Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Email Deliverability

Bill & Pay uses email to deliver new invoice notifications, payment due and overdue reminders, and payment confirmations to your customers. Knowing your email has been delivered to your customers is key to getting paid on time. Bill & Pay helps improve the delivery success rate of your customer communications in several ways.

Below are different options we provide to customize your email delivery experience.

Getting Started

When a business starts using Bill & Pay we deliver email to your customers on your behalf. You can customize the email address that these emails are sent from so that if your customer replies you will receive them.

Bill & Pay will initially send all emails from an email address of "notify@billandpay.com" with a special heading on the email called "Reply-To" that instructs your customers email system to send reply emails directly to your email address. Most email programs will show the email as being sent from your email address. It may also show a small note on screen indicating the email was sent on behalf of your address from notify@billandpay.com.

How to Change Your From Address In Bill & Pay

To change what email address Bill & Pay uses as the “From Email Address” on your emails go to Advanced Options / Letter Templates and Advanced Options / Payment Reminders.

Deliver Emails Through Your Own Email Server

Sending emails from your own mail server will greatly improve the rate of successful delivery and reduce the likelihood of the emails being identified as spam. You can setup your mail server in Bill & Pay in Advanced Options / Email Delivery.

Use Your Own Domain Name

If you have a domain name for your business you should try to use it for your business email, if you aren't already. Using an email address at any of the free email services, such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, will hurt the delivery of your emails. If you have a website with your own address, known as a domain name, you can start receiving email at your domain. You will need to have your own email server for your domain name. Most web hosting companies offer this as part of your web hosting or as an optional add-on. Contact your web hosting company for more details about using your domain name for email.

Approve Bill & Pay to Send Email for Your Domain

This is only necessary if you are unable to get your own email server setup for delivering emails to your customers. In that case you will need to approve Bill & Pay as a sender of email for your domain name.

In order to help combat spam, or unwanted email messages, many mail servers on the Internet will not accept delivery of an email from one domain name for another domain name unless specific approval has been given to do so.

You can give approval for Bill & Pay to send email on behalf of your domain name by adding a few records to your domain's DNS settings. Please contact Bill & Pay Support for instructions on getting this set up. If you are not comfortable modifying the DNS settings for your domain our instructions will also include an offer to perform the necessary changes for you.

For those curious as to what DNS settings we recommend adding, the instructions we send will tell you how to add SPF and DKIM records to your domain. These records in your domain's DNS settings will instruct other mail servers on the Internet to allow Bill & Pay's email server to send them new email as if it was coming from your own mail server.

Report of Emails Sent to Customers

There is a report in Bill & Pay that will show you which emails have been sent out to all customers. You can find this in the "Reports" section under "Emails Sent to Customers". You can also look up an individual customer in Bill & Pay and then click on the "Emails Sent" button to only see what has been sent to that specific customer.

For more information about how emails to customers are tracked in Bill & Pay, please see our Emails Sent Tracking article.

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