Email for business

Email is essential for a professional business, sending emails from the name of your organisation and the same domain as your website demonstrates you're serious about your organisation, and that repetition enhances your brand. It's also increasingly crucial to getting your emails delivered.

Own who you are
Be who you are

Sending emails from your domain is included as standard, you can choose between forwarding emails from your domain to your current provider or managing your own email account. Acceptable use and fair use policies apply.

Value

People trust a domain that matches their website more than a generic one adding confidence and increasing conversions. Email from your own domain will be accepted more easily compared to generic ones from big tech or broadband providers. By taking ownership and using your domain name for email enables you to protect your emails from impersonation, phishing and scams with industry standard techniques. Automating your emails save your time and effort.

How much does an email account cost?

Free email accounts may be free but they come at a cost. Whether it's your broadband provider where the cost is included with your service or a generic one from a tech giant, the impression they give is that it's a personal or disposable generic one. As phishing and spam increase organisations large and small are increasingly filtering out and rejecting these types of accounts.

How can you demonstrate your emails are worth reading?

You demonstrate you're serious about your business by sending emails from your domain. You'll be taken more seriously, adding weight to your business, and reinforcing your business name every time you communicate with your clients and prospects. Be human and write like you're writing to a friend, they need to be professional but they also need to feel like they're coming from a real person who actually cares.

Trust

With so many bad actors it's essential to ensure you send email that can be trusted by the automated filters that defend against threats as well as protect your domain against impersonation, phishing and scams.

Assess your current provider with our dmarc assessment tool.

How can you get your message delivered?

You can get your message delivered by using industry standards to authorise who sends emails from your domain, authenticate each message and treat your customers and prospects as humans. Email filters are unlikely to reject your emails if you use standard authorisation, authentication and follow standard practice when writing your emails.

You can ensure your email gets through by using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to authorise and authenticate your emails with SPF and DKIM. Organisations are increasingly using spam and phishing filters to reduce abuse and DMARC, SPF and DKIM are increasingly required to ensure your emails get delivered. For tech details see Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7489.

How can you protect your domain from spoofing, phishing and scams?

You can protect your domain using industry standards to authorise and authenticate your emails.

DMARC, the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorised use, commonly known as spoofing, phishing and email scams, it uses SPF and DKIM to achieve this.

What are the essentials to trusting email?

The two essentials required to trust email are: SPF confirms an email is sent from an authorised source, and DKIM confirms that the email is from the sender and hasn't been tampered with. Together these ensure your emails are trusted to come from you.

How can you authorise who is allowed to send your emails?

You can authorise who is allowed to send emails from your domain using industry standard Sender Preference Framework (SPF) for authorisation and defines where your emails can be sent from. By identifying the IP addresses that can send emails for a domain and authorising just those sources it's straightforward to identify if an email is coming from an authenticated source and reject emails that come from unauthorised sources. For tech details see Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for Authorizing Use of Domains in Email, Version 1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7208.

How can you ensure your emails are sent from you and haven't been tampered with?

You can automatically authenticate your emails using an industry standard to sign them using DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM.) DKIM cryptographically signs your emails in a way that ensures your recipients know your email is from you and hasn't been tampered with along the way. For tech details see DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6376

There are other methods of increasing security and ensuring privacy such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) and S/MIME but these tend to require technical knowledge and are less popular.

Mailing Lists for mass communications

Sending emails in bulk offers the best return on investment, and because it's automated, it's incredibly cheap to run.

How can I manage sending emails to a group of people?

By using a Mailing List Manager you can offload most of the work to recipients themselves. Lists can be public for the many or private for a select few, they can be easily managed either by you or the recipient themselves including adding themselves, pausing when they're on holiday or remove themselves from the list with the minimum of fuss.

How can you manage sending mails to groups of people?

Sending an email to a few people is easy, mailing list managers such as Sympa solve the issue when that number grows and the administrative overhead of adding new users and removing those who wish to pause or unsubscribe becomes more of a burden. See https://www.sympa.community/ for more information.

How can you be One-Click Unsubscribe compliant?

By using a Mailing List Manager your recipients can unsubscribe at any time. Most countries have laws about marketing direct communications and require easy ways for consumers to opt out and unsubscribe.

Sympa adds a header to your emails so email clients can offer subscribers an option to unsubscribe, you can also add a clickable link in your footer to unsubscribe. See https://www.sympa.community/ and Signaling One-Click Functionality for List Email Headers https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058.

What is ARC-Sign?

Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) is an email authentication system designed to allow an intermediate mail server like a mailing list or forwarding service to sign an email's original authentication results.

Do I need to ARC sign emails?

Sympa mailing list manager includes Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) when appropriate.

Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) did not solve the problems with email reputation, and it has been suggested by the IETF that ARC should no longer be used. Email is constantly evolving and some aspects might be incorporated into DKIMv2.

Branding

Branding is your visual identity and reinforces how customers see you. Consistency from all members of staff and automated processes help reinforce and amplify your organisation as well as help staff to project those values.

What are the key aspects of email branding?

Email branding ensures a consistent visual identity, voice and inbound links to your organisation from all staff and automated processes to build recognition, trust, and engagement.

What should go in an email footer?

Email footers are part of your brand identity and should reflect your organisation and usually include a single link to your organisation with any additional links for an individual, department or function. For a fun example see Moments that matter: Business cards - what to put on them and why.

Automation

Automation should save you time on repetitive stuff so you can spend more time on high value personal outreach. If you're automating everything including your sales conversations, you're doing it wrong. Automate the boring follow ups and admin stuff, but keep the important relationship building manual.

The balance that matters: Use automation to handle the baseline and then actually show up personally when it matters.

Can you send emails to users automatically?

Yes, as long as we have or can ask the user for their email it's straightforward to send a message with any additional information in any apps we build for you.

Can you filter and respond to incoming emails?

Yes, SIEVE scripts are included with email hosting. There are many ways to manage SIEVE scripts including Roundcube online email at https://mail2.p-o.co.uk/. For technical details see Sieve: An Email Filtering Language https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5228

What style should you use for automated emails?

Write like you're emailing a friend, and only send emails when there's an actual reason. Automated emails like all business communication needs to be professional, but they also need to feel like they're coming from a real person who actually cares.

How long should an email be?

Shorter is better, be concise rather than terse, 50–125 word emails are about right. No one wants to read a long email, too short and you're unlikely to get your message across.