Domain settings for Triggered Emails
Triggered Emails are sent to the visitors of your website, on behalf of your own domain, through Hello Retail's mail service. This article describes how you can optimize this, so that these emails are considered legitimate content by the more common mail services, don't end up in the spam folder, and generally speaking appear trustworthy in the recipient's inbox. As mailbox providers are enforcing increasingly stricter protection standards, through methods such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, this also has implications for the efficiency of Triggered Emails.
The overall process requires, that a few details should be added to your own DNS record, which then needs to be verified and activated by Hello Retail, before taking effect. Note, that if you have already set up a domain in Mailgun, Hello Retail will not be able to use the same domain name for our triggered emails.
Sending domain
Firstly, you will need to decide from where the Triggered Emails should be sent out. You will have to inform Hello Retail about this - by sending an email to support@helloretail.com - who will then set up the domain through our mailservice, using this information.
We generally advice, that you should be using a subdomain for triggered emails.
If you want the emails to appear as if coming from info@myshop.com, then HR would set up something like marketing.myshop.com, triggers.myshop.com or a similar name of your choice.
Custom entries to your DNS setting
Based on the previous info, Hello Retail will then ask you to add some entries to your DNS record. This will typically have to be performed by a developer with insights into how your individual configuration is set up.
Some values will be uniform for all clients, and so can be copied from the list below, while the actual value of the DKIM-key is unique for your domain - so after having contacted support and informed them of your wishes for domain-settings, this value will be part of our reply to your email. In the table below "myshop.com" will obviously also have to be replaced by the domain that was decided upon in the first step:
DNS Record |
||
Type: |
Hostname: |
Value: |
SPF (TXT) |
v=spf1 include:_spf.helloretail.com ~all |
|
DKIM (TXT) |
|
|
CNAME |
If you have set up a subdomain (e.g. marketing.myshop.com) without an existing MX record, you would also be advised to add 2 entries here, that will be provided along with the DKIM above. Note also, that if you already have multiple entries in your existing SPF record, that you will have to add the values above in a way that is valid, in order for the helloretail domain to be included.
Current trends amongst inbox providers also stress the importance of being able to unsubscribe from these types of emails easily, so be sure to include an unsubscribe button in the base-template for your Triggered Emails. This is present as a standard in the default design-template.
How will my emails appear, if I don't have a custom domain set up for Triggered Emails?
When a custom domain has been set up, and when your DMARC policy is set to adhere to current standards, the email will appear to the recipient as if it is coming from your own domain.
Without this, the email will still have the value of Sender name that has been specified in the setup (see below) however, the Sender email will be noreply@helloretailmail.com
