Getting the Most from Email Automation in Salesforce

Sending email from other software applications is pretty common these days, and unless you take a few extra steps it won’t look like a message from your company. Instead the message will come across and the sender details will look like the screen shot below.

So how do you get the most from your messages and have it look as if your employee sent it? The answer depends on the technology platform you are working with, but in general you will need to enable a few settings and ask your web administrator for a little help. Once the setup is complete your messages will begin to look like the example below.

This post will provide a brief walkthrough of where to find these settings and how to update them settings for a popular CRM / Automation platform, Salesforce.

Let’s get started in Salesforce by going to the setup menu and doing a search for “dkim”. I won’t focus on the specifics of what this does, but would encourage you to read more if the subject interests you.

From here, you need to create a new key and complete the setup. I used the exact domain and subdomains option when creating the keys, just to cover my bases moving forward.

Once the setup is complete you will end up on a screen that looks like the one below. The public key is what you will need to send to your web administrator or the person responsible for adding DNS entries for the domain. Click activate to enable these keys.

The web administrator will need to create a new TXT entry in order to complete the setup and allow Salesforce to send emails from your domain. The setup would look something like the example below, depending on who your host provider is (Rackspace instructions).

You will notice that in addition to the public key, we also add the following “v=DKIM1;p=” followed by the public key value from Salesforce. Make sure the host name is set correctly and go grab a coffee while we wait for the changes to take hold (based on TTL).

After 5 minutes of whatever value is defined for Time to Live, you can check on Salesforce to make sure that everything is setup correctly. Clicking on the name of the domain will bring you back to the page with the public and private key and you should see the following message displayed at the top of the screen.

If you see that confirmation, then the last thing you will want to do is send yourself or a colleague a test email from the platform you just enabled and have them check the sender details. I have found that testing is best done logging into your email on a web browser. Some native applications like Apple’s Mail will not show the messy sender details, making it hard to confirm if you did it right.

You can now send mail to clients, prospects, and team members without concern that they might not think you sent it and dismiss it as spam.