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What a customer sees when your business writes to them
Mail goes out from your own address with the records set up to get it into the inbox, and the site, the mail and the documents look like one business.
What arrives
- Your own address
- on the mail that goes out, not a free one with your name in front
- The records
- that let a receiving system check a message really came from you
- One look
- across the site, the mail and the documents I make for you
- Confirmations
- a customer can read without translating them first
- A plain status page
- so a customer sees it said openly when something is down
- The writing
- I set up reads the same way from one piece to the next
The address at the top of the message#
A quote from a free personal address and a quote from your own domain are the same quote, and they are not read the same way. One of them is a business. The reader does not decide this consciously and does not need to.
Landing in the inbox is a different problem from sending#
Sending is easy. Arriving is the hard part, and it turns on a few records most people have never heard of, which let the receiving side check that a message is genuinely from you. I set those up as part of the build.
Get them wrong and a perfectly ordinary confirmation lands in a folder nobody opens, which looks to the customer exactly like you did not reply at all.
The part I cannot switch on for you#
A brand-new address starts out unknown. It earns its way into the inbox over time, by sending a sensible amount to people who expect to hear from you. I can set it up correctly on the first day and I cannot make it old.
What keeps it is how the business sends afterwards. Buy a list, or send far more in one night than you have ever sent before, and the reputation goes. The setting-up is mine to get right; the sending is yours.
Two things above lean on you as well, and it is better said than discovered. The domain has to be one you control, so that the records can be set. And documents that come out of tools you already use will usually carry your mark and not much more than that.
Answered at length on the site