Email marketing is cheap and it works — when it arrives. Most of the time it does not arrive because of three DNS records and a sending pattern, both of which are fixable in an afternoon.
The three records, in plain words
- SPF — a list, published on your domain, of the servers allowed to send mail as you. If your mailbox provider is not on it, receivers treat the mail as forged.
- DKIM — a signature on each message, checked against a public key on your domain. It proves the message was not changed on the way.
- DMARC — your instruction to receivers for mail that fails the first two: let it through, junk it, or reject it. Start with p=none (report only), move to quarantine when the reports are clean.
All three are TXT records. Invite reads your domain's DNS, tells you which ones are missing or wrong, and gives you the exact record to paste. Re-check from the same screen after it propagates.
Warm the domain up
A domain that has never sent 5,000 emails and suddenly does looks like a compromise, and receivers throttle it. Warm-up means starting small and climbing while engagement holds:
- Send to your most engaged few hundred first — people who opened something in the last month.
- Roughly double every few days if bounces stay under 2% and complaints under 0.1%.
- Pause the climb if either number spikes. Invite's warm-up does this automatically.
Verify the list before the first send
Dead addresses bounce, and bounces are the fastest way to a bad reputation. Run verification on the list before you send anything. Addresses that bounce or complain go to a suppression list and are never sent to again — that list is worth more than any subject line.
Watch the right numbers
Open rates are unreliable now that mail clients pre-fetch images. Watch bounces and complaints; they decide whether next month's campaign arrives. Clicks and replies tell you whether the content worked.
Use the mailbox you already have
You do not need a separate sending service. The mailbox that came with your hosting, connected with an app password, sends a small business's volume comfortably once the records above are in place.