Optimizing Your Email Deliverability

IntakeQ and PracticeQ sends numerous emails on your behalf, including forms, appointment notifications, reminders, invoices, and secure messaging.

This guide outlines email best practices we've learned from sending emails for thousands of users and analyzing delivery rates. If some clients aren't receiving your emails, we recommend reading it.

DNS Record Authentication

REQUEST TO UPDATE DNS SETTINGS [11/24]

We will be moving to a new email provider and we are requiring everyone on a custom email sender on the old email provider to complete a new DNS verification. This will require the update of some records on your DNS settings.

If you received an in-app message about updating your DNS, please follow the instructions on adding them to your domain provider.

By default, we send emails using app@intakeq.com, but many users prefer to use their own domain through our Email Sender feature. To enable this, users must complete a simple authentication by adding a DKIM and SPF record to your domain settings.

These methods may require assistance with DNS settings. You’ll find the necessary DNS details under " More > Settings > Email Sender" Create the records where you domain name is hosted, then click "Verify DNS" to activate.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Some systems append your domain name at the end of the DKIM hostname, this will often prevent us from being able to verify the address.
If you're having a different issue verifying one of the records above (usually the DKIM), please email us as sometimes we need to manually validate it.
If you are not familiar with DNS records, this website does a great job at finding specific instructions for your DNS provider: https://dnshelp.stunning.co

Engagement

One of the most important things you can do for good email deliverability is to only send emails to people who have a relationship with you.

Email providers build a profile of your domain over time. Each person that opens or replies to an email from you is signalling to their ISP that you are a good sender. On the other hand, each person who ignores or deletes your emails is sending the opposite signal.

Furthermore, if a person flags your email as spam, it's sending their ISP a strong signal that you are violating email etiquette rules, and once you get enough of those, it can get really hard to reverse the damage.

These are some actionable tips for keeping a high engagement levels when sending emails via IntakeQ.

When collecting emails, make sure you have the correct address.
If you notice that an email is invalid, fix or remove it from the client profile.
Don't create fake email addresses for your clients. It's better to just leave it empty.
Ensure clients opt-in to email communication.
Don't send unsolicited emails.
Never send emails from a "no-reply" address.

Domain Reputation

Much like real world reputation, your domain reputation is one of your most important assets. If you use your domain to send marketing emails to people who have not opted in, your domain will eventually be added to a blacklist. Then even when you send legitimate emails, mail servers may block them.

When using email marketing tools like MailChimp or Active Campaign, make sure to follow all email marketing guidelines to avoid hurting your domain reputation.
For marketing campaigns, use an email address that is different from the email you use to send forms and appointment confirmations. Using a different domain or subdomain is even better.

Content

A key aspect of good email deliverability is the content of your emails. You can have a great email reputation, but if the content of your emails look like spam, spam filters will start to flag them.

Here's a few tips that will help you avoid spam filters:

Don't use shortened URLs. Spammers love to use URL shorteners (like bit.ly) in order to hide malicious URLs, which makes them always look suspicious to spam filters.
Avoid using images.
Avoid having too many links.
Avoid using marketing lingo when sending forms, appointment reminders/confirmations.
Test your emails using mail-tester.com (covered in the next section).

Testing Your Emails

Our favorite tool to check if an email has a good deliverability score is mail-tester.com. This tool will not only check the content of your email message for spammy content, it will also check the reputation against blacklists, verify your authentication, and other technical issues that may be preventing your emails from arriving at their destination.

The instructions below show how to test your "Send Form" email with mail-tester.com. We will need to send a form to a fictitious email.

Go to www.mail-tester.com.
Copy the email address that is provided on the center of the page.
Leave that tab open and go to IntakeQ on a different tab.
Open the Send Form dialog.
In the Client Name field, enter a fictitious name like "Test Client".
In the Email field, paste the email address copied on step 2.
Send the form.
Go back to the mail-tester tab and click on the "Check Your Score" button.

After a few seconds, you will see the results of your email test.

Hopefully, your result is as good as the one above. If not, keep tweaking things and try to get it above 8. Feel free to contact us if you need any help.