Marketing Automation Starts With Email Your Domain Can Vouch For

Teams that use FIDUS FLO for WhatsApp lead follow-up spend a lot of effort on speed and consistency. Customers still reply by email, though, and quotes, invoices and confirmations still go out by email. If those messages come from a free address, or from a domain that receiving servers can't verify, follow-up runs into trouble before anyone reads it.

Why a free address undermines good follow-up

An enquiry handled well on WhatsApp can lose trust when the next message arrives from a personal Gmail address. The customer can't easily tell it apart from an imitation, and the business can't keep that thread when the staff member leaves. An address on your own domain stays with the business.

The three records receiving servers look for

Mail providers check three DNS records to decide whether a message really comes from your domain:

• SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail for the domain.
• DKIM adds a cryptographic signature that the receiver can check.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do with mail that fails, and where to send reports.

Google's email sender guidelines set out these requirements for anyone sending to Gmail accounts, with stricter rules for bulk senders. They are worth reading before any email campaign.

Where business email sits alongside FLO

FLO handles follow-up on the channels it covers. Business email is a separate layer that the business owns: the domain, the mailboxes and the authentication records. Get that layer right once and every channel benefits, because a customer who checks your email sees the same name they saw on WhatsApp.

Bagful, part of the same Fidus group as FIDUS FLO, now offers bagful.email: mailboxes on your own domain with spam filtering, two-factor login, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up by its team. Bagful also sells and sets up Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

A business does not have to put everyone on one platform. With split delivery, office staff can stay on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 while field or logistics staff use bagful.email, all on one domain. On Workspace this uses Google's split delivery routing. On Microsoft 365 it uses an internal-relay accepted domain and an outbound connector, as described on Microsoft Learn (accepted domains, connectors). Licence prices are on the Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 pricing pages.

Whatever provider you choose, check that the three records are published and passing.

A quick check you can run today

Send a message from your business address to a Gmail account, open it, choose "Show original", and look for PASS next to SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If any of them fails, fix it before you add more volume to that domain.