.
Authentication helps service providers such as Outlook quickly identify if your email is legitimate - or if it is someone trying to impersonate you.
Without authentication service providers may get a little suspicious and reject your email. With authentication, this informs the service provider that your email can be trusted and should be accepted.
So, what is authentication
When you send an email to an Outlook user for example, Outlook will have a quick look at all the settings that go behind the scenes with your email - there are two very important things that they will look for … this is a DKIM signature and valid SPF record.
Having both on your email will help identify if your email is legitimate.
Thankfully authentication only needs to be done once and will cover you for every newsletter that you send in the future. So it is well worth taking a few moments to set everything up.
How do i add authentication?
Authentication can be done via adding a DKIM and SPF record to your company domain name. Both of these records sit behind the scenes.
When you send your next newsletter, the recipient email server will look at the SPF record and DKIM record attached to your email and perform a quick lookup on your company domain name to check if this email was really sent by your company or someone pretending to be you.
So in a nutshell, authentication falls into two parts. The first past is having the correct signatures on your outgoing newsletter and the second part is having the matching keys to authenticate it on your domain name.
When you authenticate your domain name with email blaster, email blaster will start automatically adding authentication to your emails. So we take care of all the techie side for you, but as mentioned you need to make a small update to your company domain name.
How Do i add it to my email blaster?
Adding authentication can seem a little scary at first, but we have put a huge amount of effort into making this a simple process as possible. Inside your email blaster, head over to your sender profiles screen.
Any sender profile which is not authenticated will have a yellow warning triangle next to it. Click on the warning triangle to follow the quick-start guide.
If this all sounds foreign, don’t worry. We have a downloadable guide on the sender profiles screen. Download it, and send it over to your IT team, this provides everything that you will need to get up and running in no time!
Will Authentication really help?
In a nutshell yes, as we discussed adding authentication demonstrates the legitimacy of your email and as such, major email service providers know that you can be trusted. This then opens the door to much better delivery and a lot lot more benefits:
Tech Republic report the following:
“Mail authenticated with DKIM tends to be delivered to an inbox; mail that fails the test more likely gets put in the spam folder”.
But the benefits go even further. Have you ever noticed that sometimes images inside your mailer do not load by default? If you are emailing a Gmail user, with authentication this will help images load by default - no more having to click ‘load images’.
Also, have you ever noticed that sometimes when you read your email newsletter you see a little bit of gibberish near the top - along the lines of ‘delivered via, then some random characters. This is showing the route that your mailer took, adding authentication will remove this line in nearly all email readers.
And finally, when using email blaster to authenticate your emails, we used the new 2048-bit key length for DKIM Authentication. This is the new standard that google is recommending everyone upgrades to and speculated they reward with better delivery.
So there we go, thats hopefully the topic of authentication demystified, I hope that you found this useful and informative. If you have an questions or comments, let us know if the comments. Thanks for watching. Catchup next week.