Best Practices: From Address

Anyone can sign up for a Gmail, Yahoo, AOL account or other free email provider and say they are you. Only you can prove your identity by owning your own domain. Additionally, AOL and Yahoo are the first of the free providers to update their DMARC policy in a way that drastically impacts delivery if you're using an AOL or Yahoo address. If you use a third party provider such as JangoMail or any other email marketing provider to send an email with a From Address of you@yahoo.com or you@aol.com, Yahoo and AOL will simply reject the message. Branding is key to any successful email campaign. After all, if the recipient doesn't know who the message came from, they will most likely not open it. 

For example, if your company's domain name is marketing.com, you should send campaigns through JangoMail with you@marketing.com. Once again, this goes back to branding. If a customer visits marketing.com, and then later sees a message in their inbox from you@marketing.com, they will make the connection and most likely open the mailing.

This process starts by registering your own domain name.

Why Register your own Domain Name?

There's no guarantee that any ISP's email addresses will survive takeovers, or that the email service will continue to work adequately, or that the provider will let you do tomorrow what you can do today.

 There are many advantages to owning your own domain name, including:

• You are able to create multiple subdomains (e.g. subdomain.yourdomain.com) if you have multiple employees that need to send separate campaigns.
• Forwarding addresses can be set up to help you manage replies. For instance, you can have contact@yourdomain.com redirect to your personal address, like youremail@gmail.com, or to an entire list of addresses.
• You are not beholden to a third party company, such as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, and their ever-changing terms of service and unexpected deprecation of useful features.

Registering your own domain name is a rather simple task, and is not cost prohibitive. Right now the average price for owning a domain name is about $10 a year, or roughly $80 for 10 years. Many great domain name registrars exist, including Hover, NameCheap, DreamHost, Name.com, and more. All have very competitive pricing, and offer roughly the same amount of features. 

The only downside to owning your domain is that you control everything. Therefore, if something were to break, such a certain change was implemented wrong, you would have to find a solution. Of course, the registrar and JangoMail are always here to help in the event something like this happens, but it is not common. We have many guides available to you regarding the proper setup of your new domain to achieve the open rates you desire.

This is to say, you do not need to have a website set up in order to send through JangoMail. You need only own the domain. 

Using a Subdomain

Another option available to you is to use a subdomain to send out your mailings. This is one step further than a domain, for those who already own a domain and have a website set up. For example, you can start using yourname@mail.marketing.com, instead of yourname@marketing.com.

Note that this gives you a separate domain to enter in DNS records, just to keep things organized. Chances are, if you already have a website set up at your domain, there are probably a few DNS entries with your TLD (top level domain) already. 

Reply Handling with a Unique From Address

When a recipient replies to your mass emailing, where will the reply go?

If a Reply-To Address is specified, then the reply will go there. If a Reply-To Address is not specified, the reply will go to the From Email Address you specify when you send the message. It's important to note that some email clients will ignore a Reply-To Address and instead send the reply to the From Address. This is a choice by the email client and cannot be changed by JangoMail. To ensure the reply goes where you need, use the desired Reply-To Address as the From Address as well.