When you send an email from Mailchimp, Sender, Hubspot, etc., the emails are sent using their own mail servers, which are normally shared amongst many other users. This setup can sometimes affect deliverability, as the recipients email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft) may flag bulk emails from shared domains as spam.

Here’s a great bit of news! Recently I set up a custom email domain in Kajabi for a customer. Right after this, we saw a huge improvement in her email deliverability metrics. Opened emails increased by over 10%, and the number of bounced emails dropped dramatically.

Some background about Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one platform designed for entrepreneurs and businesses to create, market, and sell digital products, memberships, and courses. Importantly, it offers built-in email marketing tools that help users engage with their audience through automated campaigns, broadcasts, and sequences.

By default, your email will be sent from a shared sending domain which is something like “z.kajabimail.net”. This is can be seen in the From email address when you open the email. With a little bit of work it’s possible to add a custom email domain so that your email From address matches your work email address, ‘mycooladdress.com’.

Why is a custom email domain important?

This is super important. Whilst the default email settings in sending platform will work just fine, it is very likely that at some point the shared sending domain might have been flagged as sending junk mail. Shared sending domains are more susceptible to reputation issues because if other users send low-quality or unsolicited emails, inbox providers may classify emails from that domain as spam. Since you are using the same shared domain, your emails could be affected too.

Using a custom email domain with correctly configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records helps improve deliverability. These records authenticate your emails, making it more likely that they will be trusted by inbox providers.. Although the email is sent from a shared server, when the recipient’s email server makes the checks it sees that everything is in order, and that the sender is reputable..

As example using Kajabi, here are the steps you can take to improve email deliverability by setting up custom email domain and the correct DNS settings.

1. Sign into your Kajabi Dashboard
2. Click on the Settings link at the bottom of the page
3. Click on the [ Marketing Settings ] card.
4. Scroll down the “Email settings” section.
5. Enter your  From name, From email, and Reply-to email values for your customer email domain.
6. Next click on [ Setup Custom Email Domain ].

Kajabi now gives some unique settings which need to entered into your DNS records. This is easy enough to do, but you can really make a mess of things if accidentally edit the wrong value, or delete a record.

MX record

An MX (Mail Exchange) record is a type of DNS record that specifies the mail servers responsible for receiving email messages for a domain.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records

Covered in a recent post, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are an essential part of making sure that your email arrives in your recipient’s inbox. Without these authentication measures in place, email providers may not fully trust messages sent from Kajabi on your behalf, potentially reducing open rates and engagement.

CNAME record

A CNAME (Canonical Name) record is a type of DNS record that maps an alias name to a true (canonical) domain name. In this case, it maps the requests from the servers receiving email from Kajabi back to Kajabi. This helps email providers recognise that Kajabi is allowed to send emails using your domain.

Whilst there are loads online resources to help you do this yourself, it can of course feel daunting to starting rearranging the pipes which run your patch of the internet. This is where I come in. Call me. I can handle this all for you 😉

Next: monitor your emails to make sure they are arriving

One this is done, the next step is to monitor your emails using DMARC reports to make sure that all the settings are correct, and that the emails are arriving properly. If they are aren’t then the results of the monitoring will help you correct the situation.

🔗 Read more about this here: Email threats – Response and monitoring

Source:
https://help.kajabi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360050369753-Connecting-a-Custom-Email-Domain