Setting up emails is still a silly, annoyingly technical task. Often, my clients don't anticipate just how many email systems are needed, even for a tiny saas business.
I'll walk through the four necessary categories of emails below and how they differ in setup.
These are the @example.com email addresses. You'll need them, your team will need them, and you'll want to be able to create aliases and groups. Your domain registrar will say they offer this. Don't use it.
Tasks:
- Setup a G-Suite account with your domain
- Connect your domain to it via MX records
These are the emails that get sent as receipts or in conjunction with core user activity on your app. These shouldn't be conflated with your marketing emails. Send them separately through Postmark or Sendgrid. You want these to be delivered and the reputation to be separate from your marketing campaigns.
Tasks:
- Setup a new domain name
- Attach it to a transactional email service
- Follow their onboarding rules and hoops, and give yourself time (sometimes weeks) to make it through their verification processes
This inbox will be where your customer support happens, so do yourself a favor and create a shared inbox. This can be a group or alias that goes to a shared G-Suite inbox, or a dedicated service like Intercom or HelpScout.
These emails require visibility so try to have multiple eyes on them !
Tasks:
- Create a "group" in G-Suite that receives emails address to [email protected]
- Add support team members to the group
You'll use one or more services for marketing emails and these domains have the highest risk attached. I recommend separating them from your transactional email domain and company email domain to better insure than any reputation issues that affect them don't impact the other channels.
Starting out, you'll also want to be smart about the "reply-to" address used in these emails. For onboarding drip campaigns: reply-to founders – this is product research. For others, make sure your reply-to lands in someone's real inbox. Customer's rarely reply to email blasts, but if they do – you want to know.
Tasks:
- Sign up for MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Customer.io, etc
- Register a subdomain, email.example.com
- Follow their onboarding process for verification (note: it may take days, or even weeks before you can begin sending en masse)
- Begin sending slowly, an early misstep in sender reputation can be costly
- Setup email security domain records: spf, dkim