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Getting Started with Benchmark Email
We know you are eager to get started and send your first campaign, but before sending it is important you set up your account correctly, and understand the key aspects for landing your campaign in the inbox.
On January 1, 2004, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 went into effect. One of the requirements of this new legislation is that all email communications include the physical address of the sender.
The physical address should be the mailing address for your business, this can include P.O. Boxes.
To update the address in your Benchmark account, see the steps below:
By default, Benchmark sets all accounts to the “Greenwich Mean (+0000) Time Zone,” and your campaigns will be scheduled using this timezone. If this isn’t a timezone you want to use, no need to panic, there is an easy way to update this.
To change your time zone settings, follow the steps below:
Important
If you would like to have multiple email addresses to send your email campaigns from, you can. You can have one as the From email address and another as the Reply email address, whatever your case is you will need to verify the email addresses.
Here’s how you add and verify email addresses:
There are many reasons why the first campaign can land in the spam folder, but if you are testing a new email marketing software, it can be normal.
Why?
Your domain is new for the software, and the different ISP’s (Hotmail, Yahoo,..) are testing how good you are at sending campaigns. What we mean by good is having a good domain reputation, good quality list, good campaign content… but what happens if you just send one campaign to yourself or to your 3-4 colleagues? You are not giving the ISP’s enough information to know if the campaign needs to land in the inbox or spam, and just as a preventative action, they will put it in the spam folder.
What should you do?
The best way for testing the delivery of the email marketing software is by sending a real campaign to your contact list. If after that you are not happy with the results you can improve the delivery by adding some authentication to your domain.
FREE ACCOUNT
SPF record: v=spf1 a mx include:bmsend.com ~all
bmdeda._domainkey should point to bmdeda._domainkey.bmsend.com
PREMIUM ACCOUNT
1st CNAME:
rCLIENTID.CLIENTDOMAIN.com should point to rCLIENTID.benchclient.com
2nd CNAME:
bmdeda._domainkey.CLIENTDOMAIN.com should point to dkim.CLIENTID.benchclient.com
CLIENTID is your unique ID within Benchmark Email. Ex. 1234567.
CLIENTDOMAIN is your sending domain. Ex. yourdomain.com
To get your ClientID, follow the steps below.
Once the CNAME records are updated, the whitelabeling flag needs to be activated from our backend.
To activate the whitelabeling flag:
The number one thing all email marketers should know is that a clean and up to date list is crucial to obtain optimal sending results. Before you begin sending emails from our service or any for that matter, you should verify your contact list. Verifying your contact list will help you weed out all of the invalid emails that could hurt your sending reputation.
With Benchmark this can be fast and easy, our list verification service costs $3 per 1,000 emails. To learn more about verifying your contact list, please click here.
If you have any questions regarding setting up your account please feel free to contact our support team via Email, LiveChat or by phone.