You’ll need this to comply with Yahoo and Google’s email rules (i.e. “Yahoogle”)

In Feb 2024, Yahoo and Google made, what can be considered, significant changes to how we all must do email marketing.

But, it’s all for a good cause – to reduce the amount of spam we see dropping into our mailboxes each day, so it’s a good thing.

Several conditions are mentioned in their respective content releases, however, suffice it to say we’re only interested in those that directly affect us, as freelancers who probably send less than 5,000 emails per day.

Have a verified Sending Domain (VSD)

This is the one I’m talking about in this article – how to set up your verified sender domain if you’re using ConvertKit as your preferred email marketing platform.

Essentially, without boring you with the tech details that underpin this condition, we need to authenticate our emails so that email servers can determine if emails that they receive, and are flagged as having been sent from our domains, did get sent by us.

There are many email scams out there (as you know) and one of them is when people blast out thousands of emails, purporting to have been sent by a particular person (or company) when they didn’t. This is known as ‘spoofing‘.

Your sender domain is the address that you associate with your name or business and you normally use it for both your website and email address. For example, my website address is provenflows.com and my email address is john@provenflows.com.

The domain part of these is ‘provenflows.com’ – it’s this that we need to verify to comply with ‘Yahoogle’.

Let’s get into how you do this using ConvertKit. (Btw, they make it really easy to do, so no need for any panic!).

The 3rd party tool that removes all your pain

ConvertKit teamed up with a 3rd party integration partner called ‘Entri‘ to make the domain verification process a non-technical effort (for us).

This is how it works inside ConvertKit…

Once logged in, click on the ‘Settings‘ menu option;

This will take you to the ‘Settings’ page, from which you then select ‘Email‘;

Once in this tab option, you’ll see a section on the right-hand side of the screen that looks like this;

Click on the button entitled ‘Set up your Verified Sending Domain‘ and you’ll be prompted to supply your domain information;

For this article, I’m using a sending domain that I own, but don’t use (other than for demos/training etc.). It’s ‘madereallysimple.com‘. 👇

Click the ‘Next‘ button.

You’ll be shown a screen that a few records listed – these are known as ‘DNS records’. All you need to know is that these records will tell the ‘Internet’ how to behave whenever your domain is used.

This is the point at which the 3rd party tool, ‘Entri’ kicks in and does its magic… click the ‘Set this up for me‘ button.

You’ll then be shown this screen, explaining what’s about to happen, and asks you to ‘Continue‘…

Once you click on the ‘Continue‘ button, ConvertKit will ‘talk’ to your DNS host (i.e. whichever company hosts your domain for you, e.g. GoDaddy, ionos etc.).

With proper authentication, your DNS host will permit Entri to update your DNS records for you – saving you from having to figure it out yourself.

Entri starts by detecting who your domain host is; as you can see below, my domain is hosted by Ionos.

Now that Entri knows the host, it’ll prompt you to authenticate your account by logging in using your existing username and password for your host’s system (i.e. in my case, I log in to Ionos).

Once you log in, you’ll be asked if you want to provide Entri with access to update your records; click ‘Connect‘;

Your host will then permit Entri to access and update your DNS records, giving you a ‘Success’ message.

After this step, you’ll be brought back to your Convertkit screen and, providing all went okay with your host, you’ll see a message that looks like the one below;

If you check your ConvertKit screen, you’ll notice that your domain is now verified, indicated by the little green tick at the top-left corner, just before your domain name.

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It can take up to 48 hours for all your DNS settings to replicate across all the global servers, however, in reality, it usually completes in less than 2 hours.

And that is it – nothing technical as I said, all just clicking buttons and logging in to a couple of platforms!

If you’d like to see this process in action, watch the 5-minute video below where I show you me verifying the domain, using this exact process.

How to verify your sending domain in ConvertKit

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⚡️What to do now…

Log into ConvertKit, go to the ‘Settings’ menu and begin the process of verifying your sending domain. It should take you no more than a few minutes to complete and you’ll be on your way to getting better email deliverability with your verified domain! 👍

If you hit any hurdles along the way, let me know and I’ll help you out.

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