You might think that once you hit the send button your email will automatically arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes. Sadly, this isn’t necessarily the case. Your email will need to pass through servers on the way to your subscribers, and these servers will run checks to keep out content they don’t want, such as spam. Your emails may be placed in your subscribers’ spam folders or never even arrive at all.
So you need to take steps to make sure your emails are allowed through and arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes as intended. Authentication is one of these steps, the others include sending emails consistently, keeping your engagement high and not buying mailing lists.
How email authentication works
When you send an email, the receiving servers will check if you are who you claim to be. Without proper authentication, your emails are more likely to be flagged as suspicious or untrustworthy.
To authenticate your emails, you will need to set up records such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These may sound very techie, but most email marketing platforms offer step-by-step guides, and your web designer can usually handle the setup for you. Here’s what they are in simple terms:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This tells email servers which IP addresses are authorized to send emails on your domain’s behalf.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): This adds a digital signature to your emails, proving that the content hasn’t been altered in transit and that the email is genuinely from you.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): This policy ties SPF and DKIM together and gives you control over what to do if an email fails these checks (for example, reject it or send it to spam). DMARC is typically not needed unless you send more than 5000 emails per day.
Having these authentication protocols in place shows the email servers that you’re a legitimate sender, significantly reducing the chances of your emails being marked as spam.
How to authenticate your domain
Setting up email authentication varies depending on the email marketing platform you use. Here are the instructions for each of the best-known platforms. Let me know if you would like me to add more platforms.
- Mailerlite
- Mailchimp
- Kit (previously ConvertKit)
- ActiveCampaign
- Klaviyo
- Campaign Monitor
- Flodesk
If this all feels a bit too technical, you could ask your web designer to help, or I can set up your domain authentication for you.
Good luck and let me know if you need any help!
This article is based on the deliverability section in my Email Marketing for Indie Businesses guide, which you can find here.