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Adding an Approved Sender & Defining Email Delivery Settings in Media Relations

Add Approved Senders and optimize email deliverability.

Cheyenne V. avatar
Written by Cheyenne V.
Updated over 7 months ago

Email plays a central role in several workflows in Meltwater. It is key to add approved senders when initially setting up your account to create more personalized outreach that comes from your email address rather than Meltwater’s.

This article will cover:


Setting an Approved Sender

To add an approved sender, follow these steps:

  1. Select the Account drop-down in the left-hand navigation bar

  2. Select Approved Senders

  3. Click New Email Account in the top right-hand corner (if you do not see this, check your user settings to make sure you are set up as an administrator)

  4. Complete all required fields identified with an *

  5. Select Save

  6. Within your email inbox, open the email we sent you titled Confirm your email address from approvedsender@returnpath.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com

  7. Click Confirm Email to verify ownership of the email address you provided

  8. Once we have processed the information, you’ll be ready to send emails via Meltwater

Approved Sender Best Practices

Use your business email address to ensure that your target audience has context about who’s sending them information. We therefore strongly advise against using a private email domain (e.g. jane.doe@gmail.com) or using a general company email address (e.g. press@companyname.com)


Approved Sender Troubleshooting

If you haven’t received the verification email that’s generated through the approved sender setup flow, run through the following steps:

  • Double-check that the email address entered in the approved sender flow is correct

  • Check your spam folder for the email address provided to determine if it has gotten caught there.

If the email got caught in your spam folder or you didn’t receive it at all, please share this allowlisting documentation with your IT department. It covers the steps they need to take to ensure optimal deliverability of emails sent from Meltwater.

Please reach out to our team via Live Chat within the Help button with any further questions.


Delivery Issues

Meltwater uses a third-party email delivery service for both Influencer outreach and analytics-enabled Newsletters. This helps us ensure optimal email deliverability, but you can take some steps to increase your individual email deliverability, such as allowlisting our IP addresses and setting up SPF and DKIM records.

When we talk about email deliverability we are referring to emails making it to the intended recipient and not ending up in their spam folders. When you send an email from Meltwater, we use email masking so that the email appears to come from you, rather than a general email address. This allows replies to be delivered directly to your inbox, but can introduce some intricacies if your organization has enhanced security features in place to prevent “spoofing”.

Email spoofing is the forgery of an email header so that the message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source as people are more likely to open an email when they think it has been sent by a legitimate source.

A validation process is required to improve email deliverability (i.e., minimize soft bounces). Meltwater enables validation by setting up SPF/DKIM records through our trusted email partner.


IP Allowlisting and SPF/DKIM

IP allowlisting is a method you can use to ensure that emails from a specific IP always reach their inbox. SPF and DKIM are security methods that are standardly used to combat spam issues. Setting up SPF and DKIM is considered good practice for promotional email sending as it ensures better deliverability to your recipient's inbox.

Similarly to how you would add a contact to your email address book, IP allowlisting allows you to add specific IP’s to your allowed sender's list. Doing this confirms that you will always receive emails from those allowed IP’s to your Inbox and not your spam folder. When you allowlist a Meltwater IP address, it ensures that emails from Meltwater, such as digest reports and newsletters, are delivered to your Inbox.

SPF is an email authentication standard that compares the email sender's actual IP with a list of IPs authorized to send emails for that domain. The authorized list is contained in the domain's DNS record.

The SPF records are used to fight spam as they tell the recipient server what IP addresses are validated to send from that domain. DKIM is also a DNS record that allows recipient hosts to validate the authenticity of the sending domain, by means of a digital signature.

Setting up SPF and DKIM records shows your email recipients that you are who you say you are.

You will find that if you keep your SPF and DKIM updated, you will have better deliverability to recipients. If you find that your emails often end up in spam folders or aren’t delivered, missing or outdated SPF/ DKIM records are often the culprit. Additionally, having SPF and DKIM records helps you build a good sending reputation on their domain.


Setting Up IP Allowlisting and SPF/DKIM

There are three main steps to set up these records:

  • Request your records within the platform

  • Ask your IT Specialist to update the records within your email

  • Your Domain status within the platform has changed to 'Verified'

  1. Within the platform, select the Account drop-down from the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select Approved Senders

    Screen_Shot_2020-03-09_at_9.09.00_AM.png
  3. If you do not have any Approved Senders listed and no details under the 'Domains' section, please add your work email address as an Approved Sender. Check out this product tutorial which will walk you through these steps on your screen, or review the written guide on setting up an Approved Sender above.

  4. If you do have 'activated' Approved Senders, select the Configure Domain button on your unverified domain. Keep in mind that you can not verify generic domains, such as @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or @comcast.net.

  5. Your specific CNAME records will open in a new page, and the URL can be sent to your IT specialist. CNAME records will house both SPF and DKIM records.

Screen_Shot_2020-03-18_at_10.31.32_AM.png

Details to send to your IT Specialist or manager of your email client:

  • Request that they allowlist the following details to ensure you receive emails sent out of Meltwater

  • The URL to your specific CNAME records

  • This hyperlinked page which outlines Meltwater's IP addresses

Once your IT Specialist confirms both SPF and DKIM records have been successfully implemented, check the status within Meltwater. Please note it can take 24-48 hours to update.

  1. Within the platform, select Settings from the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select Approved Senders

  3. Your domain will change to 'This Domain has been verified'.

Screen_Shot_2020-03-09_at_4.18.11_PM.png

Further recommendations:

  • Once allowlisted by your IT team, send a test email to one recipient with your organization’s email domain (internal) and one recipient with a different domain (external).

  • If the emails were not received, please notify your IT department and ask them to get in touch with our support team. Instructions are provided in the allowlisting documentation.

Note: once your IT department has successfully completed their process, additional approved senders with the same email domain (@companyname.com) can be added without further involvement from your IT department.


Recommendations for Email Settings For Sending Press Releases

Once setup of an Approved Sender is completed, you will immediately start benefiting from our email analytics that informs you of how recipients engage with your content. E.g. you will learn which reporters that are interested in your pitches, which in turn will help you plan follow-ups, and potentially rethink your targeting and messaging of future pitches to drive performance.

You're seeing a high bounce rate from your release

High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors. Learn more about hard bounces and soft bounces below.

  • Hard bounces typically result from incorrectly entered email addresses, outdated email addresses (e.g. the email address no longer exists), etc. Hard bounces are a good indication of list quality and should be below 2%.

Soft bounces are often triggered by spam settings or security settings on the recipient’s email server. These security measures are put in place to prevent email spoofing. Soft bounces can be a good indication of message content quality and relevance.


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

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