Local Marketing Hacks – Improve Transactional Email Deliverability

Local Marketing Hacks – Improve Transactional Email Deliverability

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

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SPEAKERS – Jesse Razo

00:08 – Intro To Local Marketing Hacks – Improving Email Deliverability

All right guys, it’s Friday morning. Hopefully, you’re ready for your dose of local marketing hacks. Where we talk with you about how to win the environmental game of business? And, utilizing all online tools to help promote market your business, e-commerce, your membership sites, and all things related. So, today I’m going to talk with you about, how to improve email deliverability? This is more tactical. So, I’m going to talk with you about how to improve email deliverability. And, for your transactional emails, this can be utilized for marketing emails as well. We utilize a third-party application called SendGrid in order to improve the deliverability of our e-commerce sites. And, the reason is a lot of times out of the box PHP email that comes with a website. Isn’t that robust when it’s about deliverability? And, best practices when it comes to email deliverability.

The reality is that a lot of times email deliverability starts off pretty low. So, you’re thinking about anywhere between 25 to 30% visibility when you’re sending out emails. And, people have multiple emails. So, you have to realize that the visibility rate kind of goes down if you think about it. A lot of us have burner emails. And, a lot of us have our primary business email. Also, a lot of us have our personal email. So, depending on what email we utilize that can improve or decrease the visibility, right. Then, make sure that you’re not ending up in people’s junk mails especially when they’re purchasing your products and services. We get this a lot with a lot of our customers. You know, leveraging e-commerce in order to help promote their local businesses and or their brands.

Improve your Customer’s Experience  – Improving Email Deliverability

And, improving email deliverability is one of the things that we think about. So, make sure that we’re improving the customer experience for our clients’ stores. Also, make sure that their email is actually arriving in the inbox. And, this is one of the ways that you can do it. Today, I actually had to put together this training for one of my developers. It is because he’s in the process of moving a lot of our customers over to the SendGrid environment. So, I’m going to walk you through the process of setting up your e-commerce store with SendGrid. And, we’re authenticating your email with DNS then walking you through the process of one of the software tools. It’s the plugins that we utilize on the back end. So, if you’re utilizing WordPress, and you understand the WordPress environment, then we’re gonna be talking about WordPress.

We’ll talk about WordPress, its environment, and e-commerce. So, we use WooCommerce in regards to our e-commerce environment. Also, we’re going to be utilizing or leveraging postman SMTP. In order to configure what’s called an SMTP relay from the e-commerce website, through SendGrid. Then, out into your customer’s email.

03:31 – Sendgrid Domain Setup

Now, it’s all about improving Tradex transactional email deliverability so that you can win the environmental game of business. I’m going to leave some links here in regards to how to do this in the body. Hopefully, we’ll get this so that you can do it quite easily. So, the first thing to do is log in or create an account at SendGrid. And, to do this, just go to SendGrid.com. They have a free account service for a certain number of emails that you send out. And, it’s depending on the size of your e-commerce store. Then, if you have an email marketing platform that you want to relay out of, as well. So, do that to improve email visibility and email deliverability by seeing SendGrid. Now, after you log in, the first thing to do is to authenticate your actual email address.

Then, we’ll go into sender authentication because you need to authenticate the domain that you’re sending your emails out from. And, so that it doesn’t come from sendgrid.com. Make sure that it looks like it is coming from you. So, what you’re going to do is update Send me your DNS records. And, I’ll take you through that process. But, just click the “authenticate the domain”. If you want to utilize the wizard here, you can select your host and where your DNS is hosted. And, if you’re with us, we’re probably managing this for you. If you’re utilizing a third-party application or third-party provider, go ahead and just select the provider of your host. And, select you would like to brand your links for this domain. Again, what this does is authenticates that SendGrid has permission to send out emails on your behalf.

SendGrid Settings – Improving Email Deliverability

And, it does replace the SendGrid domain with your actual eCommerce website domain. So, it looks like that it’s coming from you. Now, select next and enter the domain that you want to authenticate here. And, I’m going to give you an example site of one of our customers here. Then, you just need the root domain so you don’t want the HTTPS or www Debbie, or any of that. Next is, just have the root domain and I would select use automatic security. Then, you can select “Use Custom DKM sectors”. But, you don’t really need to get into that unless you’re very technically savvy. And, you want to dig into how to make that work. I’m not going to cover all the different return path link sub-domains de Kamp sectors and things of that nature.

But, you do need to automate your security. Then, go ahead and select next. And, it actually gives you the DNS settings that you want to enter into your host records. Then, you need to go to your host.

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06:55 – Edit & Authenticate DNS Zone

And, we’re utilizing WHM in order to manage all of our customers. Next is, you’re going to type in DNS, and WHM. And, if you have cPanel, you’re going to go to the zone editor inside of cPanel. And, do the exact same thing. But, what you’ll do is you’ll come in and select Edit DNS, so look up the domain. And, at the very bottom of here, you’re going to add these c name records. I believe that there are 12345 c name records here 12345. Then, you don’t want to take the entire c name record. So, just take the first portion of it. Then, all the way up to Mobiletech Shade, which is the domain that we’re authenticating, and enters that information. And, you’re going to do that for each one of these. Then, you’re going to put it where it’s pointing to.

And, just make sure that you put a period at the end of any entry here. So that doesn’t try to append this with the actual domain. But, if you try to enter this without the period, it’s going to append it with mobiletechshade.com. And, that’ll mess up your settings. So, as soon as you’re done putting in all your Cname records, go ahead and save that. I’ve actually created those Cname records in here. And, as you can see, we have the actual record and where it’s pointing to. Again, make sure that it has a period in the end. Then, the mobile tech shade is not appended. MobiletechShade.com in this example is not appended to the actual record itself. So, we go ahead and check these. Once we entered all those, you’re going to select I’ve added this record, go ahead and verify that.

SendGrid Verification – Improving Email Deliverability

And, once it is verified, you’re going to see this here. As you can see, we’ve verified the domain already. Then I’m going to delete the example that we’re looking at. And, as you can see, we haven’t verified the domain here. So, that’s the first step. Just verify the domain, make sure that you set up permission for SendGrid. And, in order to send on behalf of the domain mobiletechshade.com. Make sure that you set up those DNS records inside of cPanel and your WHM server. And, make sure that there are accurate in there. So, this is a great example of what those records look like those c name records. Again, it’s inside of WHM and c panel. If you don’t add a period to the end, sometimes the system will automatically try to append the domain.

So, as you can see here, this male record here has MobiletechShade.com appended at the end of it. And, the reason for that is because that is the sub-domain and the actual domain is there. So, you don’t want to create records that look like that. They want to be just the actual record itself. And, it’s where it pointed to without the MobiletechShade.com domain appended to it. Now, once you’ve created and authenticated the actual domain and get permission to send it out on behalf of that. We’re going to go into the email API integration guide.

11:08 – Set up an API key with the SMTP relay

Now, we’re going to set up an SMTP relay, go ahead and choose that. Set a naming system and create a key. So, this will give us all the information that we need in regards to setting up an SMTP relay. Now, we’ll come back to the site. And, we’re going to show all settings. Then, we’re going to update our mail server settings. So, we’ll come in here. And, the server is SMTP SendGrid.net. We can pick our port, of course. And, we have unsecured and secured authentication. So, we’re going to use 465 for SSL or 587 for the TLS connection. Then, I’m going to go 587 for TLS and the username is the API key. We want to keep the envelope from the address. So, it looks like it comes for us. Now, we’re going to do a TLS username API key.

Then, the password is going to be the API key that we’ve just set up. So, we’re going to set that up and save those changes. Go ahead and click through the setup wizard. Then, we need to send out a test email. Now, check our configuration, make sure that we’re able to authenticate through SendGrid. There, we’ve got a confirmation to that in the SMTP, our post SMTP setup. So, we know that those configurations worked. Then, we can verify that. Come back over to send an email from the application to verify integration. Now, let’s refresh to see if we can get verification. To look at the session transaction, we can use TLS because that’s the secure protocol in sending an authenticated email. As we can see here, we can look at the header information for the actual email itself.

Setup Integration Using Post SMTP – Improving Email Deliverability

And, that’ll give us all the information that we need to know. So, we’ve just set up integration using post SMTP. They’re getting our e-commerce website to send out a secure email from the actual website. And, we’re utilizing SendGrid as an SMTP relay which will really give us an opportunity to improve email deliverability. Again, the PHP email that is utilized through WordPress sometimes runs into issues and in certain environments. It doesn’t give us the opportunity sometimes those will get filtered. Whereas, sending through SendGrid is an SMTP relay. And, the proper authentication gives us the ability to improve email deliverability, which is really great. As you can see, we got confirmation that it worked. So, our integration is all set up. And, that is the process in regards to utilizing SendGrid to send SMTP relays from our e-commerce environment. So, it’s what we’ve seen.

And, improve deliverability when it comes to transactional emails. So, these would be like order receipts, order confirmations, invoices and, things of that. Transactional emails are automatically sent out from our e-commerce websites. And, to customers that are coming in and engaging with our clients. So, it’s a really great application in order to accomplish that.

16:31 – The Recap On Improving Email Deliverability

Again, just to go through it. First and foremost, make sure that you come in here and you authenticate the domain. Then, go to the email API and select the integration guide. And, set up the API key with the SMTP relay. So, update DNS, authenticate the domain, set up the API key, and then set up the relay through there. And, that’ll give us the ability to utilize the SendGrid to go out there and improve email deliverability. So, that’s all I have for you today. Again, we want to make sure that we’re providing your information to win the environmental game of business. And, to get more information on our local marketing hacks, we’ve got a completely free resource on our website. Just go to www.razorsharpnetworks.com. Go to our entire local marketing strategy when it comes to the technical aspect of your website and social media.

How to improve visibility with business pages, directories, and all things related to the tactics associated with your business. And, it’s from a local marketing standpoint. So, if you go to RazoRSharpNetworks.com, you can enroll in our local marketing hacks, free membership. Also, in this video, there’s a link to the local marketing hacks membership site as well. So, I would encourage you to go through that free training. It’s packed full of information. Again, over the last couple of years, I documented our processes in regards to helping our clients. And, in an attempt to you’ll help more people win the environmental game of business. It improves the visibility of their products and services. And, these are more tactics for technical people that are do-it-yourself-ers. Then, want to get more information.

Improving Email Deliverability

How to optimize their environment to improve the visibility of their products and services in their local market? So, I highly encourage you to check that out. Again, it’s going to be in the description of this video. Also, you can go to www.razorsharpnetworks.com. It’s right there on the homepage. Then, you can get enrolled in that. And, get all the information that you need to win the entire mental game of business. So that’s all I have for you today.

19:06 – What did you think of the training? Give Us Feedback

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I’m sure there’s information in the description of this video. So, until the next time, we see each other. Hopefully, you make today and every day a fantastic day. We’ll talk with you real soon. Take care!!