A Silly Mistake That Cost Me Money in Email Marketing

Hey everyone, it's Jesse from Bento. I want to share a story about a silly mistake I made that probably cost me some money. It's an easy mistake to make in email marketing, but if you catch it early, you can save yourself a lot of headaches.

So, what was the mistake?

The Mystery of the Unresponsive Leads

About a month and a half ago, my colleague Anya and I noticed something strange. When we sent emails from Bento, people were replying, and everything was good. But when we sent emails from our CRM, close.com, our leads weren't responding at all. At first, we brushed it off as a one-off issue or maybe people were just ignoring us. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like something was off.

Investigating the Issue

I decided to do my usual checks that I'd do on any customer in Bento. I sent myself an email using Bento and looked at the headers in Gmail. Everything looked good – DKIM was signing the emails correctly, SPF was passing, and DMARC was set up correctly. But when I sent myself an email from close.com, I was surprised to see that the SPF section said "soft fail." This meant that something wasn't aligned correctly.

The Culprit: An Old SPF Record

I dug into my DNS settings and looked at my SPF record. The SPF record is like a permission slip for an email, specifying which servers can send emails for your domain. I noticed that a while ago, when I was testing out a different email service, I had added an SPF record and left it there. Worse, I actually had two SPF records, which you're not supposed to have. So, while one was valid, the other wasn't, and that's the one that was being checked. This meant that when the email hit the inbox, even though everything else was signed correctly, it would look at the invalid SPF record and mark it as a soft fail. And when it soft-failed, it would go into people's spam folders, which is why they were ignoring us.

The Takeaway: Pay Attention to Your DNS Settings

The point of this story is that even for someone like me, who's in this all the time, it's easy to overlook these things. It's easy to keep an old record there or accidentally follow setup guides without realizing the impact on other services. I often see people migrating to Bento from another platform and accidentally setting up a DMARC record that causes their deliverability to tank. So, it's crucial to pay attention to your DNS settings and understand what each record does.

Understanding DKIM, SPF, and DMARC

Let's break down the three main components of email authentication:

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM is like a signature for emails. It adds a unique code to the header of the email, proving that it's authentic and hasn't been tampered with along the way.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework): SPF is like a permission slip. It specifies which servers are allowed to send emails for your domain. If an email comes from an authorized server, it'll get delivered. If not, it may end up in spam.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): DMARC is like a bouncer. You put the bouncer in front of email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. The bouncer checks if the emails have the special DKIM signature and if they're coming from authorized servers (SPF). Based on your DMARC policy, you can tell the bouncer what to do with emails that fail these checks – reject them or let them through but make note of it.

Wrapping Up

Setting up email authentication can be tricky, and it's easy to make mistakes. But by understanding how DKIM, SPF, and DMARC work together, you can ensure that your emails are properly authenticated and avoid costly errors. If you're a Bento customer and you're setting this up, don't hesitate to reach out to me in the deliverability channel on Discord. I'm always happy to help you get everything set up properly. And if you notice any issues with other tools, feel free to raise that in our Discord or send me a support email. I hope this little story about DKIM, SPF, and DMARC was helpful. If you have any questions, just ask us on Discord – we're here to help out. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next one!